In case you were wondering what he’s been up to, Newt Gingrich has been thinking hard lately, and thinking large. In fact, he has been thinking about nothing less than how to “create a new vision for the Republican party,” as he recently told several fellow Republicans. One fruit of all this cogitation has already emerged: a three-page “Movement Planning Proposal” that the speaker cooked up on his personal computer at home and then distributed to activists and congressional staff last week.
Gingrich assured his colleagues that the proposal was only a draft, and it is indeed a loosely constructed document, a rag bag of Gingrichian thoughts. His proposal comprises 12 numbered items that follow no discernible organizational principle; this “new vision” is Gingrich raw, from the top of his head, and all the more revealing as a result. The first three items, for example, show the speaker clearing his throat, metaphorically. Item #1 reads: “Planning system: Vision, strategies, projects, tactics.” Item #2 is: ” Leadership style: Listen-learn-help-lead.” And Item #3 combines #1 and #2: ” Continuous process of planning and leading: Vision, strategies, projects, tactics — Listen, learn, help, lead.”
This is not much movement for a movement-planning proposal, but after number three things get rolling pretty fast — and rolling and rolling. Item #8 consists of what the New Agers call “affirmations”:
“We are FOR rather than AGAINST
“We are Inclusive rather than Exclusive
“We find challenges and opportunities rather than problems”
And there are several “thought experiments,” as in #9: “If we succeed by 2017 (after 16 years of a Republican President and Congress, the FDR parallel) what will success be like . . . for the world we will have led for a generation?”
Item #12 is more concrete: “Our initial four foci for 1997 to 2000 are: Race, Drugs, Ignorance, Faith.”
Perhaps the most arresting item of all is #6, reprinted here as Go Figure 1. 1 (The Old Debate) and Go Figure 1.2 (The New Debate). The Old Debate was about bigger government versus smaller government, as shown in Go Figure 1.1:
The New Debate is more complex and concerns whether government should be better, smarter, or more effective, or not:
Why, however, the Old Debate should be a triangle and the New Debate a three-sectioned circle is a question best left between Gingrich and his software. Only his computer knows for sure.
The most comprehensive item on the speaker’s Movement Planning Proposal is undoubtedly #5 — a manifesto of sorts. Despite space limitations, we reprint it here in its entirety:
“We are the positive, values-oriented, problem-solving movement committed to a stronger better America with a better government that uses modern management, relies on faith-based and other charities, pursues modern science and technology, encourages . . . [Feel free to go get a snack if you’d like – – the sentence will still be running on when you get back.] . . . encourages wealth creation through the private sector, and helps people move from poverty to prosperity so we can have better services through a smaller government at less cost to create a stronger, freer more prosperous America in which everyone has their God given right to pursue happiness as a right and not merely a promise.”
Needless to say, this Item #5 is one whale of a manifesto for a political party, even if Gingrich broke it up into, say, 16 or 17 separate sentences, as he should. But a successful manifesto identifies areas of difference; it draws bright distinctions between one party and its adversary. To this end, Gingrich’s fails, since even Democrats — even Joe Kennedy! — cannot be persuaded to declare, for example: “We Democrats are the negative, values- ignoring, problem-creating movement committed to a weaker worse America with worse government that uses management techniques developed during the reign of Ethelred the Unready . . .” If you could get Democrats to say that, Republicans really would lead the world for a generation.
The harsh truth, in short, is that Gingrich’s Movement Planning Proposal, insofar as it is a proposal for a plan for a movement, is no help at all. In fact, several Gingrich supporters have looked through the planning proposal, lingered over its bizarre diagrams, its empty buzzwords, its endless trainwrecks of verbiage, and found it unnerving.
But why? It is vintage Gingrich. Republicans need not be alarmed. For the real news in the Movement Planning Proposal is that Newt Gingrich, having survived a brutal press and a harassing “ethics investigation,” remains the man he has always been.
Then again, perhaps that’s why Republicans should be alarmed.
Consider, for example, Go Figure 2.1:
The future speaker drew this chart in December 1992 to illustrate — well, it’s unclear what it’s meant to illustrate. The chart was collected and published in January by the House Ethics Committee as part of an appendix to its ethics report on Gingrich. The appendix features more than 1,000 pages of speech drafts, personal notes, letters, memos, and charts that Gingrich and his allies provided as exhibits during the committee’s investigation.
It is a remarkable document. Read in its entirety, it establishes a kind of narrative, a step-by-step recounting of the evolution of Gingrich’s public and private thinking. The appendix is the most compelling portrait yet of the current leader of the Republican party.
And he is leader of even more than that. “Gingrich — primary mission,” reads one of Gingrich’s handwritten notes from December 1992. “Advocate of civilization. Definer of civilization. Teacher of the rules of civilization . . . Leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces.”
By the time he wrote this note, Gingrich had already hit on the verbal formula RENEWING AMERICAN CIVILIZATION to summarize the scope of his work (RAC for short). RAC was a successor to the earlier CONSERVATIVE OPPORTUNITY SOCIETY (COS for short), which would emerge, Gingrich theorized, from the CITIZENS’ OPPORTUNITIES MOVEMENT. But before COS became RAC, there was THE AMERICA THAT CAN BE, an offspring of the CARING HUMANITARIAN REFORM MOVEMENT. That movement was in turn based on the TRIANGLE OF AMERICAN SUCCESS, also known as the TRIANGLE OF AMERICAN PROGRESS.
