Book World: Newt Gingrich’s lasting legacy: Making nastiness a political virtue

Burning Down the House By Julian E. Zelizer Penguin Press. 356 pp. $30 --When Newt Gingrich stormed into Congress in January 1979, newly elected at the age of 35, he was already fully formed. His mop of hair had not yet gone gray, as it would soon do prematurely, but in all key respects he was the Newt we know: demanding attention, raging against one establishment or another, portraying politics as a holy war, and proclaiming himself the savior of Western civilization (a career goal he had set while in high school).

And he was proudly pro-cannibalism. “The great strength of the Democratic Party in my lifetime,” he told a rally of College Republicans in 1978, just before his election, “has been that it has always produced young, nasty people who had no respect for their elders.” This was a compliment. “The Democrats,” Gingrich said, “understand that cannibalism is the nature of the business” - that the old order, when it had exhausted its usefulness, should “get jumped on.” By contrast, “one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which . . . are lousy in politics.”

Four decades later, the nastiness of the GOP - and therefore of much of our national life - can be seen as Gingrich’s most lasting achievement: nastiness as a virtue, a governing principle, an end in itself. We live today in the world Gingrich wrought, and the story of how he wrought it is the focus of “Burning Down the House” by Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton. Zelizer is not the first to suggest that Gingrich

“broke politics,” as a recent article in the Atlantic put it, but his book provides an engaging, unsettling and, alas, timely look at the torch that Gingrich took to our system of self-government.

“Here’s how it starts,” Gingrich grinned at a House freshman orientation event in December 1978, flashing his brand-new congressional ID card and strutting around like he owned the place, or would someday soon. His agenda, like his manner, was almost comically grandiose: to make the GOP the majority party in the House, where the Democrats held a margin of 119 seats and had ruled without interruption since 1955. The prevailing mood among Republicans was acquiescence, a tacit acceptance of the order of things. Gingrich, however, relished conflict. He stoked it remorselessly - not just against Democrats but also their appeasers, as he saw them, within his party. “You’re fighting a war . . . for power,” he had told the College Republicans, and what he meant was a guerrilla war, contemptuous of the rules of combat. The goal, Zelizer explains, was “constant mayhem.”

The House offered many targets. As members of the majority, Democrats had long been cosseted by interest group money, favors and perks; party leaders seemed largely oblivious of the extent to which Watergate had heightened public distrust of politicians. And Watergate was hardly the last of it: That scandal was followed by Koreagate, which The Washington Postcalled a “cash-based lobbying campaign” by a South Korean businessman, and by Abscam, a 1970s sting operation in which FBI agents dressed as sheikhs handed bribes to congressmen while surveillance cameras rolled. When Gingrich charged onto Capitol Hill, clamoring about corruption and moral rot, the man had found his moment.