Newt Gets Freaky

A really good online interview with Newt Gingrich. Worth a read, whether you're liberal or conservative. In particular, Gingrich offers his take on the "Republican Reboot" theme I and many others have been writing about -- he thinks that social conservatives aren't the problem and that the basic GOP coalition is just fine; but his concern is that they have taken too much of the limelight and there needs to be greater emphasis placed on agenda items offered by moatdiggers, budget hawks, and tax-cutters.

A Secularist Responds to Gingrich

Speaking at the commencement address of Liberty University yesterday, Newt Gingrich took direct aim at secular Americans and their role in the public life of America:

A growing culture of radical secularism declares that the nation cannot profess the truths on which it was founded. We are told that our public schools can no longer invoke the creator, nor proclaim the natural law nor profess the God-given quality of human rights. In hostility to American history, the radical secularists insist that religious belief is inherently divisive and that public debate can only proceed on secular terms.

Where to begin responding?


I. Who is Attacking Whom?

First of all, I know of no secularist, humanist, atheist, agnostic, freethinker, or rationalist who has seriously proposed preventing people from proselytizing their religious beliefs. Some propose to respond to such evangelizing with a counter-message of the virtues of secularism or a criticism of religion, but this is not the same thing as restricting the rights of the religious to be faithful and to seek converts to their faith. If Islam can be criticized (as it certainly can and should be), so can Christianity, Judaism, or religious belief in general.

Yes, secularists and atheists have asserted themselves more assertively over the past several years than they had before. But it's not like religious people are an oppressed minority in this country. Far from it, and Newt knows it. Otherwise, he would not be making an appeal for the support of religious people in what is surely the buildup to his campaign for President. No one, as far as I can tell, is making an appeal to secular voters.


II. What Are The Truths on Which America Was Founded?

Gingrich, who is himself an historian, should know better than to imply that the "truths upon which America was founded" are religious in nature. He should know very, very well that the enlightenment ideas of individual liberty were formulated by Deists and atheists in France and England; he should know very, very well that these ideals arose out of political philosophy rather than theology. He should also know well the nature of the kinds of societies created by European theocrats and their scant regard for human rights.

On this very blog, the role of religion amongst the Founders has been raised on multiple occasions and I know I will need to re-address that point here. So here, in full, are the references to the supernatural found in all of America's organic documents:

The Declaration of Independence contains three debatable references to God:

"...the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should..."

"...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

"...appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions..."

If you want to see "Jehovah" as the subject of these references, you certainly are free to do so. But I'd suggest that looking instead for a passive Creator, a divine watchmaker who does not participate in human affairs, that would be a better fit. Certainly Jefferson could have made a more direct reference to a diety than these oblique code words. As we've debated before, Jefferson was no believer in the Christian religion.

The Declaration of Independence is 1,337 words long -- long enough that if it were reprinted in full on this blog, I would endure criticism for "writing another novel." Such criticism calls to mind a fable about Mozart, who was accused of putting "too many notes" in his music. This post, by contrast, is 1,603 words.

Old Tom, though, was unconcerned with issues of verbosity; he was trying to accomplish a significant political objective and would use as many or as few words as were necessary to do what needed to be done. So of the 1,337 words picked by Jefferson, exactly thirteen of them -- just under 1% -- contain even the most oblique references to God.

In the Constitution, we find no references to God. At all.

The closest the Constitution comes is in the date of the original portion of the document: "Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth." This is merely an invocation of the common system of numbering years sequentially pursuant to European custom and is in no way an invocation of or reference to the diety -- and an entirely secular, historical alternative to the religious-based year dating mechanism is immediately suggested.

The truths upon which America was founded were the truths of liberal philosophy, which are of the supremacy of individual human rights and divided, democratically-based government. America was created not to create an environment where Protestant Christianity could flourish, but rather one in which there would be no taxation without representation. At best, with respect to religion, America was created and founded so that people could practice whatever kind of religion they saw fit -- including none at all -- without interference by a governmental authority. But this was a mere sidelight compared with the question of the extension of the franchise to the people who lived in the American colonies, and the political philosophies that motivated their elites.


