AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Abbott
As Americans have become ever-more pessimistic about the direction of the country under Democrat leadership, and Donald Trump looks increasingly resurgent in national politics, liberals and the left-wing media have desperately cast about for anyone but themselves to blame. Lately, they’ve set their sights on a rather unlikely target: former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who led Republicans to a historic victory in the 1994 midterms.
A number of liberal journalists and politicians have recently reprised the old canard that it is Gingrich who bears responsibility for the “current state of American politics,” and that things only started to go wrong when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives under his leadership, for the first time in nearly 40 years.
Before Newt, the liberal myth goes, politics was never mean.
The latest angry left-wing pundit to attempt this self-coping mechanism was Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. Last month, Milbank wrote that Gingrich “bears a singular responsibility for precipitating the ruin of the American political system.” Another article from December of last year asserts that Gingrich “didn’t invent harsh partisanship or negative politics, but he brought them to a new level.” In general, the liberal journalists writing these pieces allege that the ‘coarsening’ of public discourse and the ‘polarization’ of American politics can be laid at the feet of the former speaker.
As Milbank argues, Gingrich is responsible for polarization because he “popularized the idea that Democrats weren’t just wrong — they were criminals. They didn’t just disagree — they were corrupt and anti-American.” (Looking at the situation today, an impartial observer might say this was not hyperbolic; it was prophetic.)
Milbank asserts that Gingrich’s style of politics became the basis for all conservative and Republican strategies, which he claims are rooted in the slander and demonization of Democrats and liberals. This argument suggests that the escalation in rhetoric is a “Republican problem” and, should a Democrat engage in vilification, they’re merely matching the energy of conservatives and Republicans. In other words, Milbank is saying, “well, they started it.”
Milbank also blames Gingrich for “pioneering” the “now-common refusal to negotiate, which brought hopeless gridlock and dysfunction to the political system.”
While these columns go to great lengths to employ narrative flourish and even select a handful of Gingrich quotes with little context, they remain noticeably light on the facts. However, only days after Milbank released his piece, Gingrich published an open letter filling in the missing details. As Gingrich explains of Milbank’s claim that Gingrich “popularized” the idea that Democrats were criminals, his “first action concerning Democratic House members who were criminals involved then-Rep. Charles Diggs (Mich.), who had been convicted of 11 counts of mail fraud and received kickbacks from his staff and was sentenced to three years in prison. He was by definition a criminal.”
Indeed, what Milbank and these other revisionist historians seem to forget is that from 1975-1995, when Gingrich became speaker, over thirty members of Congress had been indicted or arrested while serving in office. At that point, this was more than in almost any other single period in American history. It was for this very reason that Gingrich highlighted government accountability in his famous “Contract with America” that handed Republicans control of the House for the first time in decades. Gingrich didn’t set out to portray anyone as a criminal – they already were criminals, and he exposed them.
In almost every case, the crime involved some form of bribery and abuse of public office. Democratic members overwhelmingly committed the crimes. Several of these crimes, including the House Banking scandal, Congressional Post Office scandal, Windtech scandal, Abscam, and the Savings and Loan scandal, were national stories and a mark of shame upon a hallowed branch of government. Gingrich prioritized holding Members of Congress accountable and ending many of the dishonest policies that had been allowed to flourish under Democrat control.
Ironically, if there was one person who is actually responsible for normalizing divisive rhetoric decades ago, it was not a beloved Republican leader but a Democratic one. In 1987, Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to serve on the Supreme Court. Nominations to our highest court had historically been a dignified process in which, unless malfeasance was found, the judge was likely to be confirmed. This time, however, Senator Ted Kennedy shocked the nation by embarking on a hysterical tirade against the eminently qualified Bork. “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution,” Kennedy baselessly claimed. “Writers and artists would be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.”
Kennedy so aggressively attacked the judge that Bork’s nomination was defeated. Further, the attack was so unprecedented and vile that the Oxford English Dictionary turned his name into a verb. To “bork” a person is to: “obstruct (someone, especially a candidate for public office) by systematically defaming or vilifying them.”
Democrats tried the same tactic again four years later with now Justice Clarence Thomas, and again in 2018 with Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Now, however, Democrats breathlessly insist that it is Republicans who have “politicized” the court and the nominations process. They also blame Republicans for polarization in American society generally, even after they have spent over a year denouncing every supporter of former President Trump as a “domestic terrorist.”
In all of these cases, a liberal opinion leader crafts an “invisible bridge” in which the alleged malice of one beloved conservative created a ripple effect that led America inexorably towards the divisive partisan path that we walk to this day. While this fable may bring them some comfort, their time might be better spent understanding the history of why they lost power, rather than complaining about it. They might find that virtually everything Gingrich accused them of was true.
Andrew Abbott is the pen name of a writer and public affairs consultant with over a decade of experience in DC at the intersection of politics and culture.