A Critique of Pure Newt
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
Books A Critique of Pure Newt By Charles Krauthammer In the United States at this time," wrote Lionel Trilling in 1950, "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual...
...Conservatism cannot be revolutionary in anything but the more limited "negative" sense of radically stripping away the encumbrances of the welfare state...
...Igrant that this conservative conservatism is less inspiring than Newt's...
...The book is unsystematic, but its underlying vision is easily discerned...
...It forces conservatives to choose often unpopular anti-libertarian stands...
...The "optimists" mock this caution as root canal conservatism...
...And it does not hold up...
...It is more pyramidal...
...The very expectation is absurd, a merely clever way of damning conservatives by holding them to an impossible standard...
...Gingrich's vision is of an American civilization socially restored by individualism and a sense of personal responsibility, economically restored by a freed-up, unstifled market...
...But his techno-conser-vatism is no construct of convenience...
...The child either lived or died, and, for the most part, did so quickly and cheaply," noted Gaylin...
...It is non-divisive...
...It is what won the conservatives control of Congress...
...It is the business of conservatives to oppose such expansive visions and the great statist apparatuses by which they are to be legislated into existence...
...We all know that Americans are, as Robert Putnam has put it memorably, "bowling alone...
...In this book he does...
...In his acceptance speech as Speaker, he proclaimed the goal of the conservative revolution of 1994 as not just political- "Our challenge shouldn't be to balance the budget, to pass the Contract...
...Something more is needed to turn this prosaic vision of pre-welfare state America into the shining city of the 21st century...
...Conservatives shouldn't promise that...
...Moreover, to win the other way, with the promise of revolution, is to lose from the start...
...Why does this vision not convince...
...That is the other guy's game (and why his failures, when juxtaposed with his promises, appear doubly abysmal...
...Gingrich yearns to rise above this...
...Sick people are expensive...
...Good medicine does not reduce the percentage of people with illnesses," explained Willard Gaylin in a brilliant essay on this theme in the October 1993 Harper's...
...As Gingrich once said, "There has to be a missionary spirit that says to the poorest child in America, Internet's for you...
...To Renew America trusts in the bounty, the yet to be believed wonders, of technology...
...Gingrich the politician understands that...
...For Gingrich, the solution lies at hand in the free, fluid, associative virtual communities of the Internet...
...Revolution is the end-and for conservatism, a very odd end...
...Even Reagan promised just three things-lower taxes, strong defense, less government-and left the rest to our imagination, and to the truly Tocquevillian American genius for then freely, unpredictably ordering society...
...Even regarding this narrow problem-controlling the corrupting influence of media-it solves only a piece of a part...
...This is not to deny the liberating effects of digital technology...
...Like all conservatives, Gingrich recognizes the decline of intermediate institutions (churches, clubs, charities, other voluntary associations), the kind of associationism so celebrated by Tocqueville...
...This after half a year in power, against the opposition of the executive and with only tenuous control of the Senate...
...The problem for Gingrich is that the V-chip solution is a rarity, not the rule...
...The great industrial age hierarchies- legal, medical, educational, corporate, governmental-now obsolete, will break down, "leading us back to something that is-strangely enough-much more like de Tocqueville's 1830s America...
...Indeed, the newest conventional wisdom-that the conservative revolution of November 1994 has "stalled"-is based on the alleged disappointment that the Republicans have not, since November 8, brought about a significant transformation of the welfare state...
...It is typical of Gingrich's belief in the power of technology, however, that he sees it as solving not just the hierarchical structure of modern medicine, but also the more prosaic and pressing problem of its bankrupting costs...
...He proposes to help reduce the explosive growth of Medicare, for example, by inducing the elderly to join HMO's, which is a form of rationing (as Elizabeth McCaughey made very clear in savaging the Clinton plan, which was designed to herd us all into HMO's...
...The opposite, it seems to me, is far more likely...
...The explosion of knowledge in all fields makes for more specialization and more alienation of knowledge...
...that a mini-welfare state, a reformed-even radically reformed-version of the status quo, is simply not enough for conservatism to offer...
...In the same way that Orwell and Huxley were fascinated and seduced by the totalitarian potential of technology-convinced that as technology became more powerful, it would become increasingly centralized, a means of social atomization and political oppression-Gingrich is fascinated and seduced by its potential for liberation...
...And it will do as an ironic, slightly self-mocking slogan...
...It permits some control over the corrupting mass media without preventing entrepreneurs from producing and disseminating as they please...
...It increases that percentage...
