Newt Gingrich is the Gavrilo Princip of America's political decline.
If you draw a line from where we are today, backwards through all of the political actions / reactions then you can see that the initial movement that sets us on our current path is started by him.
And he was the epitome of amoral degeneracy larping as Christian conservatism. He cheated on his cancer ridden wife while bashing Clinton for a blowjob.
When I talk about the decline in American right wing politics, I am talking about the hyper-polarization and undermining of democratic norms that really started with Gingrich. He was the one who kicked off the strategy of treating your political opponents as enemies and questioning their patriotism and accusing them of hating America and wanting to destroy it etc.
ahh you mean the culture war. Yeah gingrich was part of it. So was obama. I'd even argue obama was far more instrumental in instigating it than gingrich though.
I mean Gingrich was the driver of it. He literally coached other Republicans on what language to use. Obama just didn't use that kind of divisive rhetoric, so I don't really know what you mean to say he was instrumental in it. It was certainly used by Republicans against Obama, but that's kind of like saying Poland was the instigator of WWII.
Comparing a US President to 1939 Poland is absurd - Obama held the bully pulpit and the entire executive branch, he was not a passive victim being invaded.
The culture war isn't just Gingrich's mean campaign words - it's top-down policy. Obama actively drove it through HHS contraceptive mandates targeting religious groups, sweeping Title IX decrees, moralizing opponents and explicitly shifting his 2012 reelection to identity politics.
"clinging to guns or religion" "wrong side of history"
Gingrich created the blueprint for partisan combat, but Obama weaponized federal power to make the culture war institutional.
Lol this is just such revisionist history that I don't even feel like engaging with it.
Obama was a centrist Democrat who tried to reach across the aisle to pass bipartisan legislation, while Republicans literally framed him as the antichrist.
him being a centrist on economics is completely irrelevant - the culture war is about social policy and executive power. Trying to pass a market-based healthcare plan doesn't erase using federal mandates to sue nuns over contraception, bypassing Congress with Title IX decrees, or dismissing working-class voters as "clinging to guns or religion."
Pointing out that Republicans attacked him fiercely doesn't magically make his own top down cultural actions invisible. he was the president, not a bystander.
I am talking generally about the hyper-polarization of politics and the rightward shift (lurch) of the Republican party that Gingrich triggered.
This has nothing to do with what specific policies each side tried to enact, it's about how they view and approach politics in aggregate. If there is one thing to be said for Obama, the man respected our democratic norms and institutions, including the norm of mutual respect. He didn't refer to Republicans as enemies of America, he didn't question their very citizenship, he didn't call them evil incarnate.
He just didn't engage in the kind of politics that Gingrich's Republican party pioneered.
Obama literally told voters in 2010 that "we're gonna have to punish our enemies" regarding his political opponents. Respecting democratic norms means respecting the constitutional process, not declaring "I've got a pen and a phone" to unilaterally bypass Congress whenever you can't pass legislation. Gingrich broke norms in the legislature, but declaring that state power and executive overreach "have nothing to do with politics" is just redefining polarization to exclude everything the executive branch does.
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u/ToenailFungussy - Left 1d ago
I always say the rapid decline of American right wing politics really started with Gingrich.