The Path to Power (1978 – 1994)
Powell’s call to realign the centers of American culture around conservative ideas set off a two-phased change in the historical narrative of the country. What once was held as gospel – that the Constitution was adaptive to the evolutionary changes that happen to a society and that government had an important role in steering its path – became at best an indulgence the nation could no longer afford and at worst a traitorous foray into socialism that ran counter to the founders’ original intentions.
As the face of the first phase of the revolution, Ronald Reagan extolled the virtues of freedom and democracy while targeting the government that protected them with policies and rhetoric intended to bind together the alliance that carried him to the presidency in 1980. The Reagan coalition included fiscal conservatives, big business capitalists, white supremacists, and religious fundamentalists. Circumstances helped them elect Reagan: a decade of inflation, two energy crises, and Americans held hostage in Iran all worked against the reelection of President Carter and created an opening for a new way of thinking about how to move the country forward.
Behind the scenes of the Reagan Revolution, a much more dangerous threat began to percolate. Newt Gingrich was a political flamethrower who began his rise in the GOP in the early ‘80s and, in 1994, led the party to win the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. He was rewarded with the House speakership in 1995, but was forced out three years later after a dismal performance in the midterms. By then, however, he had started enough fires that soon began to burn beyond the party’s control. This was the next phase of the revolution – one that Reagan Republicans abetted despite any misgivings they may have had about the Gingrich tactics they embraced, and one that Democrats and the news media generally failed to recognize.
An Early Warning: “The evil that I’ve caused”
Ronald Reagan dominated the 1980s as a free market conservative guided by the intellectual output of groups like the Heritage Foundation, whose pro-business ideas had a significant impact on Reagan’s policymaking. The Reagan presidency, though, was made possible with the votes of former Jim Crow-supporting Democrats and a newly actualized religious right who were motivated by social, not financial, issues. But it was the rise of Newt Gingrich that would most impact the future course of the Republican Party and the nation.
Many who supported Gingrich in his early runs for Congress had grown wary of the man after they helped elect him. In his 1984 profile for Mother Jones, David Osborne quoted several people who knew Gingrich – friends and former friends and colleagues – who described him as self-interested, “a leech”, lacking “many principles”, “a man with no conscience”, “amoral”.
Most ominously, L.H. Carter, who Osborne says was among Gingrich’s closest friends and advisors until a rift in 1979, offered this warning and remorseful confession: “He’s probably one of the most dangerous people for the future of this country that you can possibly imagine. It doesn’t matter how much good I do the rest of my life, I can’t ever outweigh the evil that I’ve caused by helping him be elected to Congress.”
Ignored at the time, today the significance of Carter’s statement should not be lessened by Gingrich’s absence from the spotlight or obscured by Trump’s presence in it.
1978
Politics “is a War for Power”
Newt Gingrich was in the midst of his third campaign for Congress – and first successful one – when he made one of the defining speeches of his young career. Speaking to a group of young Republicans, he made it clear that there was little room in politics for being “nice”. Politics is war, he told them, and they had better be ready for battle.
1980
The Reagan Revolution
With Ronald Reagan’s election as president, pro-business conservatives had taken an important first step in their revolt against big government. Heavily influenced by the new ideas flowing from the Heritage Foundation and the reinvigorated expression of conservative thought, Reagan made a definitive break from the liberal policies and “good government” of the prior decades.
1984
Conflict Politics and Performance Find Traction
Newt Gingrich was still just a junior congressman from Georgia when he began to use C-SPAN’s coverage of Congress to attack Democrats and make headlines in the national media. It set him on the fast track to political power and the Republican Party on a path to controlling the political narrative for the next several decades.
1987
The End of “Fairness” in Media
Created to ensure that the public had access through radio and television broadcast channels to differing viewpoints on controversial issues, the Fairness Doctrine was also abused by three presidents. It was repealed in 1987, setting the stage for the growth of conservative talk radio as it fed the fears and stoked the anger of mostly White Christian Americans.
1991
The Rise of the Federalist Society
When Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected as a threat to civil liberties, Republicans accused Democrats of applying an ideological litmus test to the nomination process, ignoring that they had done that themselves in selecting Bork. When they next had an opportunity to put forward a nominee, Clarence Thomas became the first of six consecutive Republican nominees groomed and vetted by the Federalist Society to sit on the nation’s highest court.
1994
The Contract with America
The Contract with America turned the ‘94 midterm elections for the House of Representatives from a series of distinct local elections based on local issues into a national referendum on politics in Washington, DC. It is credited with the Republicans’ overwhelming victory in both national and state races that November.