...Delimiting Leviathan is work enough without promising nirvana...
...The anti-liberal sentiment in the country is so broad and deep that offering a vision of America freed from liberalism's welfare statism is appeal enough...
...The problem for conservatives, however, is that while the new national consensus is decidedly, undeniably anti-liberal-the word can hardly be spoken without disdain or embarrassment-it is not yet conservative...
...However much kids ride their Macs, they still spend most of their day bathed in the influences of music, movies, TV, and advertising...
...It inspires the troops...
...But it is bound to be more durable because it will be less disappointing...
...At root, the problem with Gingrichism is not its belief in technology, but its belief in revolution...
...Yet even given the magnitude of the task and the decades required, there is a deep feeling among conservatives that this vision of merely delimiting the state is too, well, negative...
...The more channels, the more fractionated the audience...
...Each revolutionary has his own particular agency-Reason, History, the proletariat, technology-but they all share a belief in its unremitting power, ultimate benignity, and absolute necessity...
...To be sure and to be fair, there are myriad other prescriptions for reorganizing this and reforming that in To Renew America, not at all tied to technology...
...Better machines, whatever their cost, make for better medicine...
...People who live longer suffer, over time, more disease and disability...
...it should take no more than 11 percent...
...In normal, "negative" politics, you fight, denounce, threaten, and, as a last resort, censor...
...Even from the point of view of practical politics, one doesn't have to promise the moon...
...But reforming Medicare, arresting cultural decline, curing the federal debt require root canal work...
...He later retracted...
...Perhaps there will be a slice of society that will interact on the Internet, though how real this kind of community is remains very much open to question...
...how software and e-mail will make lawyers obsolete...
...And now, a new entrant in the field, authored by Newt Gingrich...
...And the TV and Walkman are far more common than PCs with NetScape...
...Having brought about, by extraordinary tactical skill and strategic vision, the most remarkable conservative victory since World War II- potentially far more significant than Ronald Reagan's-Gingrich has set out to endow it with theory...
...There are two possible views of the meaning and mission of the conservative upheaval of November 1994...
...that without a broader, more "positive" vision, conservatism will fail because it will fail to inspire...
...But what he ignores is the far more important influence of high technology...
...Gingrich's solution...
...And, when everyone can access everything, the knowledge priesthoods will dissolve...
...The more every individual can order up the kind of self-stimulation that suits his particular taste, the less his need for social association...
...Telemedicine, for example, will allow remote diagnosis and treatment, reduce costs, and allow the exportation of medical services to other countries-turning medicine from a financial drain into a vast new source of wealth for the United States...
...The coarsening effects of mass culture present conservatives with a difficult choice: freedom of expression and free markets on the one hand, versus the preservation of public morality on the other...
...Technology is just the means...
...The new technology, he promises, in the chapter titled "America and the Third Wave Information Age," will in and of itself overthrow the great obstacles to growth and freedom: the guild-like legal system, the monopolistic educational establishment, hierarchical medicine, the giant corporations, Big Government itself...
...No need-no conservative call-to order the result from above, nor to believe its shape inevitably determined by technology or any other agency of history...
...I am a doctor, board certified in psychiatry and neurology...
...how, in effect, the single mom with laptop will find her way out of dependency...
...At the broadest level, because it is as naively optimistic about the social and political possibilities of technology as thinkers 50 years ago were naively pessimistic...
...This is nonsense on stilts...
...Utopia is the business of liberals and socialists...
...And on every issue except possibly abortion it has...
...It is positive...
...Books A Critique of Pure Newt By Charles Krauthammer In the United States at this time," wrote Lionel Trilling in 1950, "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition...
...Instead we have a field of several conservatisms in serious contention- Christian Coalition social conservatism, Nixon-Dole traditional conservatism, Cato Institute liber-tarianism, Buchanan's reactionary populism (nativist, protectionist, anti-"finance"-capitalist)-and no one to adjudicate between them...
...Meantime, the unrelenting impact of high technology on medicine is to increase cost...
...Leave the people to their own devices and virtues, unencumbered by the lumbering, grasping, interfering state, and they will flourish as of old...
...Why are Americans bowling alone...
...Finally, a conservative conservatism is more honest...
...He believes that the dissemination of information technology will democratize knowledge...
...Confronting and deconstructing existing social hierarchies-educational, legal, governmental, corporate-is generally assumed to require politics, a politics of destruction, a hard, divisive, traditional "negative" politics of the kind practical politicians (like Gingrich and Armey) have to engage in daily in Congress...
