Gingrich's Flawed Vision

Gingrich's Flawed Vision

Since hearing Newt Gingrich say the Republican Party needs "to do more than attack Hillary and Obama," I've managed to recover from the hypocritical irony of such a statement from the man who led the charge to impeach Bill Clinton. In fact, I've thought about what else he had to say Thursday in Iowa City.

I've always begrudgingly respected Gingrich as a brilliant tactician with a flawed ideology. He's unquestionably the second-most important figure in modern American conservatism, behind only Ronald Reagan. But unlike the warm, sunny Reagan, Gingrich has a cool and aloof manner in person. It's all about the ideas for Newt. Intellectually, he could run rings around George W. Bush. If you buy into his basic premise -- the free market solves all -- he could be seen as very persuasive.

But, as libertarian Republican candidate Ron Paul becomes the internet fad of the month, a political version of the lolcats or the O RLY? owl or All Your Base Are Belong To Us, it's important to remember that the free market does not solve everything.

Unfettered capitalism gave us sweatshops and robber barons. Only the reforms of the Progressive era in the 1900s and 1910s, a period Gingrich cited as a turning point, returned us to a more level playing field with progressive taxation, worker's compensation, popular election of senators and more. The pendulum swung back in the 1920s, and the ideological rigidity of Coolidge and Hoover deepened the Great Depression. Again, government under Roosevelt and Truman restored some fairness.

The result of the Reagan-Gingrich-Cheney era has been the increased concentration of wealth, the inversion of progressive taxation, and the shredding of the safety net. Perhaps Gingrich sees this as a mere adjustment in markets, a simple disagreement in the political who-gets-what of our economy.

But there's also been a spiritual change in the character of America. Gingrich singled out Wal-Mart and McDonalds as innovative companies with new ideas. Which is fine, if all that you're valuing is the bottom line. But uniqueness, diversity, local color and flavor have increasingly been crushed by the malling and chaining of America. Starbucks coffee shops have become symbols of this dynamic, a focus for protests in hip cities and abroad that often have little to do with coffee. There's even a word for it - "Generica," signifying those endless edge-of-town highway strips of franchises and access roads with no organic indicators of where you are.

As an Iowa Citian I treasure my local one-of-a-kind businesses. I've written here of the Record Collector and the Hamburg Inn. The corner market may be an anachronism, but no one can deny that John's Grocery is one of the special things about my town. Who needs a Waldenbooks or a Barnes and Noble when there's Prairie Lights nearby? Why would anyone order from Dominos with Pagliai's in town?

I sense that my stance is atypical. But Newt Gingrich's vision of America misses much of what makes America special.