Confused? As Gingrich explained in a 1990 speech, “We summarize the Triangle of American Progress with one sentence: Common sense focused on opportunities and success. It’s a very radical sentence.” So radical, indeed, that it isn’t even a sentence.
As you read through the Gingrich documents, you quickly catch the method by which he cobbles together these schema — the technique that controls his use of words. It is modular. Groups of words, chunks of language, float freely through his writing and speeches, detaching themselves here, reattaching there, coupling and uncoupling with other groups of words seemingly at random until they form what appears to be a sentence. “It is our goal,” he said in that 1990 speech, “to define our position as a caring, humanitarian reform party applying the triangle of American success and applying common sense focused on success and opportunities.”
This is a special kind of gibberish; it is gibberish imprinted by pseudo- science, since it has been plumped and processed and tested in focus groups.
In a candid moment, in a speech reprinted in the appendix, Gingrich explained how his various chunks of language came to be discovered. He told of road-testing one such phrase, “honest hard work,” before a high-school class in Georgia: “And I reused the phrase about nine times in three minutes, and finally a student raised her hand and said, ‘Well, we don’t have a system that rewards honest hard work.‘” The phrase had caught on! In this way, Gingrich knew to add the phrase to his lexicon, and indeed, it became one of his modules. “The CITIZENS’ OPPORTUNITIES MOVEMENT,” he later announced, “is the movement of honest hard work.” There is much more where this came from. After “the largest focus group project ever undertaken by the Republican party,” Gingrich said in 1991, “we will have an enormous data base of what words work and what words don’t.”
What words mean, however, is a trickier subject. Untethered from the world of sense and nonsense, Gingrich’s formulations mutate endlessly. From the appendix, we learn that The Triangle mutated into The Four Pillars of American Civilization. Soon The Four Pillars were Five Pillars — and they were pillars not only of American Civilization, but also of the 21st Century. And then of American Success. And then of Freedom and Progress.
Newt Gingrich is mad for lists. In each of his speeches and memos — just as in last week’s Planning Proposal — we see him heroically striving to impose order on the chaos of the world in general and of politics in particular. He is, he says, a “systems designer.” And so, along with the Pillars, we read of the Four Can’ts, the Nine Zones of Creativity, the Fourteen Steps to RAC, the Four Great Truths, the Five Cs, and so on.
In one typical to-do list, he writes: “1. Design planning-management systems. 2. Define, plan, and begin to organize the movement for civilization and the effort to transform the welfare state into an opportunity society to help people to achieve productivity, responsibility, and safety so they can achieve prosperity and freedom so they can pursue happiness.” (In another to- do note, he plans a series of books: “The History of Freedom, Prosperity, and Safety.” Another day, another dollar.)
In his craving for “systems,” Gingrich shows the abiding influence of that great literary genre, the pop business book. Each year thousands of meatball middle managers buy Gnostic texts like Team-building to Your First Million and Beyond and Secrets of Total Quality Management for Overnight Success. Most of those meatballs, of course, vote Republican, and perhaps for that reason Gingrich has shown himself comfortable with their ways of thinking. The evidence indicates, in fact, that he is one of them.
The purpose of such management books is to take a series of banal propositions and make them as complicated as possible, by means of lists, diagrams, and jargon; this creates an illusion of originality or profundity. It is Gingrich’s method as well. You can see it even now, in the Movement Planning Proposal. Somewhere he came upon the commonplace observation that people like you more if you listen to them when they talk and help them when they ask. As rendered by Gingrich, this has become a four-part “Leadership Model”: “Listen-Learn-Help-Lead.”
So too his “Planning System” of “Vision-Strategies-Projects-Tactics.” In normal language, the point seems to be: “Have a pretty good idea of what you want to do before you do it.” One wonders why he hasn’t yet rendered this four-part system as a trapezoid; all it would take is the right software, and the meatballs would be floored.
As it happens, both the planning system and leadership style have been constants in Gingrich’s thinking, dating back at least to the late 1980s. But in the speaker’s philosophical journey, constants have been the exception rather than the rule. More typically, the words change continuously, and with them the “substance” they are meant to denote. What never varies is the tone of impending crisis. The urgency is great because the stakes are high: ” literally the future of the human race,” as he wrote in one planning document from 1993. The literally is pure Gingrich. He disdains the concrete in favor of the abstract, preferring nouns like vision, strategies, structures and verbs like implement, empower, prioritize. His taste in adjectives runs to the large: historic, incredible, amazing. And his favorite adverb is frankly, often intensified by quite. His thinking is never less than cataclysmic, and the result of his efforts, as he describes it, will never be less than Utopia: “If America launches a rebirth of freedom by renewing American civilization we will have the personal energy, the multi- racial outlook, the cultural certainty, and the economic, political and military strength to lead the entire human race to freedom, prosperity and safety.”
And to think that most Republicans just want him — him, Newt Gingrich, the Teacher, the Definer, the Advocate, the Leader (possibly) of the Civilizing Forces — to cut the capital-gains tax!