...Now we save them, expensively, so they can die later, even more expensively, of more chronic diseases like cancer...
...Ultimately, the only answer is some kind of rationing, under whatever guise...
...There is no new conservative consensus...
...Even higher tech...
...But what is new and unique about Gingrich's conservatism-what lifts his above its merely "negative" anti-welfare-state counterpart-is precisely this marriage of conservative values and digital technology...
...He wears the label proudly...
...Better medicine means people live longer...
...Even the 500 channels celebrated by the high technologists as liberating have their largely ignored, atomizing underside...
...Today it takes 22 percent of GNP...
...It is not the business of conservatives to offer utopias...
...At the heart of conservatism's argument with liberalism is its rejection of the notion of human perfectibility, with or without technology...
...Dick Armey makes this the centerpiece of his less celebrated, though quite substantial, book outlining the goals of the new conservative majority...
...For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation...
...Technology is how Gingrich gets there...
...There is no way out of this dilemma...
...There," however, is a strange place for a conservative to be...
...The book is a catalogue of the combinative powers of freedom and technology, of how tele-education will democratize learning...
...Isaiah Berlin drew a famous distinction between negative liberty (being left alone) and positive liberty (the "truer" freedom of finding and fusing with some higher purpose...
...What new society this will yield, we do not know...
...The revolutionary vision is not just confined to the book...
...Having seen the PC and the Internet, Gingrichism, a post-totalitarian creed, shows no appreciation for the darker side of technology...
...He'd go to the Mayo Clinic...
...Conservatives do not need a more "positive" vision other than the faith that, with these encumbrances removed, native American genius will flourish, and civil society, freed from the grip of the state, will renew itself...
...It is not by accident that he once suggested tax credits for the poor to buy laptops...
...Though there is always the odd skeptic asking: Why join the revolution if it is going to happen anyway...
...We don't know what comes after the welfare state...
...Cutting even a fraction of that is a very ambitious mission, one that could take a conservative Congress a generation to achieve...
...Yes, technology is Gingrich's deus ex machina, the means by which he finesses the dilemmas of modern capitalism and conveniently bridges its philosophical and political divides...
...Times change...
...To Renew America (HarperCollins, 260 pages, $24.00) is the attempt, a grander attempt than his critics have given him credit for...
...As Michael Dukakis learned, no candidate for president can win under the label of liberal...
...And therefore no escaping the hard, divisive, political choices required to curb them...
...And this particular case does offer Gingrich some vindication...
...It is technology's very success that occasions its ruinous cost...
...And it is to deny the view that they somehow finesse the central contradiction of democratic capitalism: the atomization that threatens social cohesion...
...I doubt Gingrich would go to Joe for the removal of an obscure bone tumor...
...It occasionally finds expression from Gingrich the politician, particularly at times when he believes high politics demands the expansiveness of a "positive" vision...
...What to do...
...Because technology enables everybody to spend all night (and much of the day) co-cooned in front of the wide-screened "home entertainment center...
...Our challenge shouldn't be anything that's just legislative"- but meta-political: the manufacture of a new society, an America where, for starters, random violence, child abuse, poor education, and chronic unemployment have been abolished...
...He believes in its power, and believes in it deeply...
...Perhaps...
...In the old days of three channels, the audience could be shepherded into some kind of shared national experience-moon shots, Roots, presidential debates- that helped knit together a country of suburbanites and ex-urbanites...
...It is also what makes it so appealing...
...It is the work of the great corporations of America, as Calvin Klein's latest outrage, its withdrawn kiddy-porn ad campaign, reminds us...
...The V-chip will shield no one from the bus-shelter posters and looming billboards of the next Calvin Klein campaign...
...As Bill Clinton has learned, no president can govern as a liberal...
...The other party has adopted every one of these goals, some more ingenuously than others, and for good reason...
...So far so good, but still conventionally "negative...
...Medicine, for example, is hardly democratized by high technology...
...It can win them the presidency...
...The business of conservatives is to balance the budget, to pass the Contract, and leave social transformation to liberals...
...The most dangerous cultural contradiction of capitalism, however, involves not the form but the content of mass communication: the corruption of culture and values by debased, corporate controlled mass media...
...Enter Gingrich and To Renew America...
...But it is to question the view that these effects are uniformly good...
...On what grounds are both parties contending these days...
...Gingrich, who sees a new society about to be born with technology as midwife, really is that oxymoron, the conservative revolutionary...
