 |  | | Jan. 14, 2014 |  | No. 154 | | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  |  | | | | COLD OPEN |  | | | If you haven't been watching the Conversations with Bill Kristol series, you're cheating yourself. Recent episodes have featured long, wide-ranging interviews with Brit Hume, Joe Lieberman, and Ruth Wisse (among others). But calling them "long and wide-ranging" doesn't really convey how interesting these conversations are: There is no other format where important figures from public and intellectual life will sit and talk, uninterrupted and unedited, for 90 minutes at a time, with no constraints or strictures.
And the latest episode, featuring Newt Gingrich, might be the most fascinating one yet.
It's slightly depressing to think that a certain segment of the population-meaning people under 30-know Gingrich only as a failed presidential candidate from 2012. That was actually his third act in American politics, and when you survey his career in full, it's not an exaggeration to say that Gingrich is probably on the list of the dozen or so most important figures in American politics over the last 40 years.
It can be easy to underestimate Gingrich, I think. He has an unusual sense of grandiosity, and in a world full of careful, scripted political robots, Gingrich is the rare man willing to risk candor and embrace non-conventionality. For instance, in the early 2000s, Gingrich took to reviewing books on Amazon. No, really-for a time, he was even a Top 500 reviewer on the site. Try to imagine any other major politician of the last 40 years embracing this sort of public task with such genuine enthusiasm.
What's clear in Gingrich's conversation is that he is also the rare politician whose career was powered by a combination of conviction and vision. Here's Gingrich explaining how he decided, at a very young age, to go into politics:
I think part of the decisive moment actually, a sign of the power of books, was my senior year in high school reading Theodore White's Making of the President in 1960, which I think is still one of the greatest introductions to American politics. And he makes the point that Nelson Rockefeller had had a series of very senior appointments and learned that power comes from the people and you have to win elections, and then ran for governor. But that and I read that, and I thought there was something very profound.
And listening to my father's friends gripe in the Army about President Eisenhower, about the Congress, it began to occur to me they were griping about the guys who had power. And the guys who had power weren't the guys who were in the Army, they were the guys who passed the appropriations, set up the laws, structured them.
When he finally got elected to Congress, before he was even sworn in, Gingrich began nudging senior Republicans about trying to become a majority:
So when I won, I went to Vander Jagt in December of '78. We hadn't been sworn in yet. And we had a very big class in terms of the total size of it because the House Republicans had decayed so much. And I went to Vander Jagt and I said, "You know, we've not been in power for 24 years, and shouldn't we have a plan to become a majority?" And he said, "That is a terrific idea, why don't you chair the planning committee?"
So I had not been sworn in yet, and I now had a title, which enabled me to go do all sorts of things and spend a fair amount of the NRCC's money.... Because Bill Brock was from Chattanooga, was the Republican National Committee chairman, former U.S. Senator, he now had standing to work with me because I was the chairman of the planning committee. So even though I was a first-term freshman, I could go over to the RNC.
So when Thatcher won in May of '79, I could be part of the group that worked to bring Thatcher's ideas into the 1980 campaign. It's just an interesting example of how very small changes can become leverage points for lots of other things.
And all of this was in service to three big ideas:
I basically had three goals. Defeat the Soviet empire, replace the welfare state, and replace the Democrats as the majority party in the House. And that's what I arrived with. I spent my day on those three goals.
It's difficult to emphasize enough how different a modus vivendi this is from how most politicians approach life.
There's lots more in the interview, including a fantastic story about Bill Clinton. And the sum total of the conversation is a reminder about the contingency of history. Marx wasn't all wrong about historical determinism, but neither was he entirely correct. There are great forces at work, but, per Thomas Carlyle, there are also great men who occasionally meet the moment and bend those forces in new directions.
(If you want a perfect example of historical contingency, have a look at this story, from Donald Rumsfeld, about how Gerald Ford almost didn't become House minority leader, which would have meant him not being chosen to be Nixon's vice president, which would have meant him not becoming president.)
If you didn't recognize Gingrich as one of the great men of American politics before, you will after you take in this conversation. You can watch it here, download it as a podcast, or even print out the full transcript and read it, if that's your preference.
But don't miss it. | | | | LOOKING BACK | | | | | "The year 1997 was a big one for Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at MIT and a celebrated popularizer of science. His most ambitious book so far, How the Mind Works, was published to enthusiastic reviews, which is good news for him. And he was accused of advocating infanticide, which is not."
-Andrew Ferguson, "How Steven Pinker's Mind Works" from our January 12, 1998, issue.
Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. | | | | | | | | THE READING LIST | | | | | An interview with Gun Larson, one of America's premier calligraphers.
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The inside story of how Amazon's Fire Phone failed.
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Samuel Matlack on confronting the technological society, in the New Atlantis. | | | | INSTANT CLASSIC | | | | | "These men were exceptionally brave. Most of the people expressing solidarity with them are not that brave. I'm not that brave. But when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing, I fought back, and I pushed back, and I got a law changed in the Canadian Parliament, because that's how important I think freedom of speech is. But I wasn't asked to die for it like these guys were. And to be honest, it makes me vomit to see people holding these Princess Dianafied candlelit vigils, and using the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie-I am Charlie-and in effect appropriating these guys' sacrifice for this bogus solidarity. It makes me sick to see all these 'the pen is mightier than the sword' cartoons that have appeared in newspapers all over the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Australia, everywhere, from other cartoonists, again expressing solidarity with these very brave men-but not doing what they did...