III. Religious Belief Is Divisive

If religious belief were not divisive, intelligent, educated young men and women in the middle east would not think it was a good idea to enter crowded marketplaces and blow themselves up, hoping to take as many people of different faiths (or sects within the same faith) along with them as possible. Nor would their deaths be celebrated by their families and co-religionists.

Religious belief is inherently divisive because each religion, and indeed most sects within each religion, claim a monopoly on the ability to adjudicate truth and to dispense moral pronouncements on the actions of others. Religious belief is inherently divisive because each religion claims to be the one true religion, and all others are false. Every religion contains a strong tribal strain of xenophobia; religious belief is inherently divisive because in order for people of different religions to get along with one another, they must ignore their differences; they must set aside the xenophobic isolationism found within the words of their holy texts.

This is not to say that people of differing religions cannot work together peacefully; it does mean, though, that they must pick and choose which portions of their religion they will follow. Perhaps you think I should be stoned to death for being an open atheist. If you do not, and you claim to be a Christian or a Jew, you are ignoring the explicit command of Jehovah in, for instance, Deuteronomy 17:12, and therefore you are picking and choosing the portions of the Bible you want to obey and those that you prefer to ignore. I'm glad you are making that choice, by the way.


IV. Must Public Debate Be Secular?

Yes, public debate ought to be secular, because public debate is about public issues, which affect everyone and which are not about religion. The government and the various churches and other bodies of worship in this country are different things.

Now, many people are religious. And their religions inform their morality. I suggest, politely, that reference to a deity is generally an unnecessary step in deciding whether something is right or wrong -- and I risk being attacked as a "radical secularist." But let's leave that aside. The question is whether someone engaged in public debate must necessary dispense with their religion, and of course that is not the case. If your religion informs your sense of what is right and wrong, then setting that aside is functionally impossible, and not desirable. No secularist I know of seriously suggests that people should dispense with issues of morality when engaged in discussion of a public issue. Many secularists suggest that religion is used to arbitrarily gloss over an otherwise-deficient moral choice, or that the dictates of various holy works and religious concepts are so flexible and ambiguous as to really be of no use at all. But that is different than saying religion does not belong in the public square.

What I object to is my tax dollars being used to support someone else's religion. If the government subsidized construction of a mosque, you'd likely be upset. Why would you not be similarly upset when the government subsidizes construction of a church? Religion is a private matter and private money should be used to support it. Do religious activists have a right to proselytize? Of course; and they should have the same ability to access a public forum as anyone else to do it.


V. What About President Gingrich?

Suffice to say that I am now horrified by the thought of a President Gingrich -- Gingrich is positioning himself to be the second coming of the existing administration and its cozying-up attitude to millennialist Protestantism. I ought to be excited by the idea of Newt Gingrich playing a role in future administrations -- he's a persuasive speaker, an intelligent and original thinker, and a great creative force for American politics. But if he's going to spend his campaign making himself the mouthpiece for the Southern Baptist Convention, he's going to have to look elsewhere than this secular Republican for support.

New Newt News

Well, here's something that doesn't add luster to Newt's Presidential prospects: Fooling around on his wife while leading the charge to impeach Bill Clinton because Clinton lied about fooling around with an intern. I presume that this information is being released in an interview with James Dobson for a reason -- better that the loyal troops in the GOP religious-right base hear this sort of thing in a friendly forum, where Gingrich can have a chance to explain himself and put his spin on things, before it gets splashed over the front page of the Washington Post.

So what's the spin? "The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge ... Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials."

It doesn't read well, but then Newt has to be heard rather than read to get the full effect; he's quite eloquent with the spoken word. Still, I'm frankly not sure I buy it, at least not the part about not "rendering judgment" on Clinton. Insisting that the impeachment was about perjury and not adultery is a half-truth; as I recall it, the articles of impeachment focused on the perjury but the political momentum was elsewhere.

