“I want to say to the elite of this country – the
elite news media, liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite – I
accuse you in Littleton and I accuse you in Kosovo of being afraid to talk
about the mess you have made and of being afraid to take responsibility for the
things you have done and instead forcing on the rest of us pathetic banalities
because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.”—Newt
Gingrich, “I Accuse,” speech given
by Newt Gingrich to the Republican Women Leaders Forum on May 12, 1999, quoted
in Washington Times, May 21, 1999
Twenty years ago today, recently forced out of his
post as Speaker of the House but still spouting divisive rhetoric, maybe just
to stay in practice, Newt Gingrich
waded into the gun-control debate swirling around the country in the wake of
the Columbine massacre.
A generation later, the question of “responsibility”
and “the world you have created” weighs more heavily than ever, both in terms
of the epidemic of gun violence in this country and in the toxic atmosphere of
American politics. In more than a little bit of coincidence, STEM School
Highlands Ranch, the site of the latest school shooting last week, is also in
Colorado, like Columbine—for all those people who wanted a little more
present-day reality with their Wild West.
Although Gingrich was not solely
responsible for both incidents, he cannot escape his culpability for what he
said or did in worsening these situations.
If there is anything “pathetic” in all of this, it
lies in how an influential politician's dreams of higher office led him to
abet an unceasing war on America’s children. The whole matter is so shameful
not just because it was unnecessary in the first place, but also because,
rather than being a heinous outlier, mass shootings have only become more common in American life.
Gingrich is a well-known animal lover. Maybe that’s
why he earned a place in what I called Trump’s “Pig Sty.” In few instances have his swinish instincts been more apparent
than in his longtime cultivation of the gun lobby.
It bore fruit in 1994, when
the National Rifle Association (NRA) spent $70 million on political action,
helping swing an estimated 20 House seats from Democratic to Republican and
ensuring that Gingrich would become Speaker. Gingrich assured the NRA he would
use his post to block any further gun-control legislation, and was as good as
his wood.
That electoral kitty had been eyed greedily by the
Georgia Congressman even since he began plotting his rise into the party
leadership. “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money
from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument,”
he was quoted saying in David Beers” “Master of Disaster,” in the October 1989
issue of Mother Jones.
On the contrary, after being implored for their
money—and assured that their concerns would be heeded—many contributors would
regard a subsequent refusal to do their bidding as the height of ingratitude.
An equivalent number would regard it as downright theft. Hardly a “socialist
argument.”
But bounds of propriety and rationality have never
restrained Gingrich in appeasing the gun lobby. In fact, in a little-noticed
incident in the 2012 primaries, he said the NRA was being “too timid” in
protecting its priorities. Instead, he called for protection of the Second
Amendment around the globe.
Just think of that. A right to food around the
world? No. Protection for the First Amendment? Please! Even students’ right to free
computers, as he had advocated for American kids at one point? No.
But a right to own guns with no restrictions
whatsoever on their licensing or possession, even if the weapons were used to
kill innocent schoolchildren? Now we’re talking!
Let there be no doubt of the consequences of
allowing the NRA to reign unfettered in the United States. At least 288 school
shootings took place in the United States from January 1, 2009 to May 21, 2018,
or 57 times as many shootings as the other six G7 countries combined, according
to a CNN analysis of the numbers.
Shootings—particularly those involving multiple
victims, as in those occurring in schools—breed depression and disorder among
the survivors, friends and relatives of the victims. But not for Gingrich and
the GOP he transformed in the 1990s.
To understand why, you need only consider the
statement by Ser Petyr Baelish in Game of
Thrones: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.” The chaos bred by these
and other shootings represented an opportunity for the Gingrich Republicans: a
chance to blame Democrats for the cultural unrest that allegedly lay behind it
all.
Again, the buildup to the 1994 midterms that swept
the GOP to power on Capitol Hill is instructive. Through GOPAC, a Republican
(GOP) state and local political training organization, he distributed materials
to candidates across the country who wanted to “speak like Newt.” One such
memo, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” proposed a set of words to
describe Democrats: sick, lie, anti-flag, traitors, radical, corrupt, and—the one
in our “Quote of the Day”—“pathetic.”
Those instructions were all part of the blueprint
for electoral control he began trumpeting in 1978, when, in his third,
increasingly desperate attempt to move on from his job as a college instructor
to Congress, he hit upon the formula for his eventual success that fall.
“One of the great problems we have in the Republican
Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told a gathering of
College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport in 1978. “We
encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy
Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in
politics.”
By the time he had gotten around to speaking to the
Republican Women Leaders Forum in 1999, Gingrich was in full automatic pilot mode
in speaking of the “pathetic banalities” voiced by Democrats. But in the two
decades since he spoke, leading the list of “pathetic banalities” has been the
mantra that victims of school violence would be in the GOP's “thoughts and prayers.”
When will the GOP spare Americans such pious cant?
Once they are punished at the polls for the rancid rhetoric pioneered by
Gingrich—now an ingrained element of what passes for American political
discourse—which, for the last quarter century, has substituted for action to
curtail violence against schoolchildren.