"These guys are dead because back in 2005, these Danish cartoons were published in an obscure Jutland newspaper, and a bunch of fanatics went bananas and started killing people over them. So a couple of publications on the planet, including mine in Canada, and Charlie Hebdo in Paris, published these cartoons . . . Le Monde didn't, and the Times of London didn't, and the New York Times didn't, and nobody else did. And as a result, these fellows in Charlie Hebdo became the focus of murderous rage. If we'd all just published them on the front page and said 'If you want to kill us, you go to hell, you can't just kill a couple of obscure Danes, you're going to have to kill us all,' we wouldn't have this problem. But because nobody did that, these Parisian guys are dead. They're dead. And I've been on enough, I've been on enough events in Europe with less famous cartoonists than these who live under death threats, live under armed guard, have had their family restaurant firebombed-it's happened to a Norwegian comedienne I know-have come home and found their home burned, as a Swedish artist I know happened to. And all these people doing the phony hashtag solidarity, screw your phony hashtag solidarity. Let's have some real solidarity-or if not, at least have the good taste to stay the hell out of it."
-Mark Steyn on Charlie Hebdo and hashtag solidarity, January 8, 2015. | | | | THE LAST WORD | | | | | In our continuing series on the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, and last year's extraordinary (in both the theological and descriptive sense) synod on the family, we have a new piece of reporting and analysis from the great George Weigel. It is, I think, important for anyone trying to understand the tension within the Church today.
Weigel begins by delving into the German problem. Nearly all of the radical inputs from the 2014 synod-the suggestions that divorce ought to be countenanced and sacramental marriage somewhat de-mystified-came from one Cardinal Walter Kasper and his coterie of German bishops, who have long been pushing for something akin to the normalization of divorce within the Church. Here's Weigel on ze Germans:
Pope Francis understands that there is a global crisis of marriage, as he made abundantly clear in a passionate address to the Schoenstatt movement the week after the synod concluded. There, he observed that marriage and family have never been so attacked as they are today, by a "throwaway culture" that reduces the covenant of marriage to a mere "association," and against which the Church must propose "very clearly" the truth about marriage. It was always the pope's intention that the 2014 extraordinary synod be a wide-ranging discussion of the crisis of marriage and the family. For he believes that only if the nature of the crisis is understood in full can the Church proceed to think about how it can propose its understanding of marriage in ways that can be more readily heard and lived in today's Gnostic culture. That thorough examination of the crisis, and the celebration of Christian marriage as the answer to it, didn't happen to the degree one might have hoped. And that was in no small part the doing of German bishops led by retired Cardinal Walter Kasper, in league with the synod general secretary, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, who seemed determined to push the question of Holy Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to the front of the line in the synod's debates.
The German fixation on this issue was in one sense an expression of self-absorption with the pastoral problems of a sclerotic German Church, which are indisputably grave. In another sense, however, the "Communion ban" issue (as it was vulgarly described in the press) is a stalking horse for a much larger argument about the nature of doctrine and its development. And this, in turn, reprises the long-running debate over the meaning of Vatican II and its relationship to Catholic tradition that Kasper and his allies seem determined to reopen.
Ten months before the synod met, I asked a knowledgeable observer of German Catholic affairs why the German Catholic leadership insisted on revisiting the issue of Holy Communion for those in civil second marriages, which most of the rest of the world Church thought had been sufficiently aired in the 1980 synod on the family, and which seemed to have been settled by the reaffirmation of the Church's traditional teaching and practice in St. John Paul II's 1981 apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio (The Community of the Family) and in the 1983 code of canon law. I got a one-word answer: "money."
By which Weigel's friend meant the roughly $6.2 billion a year that German Catholic churches receive through a semi-voluntary state tax called the Kirchensteuer. I say "semi-voluntary" because Germans are automatically enrolled in paying the Kirchensteuer, but they may opt out of it. And in recent years, more and more Germans-and German Catholics-have been pushing the exit button. Leaving the German bishops worried about their finances. Like all good European liberals, the German bishops decided that the way to keep Germans in the fold was to make the Church less retrograde and more in tune with the dominant culture. Which is to say, they decided to abandon its teachings in regards to the sexual revolution.
But it wasn't just ze Germans. Weigel notes that two powerful Italians, the synod's general secretary, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, and the synod's special secretary, Archbishop Bruno Forte, were doing more than giving the German delegation cover. They were actively attempting to hijack the process and bury the will of the majority of bishops, who were diametrically opposed to the German project of re-defining the Church's teachings on family. And as Wiegel points out, the question of redefining church teachings on the family was, itself, about something larger. It is a stalking horse for the project of counter-reforming Vatican II and the teachings of John Paul II.
In any event, the Baldisseri-Forte-German gambit failed. The 2014 synod exploded into open conflict and the majority re-asserted itself, forcing the radicals to discard the proposals in their draft documents. Weigel views the conversation as being closed as we now head into the 2015 "ordinary" synod:
Now that it is abundantly clear (to everyone except Cardinal Kasper, it seems) that there is no consensus possible in favor of the Kasper proposals for changing the Church's practice in this matter (because doing so would constitute an impossible change in doctrine), the discussion over the next year should focus on adjustments of the canonical processes by which marriages are judged null, and on the truths about the Holy Eucharist and the sacrament of penance that are at the root of the Church's current-and future-understanding and practice concerning worthiness to receive Holy Communion.
I hope that Weigel is correct. Because the alternative interpretation would be that the faction led by Baldisseri, Forte, and the Germans, was operating with something like the tacit blessing of Pope Francis. (Which might explain the demotion of Cardinal Burke.) In which case, the extraordinary synod might have been not the end of the line for a small putsch, but the first public skirmish in a larger conflict.
I'll see you next week. As always, keep calm and carry on. And remember, you can always email me with tips, thoughts, etc., at editor@weeklystandard.com.
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
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