So if Newt feels the need to spill the beans on himself, clearly there is a need for him to engage in that kind of preemptive disclosure. One thing that could mean is that he's moving to challenge "the big three" for the Republican nomination next year. It's late so I can't think of alternatives to that objective, but I'm sure they exist. But even if they did, they're not so obvious as a Gingrich candidacy to gather the conservative votes under a single banner, one more credible and prominent than Tom Tancredo's or even Sam Brownback's. So are you playing Intrade? Buy Gingrich -- his price is going to rise soon.

Elephants Getting In Line

The Giuliani campaign website made two significant announcements yesterday while I was at judge school downtown. First, a “Massachusetts Leadership Team” was announced with a bunch of prominent-seeming Republicans including a majority of the Republicans in the Massachusetts State Senate. This is a huge early swipe at Mitt Romney, since it reflects that he doesn’t even have the solid backing of fellow Republicans in his own state. Romney, seemingly anticipating both this defection from the Massachusetts GOP as well as an inability to carry the state in the general election, seems to have moved towards adopting Michigan as his “home” state despite his Massachusetts credentials.

Second, Rudy apparently earned a sterling endorsement from National Review, or at least one of the of Weekly Journal of Americans Who Wish They Could Vote Tory’s frequent correspondents. It’s not clear to me whether this is an NR endorsement or not. Nor am I entirely sure if NR remains the flagship publication of the conservative “movement,” or whether it has been supplanted in that role by the Weekly Standard or maybe even the American Spectator. It sure looks like NR is behind the endorsement.

It sure looks like the pitch of Giuliani to conservatives has been going very well, and even principled conservatives who may disagree with Giuliani on social issues are coming to intellectually accept that he’s their best shot at keeping the White House in GOP hands. This may well turn the Republican primary into a protracted and subtle dance of what kinds of concessions the Giuliani Administration will be willing to make to social conservatives. (I wonder if this was part of the plans in the playbook that went missing and got leaked; probably not, though.)

That this is happening now, twenty months before the general election, is a very good sign, because it demonstrates that the GOP is getting its house in order early. That is more than the Democrats can say – Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama seem to be gaining momentum, and their early jockeying for position between themselves has so far seemed ineffectual. John Edwards is looking like an also-ran at this point, which must be a great disappointment to him. But hey, it’s still early.

Given the strong initial showing that Giuliani is making, I’ll be surprised if Newt Gingrich gets involved at this point as a candidate. Maybe it ends with Newt as Rudy's running mate? That would certainly please social conservatives, and it lets Newt do what he did best, which is to serve as an attack dog. This might be more appealing than Elizabeth Dole as Rudy’s running mate. That’s just an idea thrown out for discussion, not a prediction or an endorsement. The point is, Gingrich would be well-advised to not get in the ring now, and it looks like Rudy pushed a reasonably impressive play yesterday to marginalize Romney. That leaves only two dogs in the fight of any magnitude, and Rudy seems to be betting that he can take McCain in the early primaries.

This is because McCain is distrusted by social conservatives. He may or may not be a good legislator, and I say that the fact that he makes deals at all with Democrats suggests that he at least has the skill set of a good legislator. Republicans’ evaluation of him in this respect should depend on the manner of the use of those skills; whether his history is of reaching acceptable compromises with Democrats or whether he has repeatedly given the farm away to the other side when it was unnecessary to do so. But, having the skill set of a good legislator, or even that of a good soldier, does not mean that he has the skill set of a good President. He’s led his fellow captive soldiers through an unimaginable ordeal, and he’s led his legislative staff through difficult political waters. But he has never governed anything; his political career consists of three terms in the House and three terms in the Senate.

Speaking of which, why haven’t any Democratic Governors caught fire like Obama yet? Bill Richardson has a damned impressive resume. Presidents are historically picked from the executive class of politicians, not the legislative class, as I demonstrated last September. So far, all the Democratic candidates have only legislative experience, unless you want to claim that being First Lady was executive experience for Hillary (which in her case might not be a weak case to make).

So think about it – the ticket could be Giuliani-Gingrich now, with the subtle promises of favoring social conservatives for judicial appointments that we began to hear this week (the subject of some comments I made a few days ago). Is that enough to get “values voters” and their dollars, volunteers, and church-centered social networks on board?