...It does not so much adjudicate between the factions as try to transcend them with a new forward-looking, indeed futurist, vision...
...People used to die young of heart attacks...
...The resulting structure is not more horizontal...
...It is the business of conservatives to debunk such visions, not just as impractical but as inimical to liberty...
...And not just because machines are expensive...
...It is as if Gingrich's entire philosophy hinged on the famous Apple commercial (shown once, during the 1984 Super Bowl) that had the individual, armed with the Mac, destroying the Big Brother telescreen...
...Forty-five years later, in the world of practical politics (as opposed to the otherworldly outposts of academia), nothing but conservative ideas are in general circulation...
...There is nothing like being on the winning side...
...For a part of this problem, there is indeed a magical technological fix: the V-chip, the computer chip placed in televisions at manufacture that allows parents to automatically screen out violent or other unsuitable programming...
...Cynics might say that Gingrich has latched on to technological Tofflerism just for that reason, as a way to endow his conservative vision with a sense of historical inevitability...
...Conservatives believe such things unknowable...
...Information technology may, in fact, make it worse...
...Gingrich would transcend these contradictions and avoid the unpleasant choices with technology...
...But the original suggestion, blissful and wild, was the real Newt, the one who wrote To Renew America...
...Newt has found it: high technology...
...There is no escaping them...
...Now that child "will grow up to be a very expensive old man or woman...
...But the cynics are wrong...
...All serious revolutions produce theories of history to explain why their triumph is inevitable...
...The Internet shields no one from gangsta rap...
...Conservatives can't promise that...
...By assigning the task of politics to the painless and miraculous workings of technology, Gingrich manages to escape the negative and sail his techno-conservatism, unsullied, into a bright and shining future...
...Fifty years ago there was whooping cough and diphtheria...
...It is visionary...
...I cannot even read journals of immunology...
...Gingrich does so because he is a revolutionary...
...The dead are a burden to no one...
...Nitrous oxide won't do...
...Yes, censor: We already have, for example, all kinds of censoring conventions that distinguish broadcast TV from cable TV from pay-per-view TV...
...When even Bob Dole denounces Hollywood-to general applause-we have achieved a national consensus that there is a problem...
...Those who do go out move zombie-like through the streets, hard-wired to Walkmans, as oblivious and unavailable to society as the voice-plagued schizophrenic...
...The Freedom, Revolution, the House majority leader's entry in the Bible-of-conservative-revolution sweepstakes, even gives this goal a number: Cut the federal government in half...
...Take, for example, the central contradiction of capitalist democracy pointed out by Daniel Bell: the way in which the constant churning and change of capitalism undermines the social structures of society...
...how tele-medicine will solve our medical cost dilemmas...
...Wed the free individual and unfettered market to the emerging power of information-based technology (Third Wave, in Tofflerese, emerging from the hidebound Second Wave industrial technology) and you get the "opportunity society," an America of boundless prosperity, opportunity, mobility, harmony, and order...
...It is optimistic...
...Technology does not, as Gingrich suggests, make it possible for any Joe to become, at his will, a "specialist in some obscure medical procedure...
...Nonetheless, the book fails...
...Bill Clinton's frantic repositioning towards the center is the sign of an astute politician who knows when the ground of debate has shifted...
...Technology is making medicine so specialized that even specialists need specialists...
...There is a second aspect to Gingrich's belief in the Tocquevillian, associative, liberating direction of technology...
...Using this terminology, one might call the first conservative vision "negative": Its purpose is to, if not abolish, then delimit, deflate, defund, radically reduce the welfare state...
...Good medicine keeps sick people alive, people with heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and other chronic diseases...
...V-chip conservatism, leaving so many contradictions unaddressed, is at best a niche ideology...
...But Gingrich the visionary will hear nothing of such conventional negative thinking...
...Tax cuts, welfare reform, "family values," shrinking government, controlling immigration, curbing racial preferences, building prisons, adding cops, even balancing the budget by a fixed date...
...And revolutionaries believe in brave new worlds, brought about by irresistible agencies...
...Telemedicine-assuming it ever becomes feasible, a large assumption-is decades away from making any significant impact on medical practice and cost...
...The problem with To Renew America, however, is that it takes the oxymoron seriously as a political program...
...And it is not the work of liberals in the Education Department, Pat Buchanan's fanciful bureaucrats in "sandals and beads...
...The cultural onanism of movies-on-demand-by-fiber-optic-wire may be personally satisfying, but it does nothing for community...
Vol. 1 • September 1995 • No. 1
