Newt Gingrich: A Reminder

There has been an idea floating around that erstwhile Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is the heir apparent for the struggling GOP, and may end up running in 2012. If that comes to pass, I hope everyone remembers well the sorts of things he says today, because he really does say batty things. A snippet from a Bill O'Reilly interview about the aftermath of the Prop 8 result:

O'REILLY: OK, now the culture war, I know you’ve been flying around the country and doing stuff. In the last three or four days, really nasty stuff. I mean, you know, hyper. We’re going to show you some of the video. A woman getting a cross smashed out of her hand. We had a church in Michigan invaded by gay activists. We’re going to show you the video on Monday of that. We have exclusively. We had a guy in Sacramento fired from his job. We have boycotts called on restaurants. I mean, it is getting out of control very few days after the election. How do you assess that?

GINGRICH: Look, I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants impose its will on the rest of us. It is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government, if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact, and frankly for that matter if you believe in the historic version of Islam or the historic version of Judaism, you have to confront the reality that the secular extremists are determined to impose on you acceptance of a series of values that are antithetical, they’re the opposite of what you’re taught in Sunday school.

Gingrich has an interesting habit--on display here--of taking some emotionally charged but unrelated concept, such as fascism, and shoehorning it into his argument via the strategic deployment of adjectives. Thus, we get constructions like "gay and secular fascism" and "historic Christianity"--phrases that don't actually mean anything, but are just academic-seeming enough to not sound completely ridiculous on television. It's pseudo-intellectualism providing cover for the ugliest kind of divisive rhetoric.

I mean, think of it: even if we accept for the sake of argument O'Reilly's (shamelessly) exaggerated portrayal of secular/gay reaction to the Prop 8 results, Gingrich's comments are still out to lunch. Surely, violently "invading" churches and knocking things out of people's hands is unjustified and wrong, but how on earth is it the 20th-century-era anti-liberal form of government known as fascism? When an extremist pro-lifer bombs an abortion clinic, is that "pro-life fascism"? When some civil rights protesters went too far in the 1960s, was that "black fascism"? The only way "fascism" has any bearing at all to any of this is if we trivially define "fascism" to be merely the violent pursuit of some political ends--a definition that renders the observation "the violent gay reaction to Prop 8 is fascist" completely redundant.

And what does it mean to add the word "historic" to the front of "Christianity", "Judaism", and "Islam"? Certainly, Gingrich could not say simply that "if you believe in Christianity, then you will be confronted with the reality that secular extremists will impose values that are antithetical to yours", because it's not true: there are plenty of Christians who are okay with gay marriage, separation of church and state, and other secular values. And so he says, "if you believe in historic Christianity...". But what kind of Christianity is that? It is a term that he just makes up, and which apart from having a sort of anti-modernity tone to it, doesn't really contain any information aside from what we can trivially infer, which is that someone who believes in "historic Christianity" is someone who is a Christian that believes that gay marriage is antithetical to Christianity. And what does "historic Judaism" mean? Does it mean Orthodox Judaism? It's true that Orthodox Jews are anti-gay-marriage, on the whole--but it's also true that most Jews aren't Orthodox and are, in fact, a fairly liberal and tolerant bunch. Is Newt really pandering here to Orthodox Jews? And what does "historic Islam" mean? If it means a strain of Islam that has remained relatively untouched by modernity, well then, er--isn't that what Republicans like Gingrich are always so quick to label "Islamo-fascism"?

I get the impression that when Gingrich orders a bagel, and it is not toasted to his liking, he decries the bagel fascism he has been subjected to, and yearns for a proper historical bagel.