And is this how Presidential campaigns are going to be from now on – very early jockeying for position, even before any primaries are held, resulting in an effective anointment during the primary season? That seems to be what happened to John Kerry in 2004, and George W. Bush in 2000, Bob Dole in 1996, and even Bill Clinton in 1992 (although he lost the New Hampshire primary to Paul Tsongas, he swept everything after that). The last really strongly-contested primary season was 1988 for the Democrats.

President Newt

I've been wondering about all the reports about Newt Gingrich running for President when I haven't heard "boo" about that prospect on any of the many news websites I read so voraciously. So, when in doubt, you take you chances and turn to wikipedia, the encyclopedia that unfortunately, anyone can edit.

So it seems that Newt said last June that if no front-runner emerges, he might step forward to claim that spot, and he would decide that in fall of 2007. And although it seems that there are two strong contenders right now on the GOP side, Gingrich has been spending a lot of time sucking up to Iowa and finding strange political bedfellows.

But it's the speechifying in New Hampshire (another telltale sign of Presidential agitation) that has me worried. Quoth Newt in a speech intended by its sponsors to honor heroes of the First Amendment:

We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we're unfortunate. ... We now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren't for the scale of the threat. ... Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people. ... We should propose a Geneva Convention for fighting terrorism, which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are, in fact, subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous.

Well-motivated, perhaps; you can't fault a man interested in being President for demonstrating how seriously he takes the job of defending America. But Loyal Readers will note the following elements within Newt's speech:

1. Fearmongering,
2. Sideways flattery to the intelligence of the audience,
3. Condemnation of civil libertarians and an equation of civil liberties with weakness
4. Appeals to double standards,
5. Elitism, and
6. A willingness to substantially revise, if not completely rewrite, the concept of fundamental rights upon which the country was founded.

I had higher expectations of Gingrich than this. The flattery is odious but perhaps warrants a pass; he is trying to build political capital, after all. But I want a President who inspires us to be strong, not one who tells us to be afraid of shadows.

It's particularly disappointing because Gingrich can be much better than this when he chooses to. He is an eloquent speaker, a powerful thinker, an accomplished writer and can be, when he wishes, a nuanced, realistic, but focused and persuasive politician with significant charisma. An emphasis on national security is a fine platform, but I would have hoped that a historian, of all people, would keep in mind that in saving America from her enemies, our leaders ought not to change the meaning of what it is to be an American in the first place.

Should Gingrich run -- and be able to raise money to finance his campaign -- I have little doubt he would be a formidable contender. And a little looking around indicates that yes, he is quite interested in the job and doing what it takes to get the job of President. But he's hesitating to form even an exploratory committee. And he's indicated that he's willing to continue the same forced-choice balancing of civil rights against national security that the current Administration has been pursuing.

But Gingrich's vision here is is wrong. It's not a forced choice. I want a President whose vision of the future includes both liberty and security, both prosperity and justice, both the respect of the world for our moral goodness and the confidence to exercise our prowess when necessary. Unless you are convinced that our arc of national power has crested and we are now in a period of historical decline, we are yet a sufficiently wealthy and powerful nation to not have to give up some these things to realize the others.

Franklin Roosevelt told us "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" -- this while preparing to face down the two most powerful military opponents with whom the United States has ever crossed swords, enemies who captured almost all of Europe, much of Asia, and most of the Pacific. He inspired a deeply-troubled nation to rise to the challenge and in so doing transformed an economic basket case of a country to become a global superpower. He made tough choices along the way, not all of them the right ones, but with more good decisions than bad ones. He did it while inspiring courage and effort, by assuring America that it could rise to the challenge, and by appealing to our sense of pride and honor.

Those are not the rhetorical appeals that Gingrich is making these days. So should you become President, Mr. Gingrich, I hope you rediscover your optimism and power to inspire what is good and strong about our country, and take someone like Roosevelt rather than someone like your immediate predecessor, as your model. Or better yet, clear out of the field entirely, accept your role as an elder statesman with honor and grace, and finally above the fray of partisan politics, dispense the tremendous wisdom you have to offer from (and within, and to) the academy, where you are much needed and can best put your considerable talents to good use.