To Renew America Newt Gingrich

...He resembles Nixon in his near-paranoid assaults on the "whining" left-wing media, "liberals" (undefined), and vague and sinister "elites...

...If people don't want to buy it, we probably won't do very well...

...and balancing the federal budget), the five principles of our civilization, the eight reforms needed to change the welfare system, and so on and so on...

...The contract may or may not be "the most radical and important conservative manifesto of our times," as Lady Margaret Thatcher has characterized it, but the recounting of its procedural implementation in the House is comparable to a description of grass growing...

...Never mind the absence of the personal element that most would find essential: the doctor who breaks the news of a fatal illness, the lawyer who gives his best judgment as to the pros and cons of a course of action, the teacher who is a role model...

...Despite nods to the likes of de Tocque-ville and Arnold Toynbee, a Nixonian anti-intellectual tone often surfaces...

...Thus in health care we can expect a system unfettered by the doctors' "trade guild" (or the Food and Drug Administration for that matter) that will allow the patient, through "telemedicine," to handle most ailments by computerized self-diagnosis...

...He is the author of Domestic Affairs: American Programs and Priorities...

...West Point...

...His "twenty-first-century vision" for America draws on a heady combination of futurism-Alvin Toeffler variety- and science fiction a la Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke...

...Forget it...

...there's no vodka-swilling welfare queen, but we do have the welfare mother "punished for sewing her daughter's clothing and saving on food stamps" so she can put money aside for her daughter's education...

...And there's nary a word about the Christian Right, abortion, or school prayer, just the hope that our social problems will be solved by the "volunteerism" of our "churches, synagogues, and mosques...

...points out gleefully that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were college dropouts, and notes that seven of the last ten presidents did not attend "elite" colleges...

...It is more, as we learn in this burst of candor: We are not simply trying to move a few offices out of Washington...

...competitiveness in world trade...

...Trendy...

...Good old-fashioned get-off-my-back-and-lower-my-taxes conservative radicalism...

...Michigan...

...The contract, the revolution, the devolution, or whatever one chooses to call it, is a reversion to another Republican tradition going back at least to Calvin Coolidge...

...improving U.S...

...The history Ph.D...

...replacing the "welfare state...

...Thy brother's keeper...

...As for education, individuals will in- struct themselves over a lifetime via computer-a sort of Calvert School in cyberspace...

...Like Reagan, he also treats movies as reality, drawing morals from Star Wars and the remake of The Last of the Mohicans...

...The original portions of the book, dealing with the Contract with America, are surprisingly tepid...

...To Renew America is a best-selling success for its author...

...Everything but a twelve-step program for political junkies...

...A parlor game for you...

...decentralizing government...

...James Duffy Addressing the Republican National Committee last January, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich had this to say about his controversial agreement with Rupert Murdoch's publishing company: "I am going to write a book...

...There it is...

...James Duffy is a writer and former lawyer living in New York...

...The socialists in the Democratic party don't quite get it...

...We want to leave choices and resources in the hands of individuals and let them decide if they prefer government, the profit-making sector, the nonprofit sector, or even no solution at all to their problems....[Freedom ultimately includes the right to say no" [emphasis added...

...But it is a bad, or at least a mediocre, piece of work, cobbled together from speeches and (presumably) from the materials for the history course he has taught in Georgia and on the Mind Extension TV channel...

...We are trying to reestablish the American value of individual liberty and the citizens' first claim to their own money....The last sixty years has [sic] seen so much centralization in Washington that at this point the best we can do is to start by shifting power back to the state capitals....Yet our ultimate goal is to move power even beyond the state capitals...

...Readers should note that if they call 1-800-TO-RENEW they canorder videotapes of the speaker's course lectures on renewing America for a bargain $159.95...

...The speaker's book is replete with lists: the six major challenges to our society ("renewing" American civilization...

...There's Harvard and Yale, but what is the third "elite" college...

...W]hat we really want to do is devolve power all the way out of government and back to working American families...

...Writing as Haughton Murphy, he is the author of the Reuben Frost mystery novels...

...Gingrich's thinking reflects several Republican traditions, albeit in my view the wrong ones...

...The speaker was half right...

...It must be said, however, that some of Gingrich's more provocative public utterances are omitted-the characterization of Democrats as "socialists," for example, or the bashing of public broadcasting...

...This is a system called free enterprise...

...accelerating the Information Age...

...The legal profession will wither away, too, as people write their wills and contracts aided by programs on their PCs...

...George- town...

...We abandoned that when we adopted the ideal of equality of opportunity...

...Gingrich is Reaganesque in his resort to the unsubstantiated anecdote...

...I don't know whether it is going to be a good book or a bad book....If people want to buy it, Marianne [his wife] and I will probably do pretty well...

...We have confirmed its abandonment in terms of legislation, of social and economic justice-in part because we have learned that social injustice is the destruction of justice itself...

...When one strips away the futurism, the anecdotes, the lists, and the occasional personal reminiscences, what is left is a hard-nut reactionary agenda, the goal of which is not just to gut the detested "bureaucracy" and shift power to state and local government...

...But Gingrich the erstwhile history professor might ponder these words of Herbert Hoover, written in 1922: We have long since abandoned the laissez faire of the eighteenth century-the notion that it is "every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost...