ANOTHER VOICE
The Newtists are engaged in something dramatic and important. We British should heed them
CHARLES MOORE
Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, is quite well known in Britain, but for the most part as a figure of fear or of fun, or both. Left liber- als think that he is the manic voice of the gun-toting, redneck, free-market, religious Right. Tories of the Old World think he is a batty autodidact, with his Six Challenges, his Five Principles at the Heart of Ameri- can Civilisation, his love of the Internet and his excited speculations — 'What if we could bring back extinct species?', . . . Honeymoons in space will be in vogue by 2020. Imagine weightlessness and its effects and you will understand some of the attrac- tions' — about the technological future.
Obviously, we like to assume, Newt is a purely American phenomenon and not to be taken seriously. Having immersed myself in matters Newtish in order to inter- view the man in Washington a fortnight ago, I would say that this prevailing British interpretation was a mistake.
The first thing to notice is that Newt and his friends are formidable politicians. They didn't overthrow 40-year Democrat control of the House merely because of an 'anti- incumbency vote' — no Republican incum- bent lost his seat — but because they advo- cated a clear position and organised themselves to present it nationally.
The Contract with America was really a simplified version of what in Britain we call a party manifesto, and it was significant because it represented the first serious attempt in modern times to carry Congres- sional elections on national issues. When I interviewed Mr Gingrich he told me he had studied Disraeli's efforts to centralise the Conservative Party in order to do this. He perceived that the Constitution's emphasis on the importance of the Congress had been neglected because of the imperial Presidency of the 20th century, and that this importance could be revived. He saw that the Speakership, like the Presidency, could be a 'bully pulpit'. It was clever to see all that and cleverer still to achieve it. 'My job is to teach,' says Newt, 'and to hold together the coalition.' He is doing both, and has managed, despite the labyrinthine legislative methods and weak party disci- pline of the House, to get through all but one of the items in the Contract with America (Congressmen could not be per- suaded to vote for their own term limits).
What this means is that the Republican House and, to a lesser extent, the Republi- can Senate, are deeply opposed to the assumptions that have dominated Ameri- can government since the New Deal. They are against the welfare state — 'We simply must abandon the welfare state,' says Newt; they want tax cuts and deregulation and have voted to balance the budget over seven years; they are pro-religion and anti- abortion; they oppose 'group rights' and `affirmative action'. Above all, perhaps, they take the other side from FDR and his successors in the endless American debate about where power should lie. The Repub- licans say that big federal government is the problem, not the solution, and that powers should be returned to the states. Mr Gin- grich makes the point more fundamental. When we talked, he led me through the Declaration of Independence and took up the phrase that men are 'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights': the relationship between man and God gives man his power and freedom, and the state has no rights in itself.
I hope that I have said enough to show that the Newtists are engaged in something dramatic and important, but I admit I have so far appeared to confirm that it is purely American. The wars between the states and the capital are not our wars; the obsessions are not our obsessions. What's it got to do with us? How could any British conserva- tive learn anything from it?
It's got to do with us because anything important which arises in the greatest nation to which we gave birth has got to do with us, but also for more specific, current reasons. The Anglo-Saxon political culture is predisposed towards people and their freedoms. The Continental political culture is predisposed towards government and its powers. Britain, being both Anglo-Saxon and European, tries to balance the two, but is being pushed by the European Commu- nity towards the Continental model. Mr Gingrich, who knows and likes Europe well, having been brought up there as an `army brat', was caustic when I asked him about the Community today. 'It's exactly the wrong model,' he said, the Community was 'a wonderful idea with exactly the wrong core structure' . 'There will presently emerge a clear Europe-wide critique of Brussels . . . Brussels is everything we're trying to get away from — centralised, slow, bureaucratic, unrepresentative and unac- countable.'
Despite everything that is unattractive about America — litigation, political cor- rectness, materialism, baseball caps (fill in pet hate to taste) — the core of its political culture is very impressive. Here is a country which takes freedom seriously and is con- stantly debating it. Whether the issue is anti-trust laws or gun control or tax or school prayer or who becomes a judge, at least some important people will be there to argue for making people freer. Think of the equivalent in Europe and you will see the problem. When does Herr Kohl or M. Chirac or Mr Major take an issue and look at it from the point of view of freedom? In domestic matters, they see everything in terms of party, in international ones in terms of government. Newt Gingrich may, as his critics allege, be egotistical, vain, mercurial and opportunist, but so what? That would not distinguish him from most leading politicians. What does distinguish him, particularly from politicians on our Continent, is his use of the Constitution and his position and the party platform and television and the Internet and every possi- ble means available to propagate his ver- sion of liberty.
Yes, but is it a conservative version? Well, it certainly lacks the charming, gentle pessimism of many British conservatives. It has a missionary quality, rather than a disil- lusioned or, more accurately, unilluded view of how the world works. It is brashly optimistic, excited by the future and its technologies, uninterested in those distinc- tions of race, culture and tradition which make old societies shy away from universal messages. I don't know, for example, how Newt would justify the British monarchy (although I bet he knows more about it than most British politicians: his reading of history is prodigious). But I wonder if these differences of philosophical temperament matter much in modern politics, for the fact is that government has become so big that the only people with the will to make it smaller will be can-do Newtists rather than can't-do Tories. In his recent book To Renew America, Mr Gingrich says that he wants to 'turn anxiety into energy', he wants people to recognise 'that there is a problem and that we can do something about it'. It is that 'and . . . ' which sepa- rates him from the Tory pessimist. I'm a pessimist myself, but it seems to me there's no point in being gloomy in public: one must grin and bear it and support people like Newt.
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