Newt Gingrich’s Bad History

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:



Newt Gingrich’s Bad History
Michael Kazin - July 22, 2011 12:00 pm


Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign is finished, although it may be a few months before he admits what nearly everyone who follows politics already knows. In the meantime, the loquacious fellow who once spearheaded the conservative insurgency, ran the House of Representatives, and jousted with President Bill Clinton has now become the butt of predictable jokes about his hefty debts, his three marriages, and the staffers who were smart enough to get off his sinking ship.

But, unlike other failed politicians, the former Speaker and soon-to-be former candidate still enjoys a reputation—at least among prominent conservatives—as a figure of learning and insight. In May, Eric Cantor swooned that Gingrich “has always been an ideas man, and I’m sure will provide a lot of positive input in the debate.” “No question Newt is an ideas machine, and he’ll add intellectual heft to the debate,” added Mark McKinnon, chief media adviser to both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns. Indeed, Gingrich’s many books of fiction and nonfiction and his ability to talk at length about subjects ranging from technology to space travel to dinosaurs have won him a kind of intellectual respect from his ideological peers that a Bachmann or Perry will never achieve. What’s more, the man has a Ph.D. in history and taught the subject for eight years at a Georgia college.

Is the reputation deserved? I am not qualified to judge Gingrich’s knowledge of pterodactyls or the merits of establishing a colony on Mars. However, I have just completed his latest book of history: A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters. And I can say, with absolute confidence, that it may be the most inaccurate, least intellectual book about our nation’s past I have ever read. Let’s start with his premise. One can certainly make a decent argument that the United States is a nation with exceptional ideals and/or a history distinctive for its economic success—whether that success was due more to brilliant entrepreneurs and industrious workers or to the good fortune of settlers and their progeny who conquered a vast land graced with abundant natural resources, a small native population, and an ocean away from European wars. But, to make that argument convincingly, one would have compare those ideals and that history with those of other nations. After all, something is exceptional only in contrast to some other things.

Gingrich, however, has no time for anything but American history. He merely declares, repeatedly, that the United States is different and better than any other place on earth and expects readers to take him on faith. Only America, he asserts, is dedicated to individual freedom, to limited government, to human equality and “to the profound religious principle that recognizes God as the ultimate authority over any government.” The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen? The British tradition of divided powers between the monarch and Parliament? The Iranian and Saudi theocracies? Newt the politician-historian seems to have missed all of these. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=509

[Angry Dragon]

1. the newt misses a lot

soon he will have more time to search for that wife #4

[BiggJawn]

2. Naw, he won't stray as long as Callista stays healthy.

Let her come down with something chronic or terminal, though...

[SheilaT]

3. I always like to point out that back in the early 90's,

when he was just beginning to show up on the national radar, someone I knew said, "Newt gingrich. Now that sounds like a strange and disfiguring skin disease. Oh, look," he said grabbing his arm, "my newt gingrich is getting worse."

I ALWAYS think of that when I see his name.