How did this role reversal come about? Newt Gingrich is certainly one of the architects of disorder, a would-be Ann Randy superman riding the third wave of human consciousness who was one of the progenitors of “break the rules” conservatism. It’s hard to know what random swerve sent Newt spinning from the left of the political spectrum to the right, other than the found necessity of getting himself elected in Georgia and (perhaps) a distaste for all the uppity dames who came increasingly to first populate and then dominate the left, but he quickly mastered the truly reactionary bitterness of North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. Helms, a passionate segregationist who came to Washington to punish the Yankees, was both a sincerely outraged traditionalist and a shrewd politician, but to me Gingrich’s deepest passion was simply the pleasure of making mischief. And with the Cold War over, there didn’t seem to be any particular need to play by the rules, which, for an outsider like Gingrich, simply seemed to mean “dealer wins, and winner deals.”
Ted Cruz seems to have a makeup similar to Gingrich, representing the South by not really of it. The Republican Party is full of hired guns these days, like Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, and Eric Cantor, who speak for the outraged WASP masses without being a part of them culturally. Even Rand Paul is “different” for his deliberate apostasy on the need for an aggressive foreign policy, while Chris Christie is from the Northeast.
Back in 1995, Gingrich had a semblance of an argument for his attack on the system: Bill Clinton had been elected by only 43% of the vote, and the Republicans had picked up impressive majorities in both the House and Senate, the first real Republican sweep in Congress since 1946. Today, in contrast, President Obama has won both terms by outright majorities of the votes cast, the first president to do so since Ronald Reagan, and Republicans control only one house of Congress, and they control that only through astute gerrymandering. But that doesn’t matter. They want to break something, goddamn it. And so they will.
Afterwords
I wrote about the Jacobin leanings of the Republican Party several years ago, here. Over at Politico, David Rogers does a very good job explaining why and how the Republicans have engineered this latest “crisis”—largely, I would say, because they can’t, or won’t, add.†
*Actually, it was my friends who did all the talking. I was, and am, far too timid to do any smashing. Back then, all I wanted to do was read books and fall in love. I was only good at the former.
†Among other things, Republicans have vowed to eliminate Obamacare at the same time that their “balanced” budget is based on the assumption that the reductions in health care spending promised by Obamacare will somehow still occur. In addition, Republicans set targets for domestic spending so low that they found it politically impossible to bring any domestic appropriation legislation to the House floor.
