Is it possible that Newt might NOT crash and burn? If so, Hendrik Hertzberg of "The New Yorker" thinks he knows why

"Gingrich's sudden rise and special appeal to the emotions of "the base," one suspects, stem less from his vaunted 'big ideas' than from his long-cultivated, unparalleled talent for contempt."

-- Hendrik Hertzberg, in a "Comment" piece, "Alt-Newt,"
in the December 19 & 26 New Yorker

by Ken

I didn't intend to be writing about Newt again so soon, really and truly. For all I knew, or at least hoped, he might soon slither back into whatever primordial slime he oozed out of and never be seen or heard from again. But I've got a loose end from my post last night troubling me, and it happens to segue naturally into Hendrik Hertzberg's current New Yorker "Comment" piece on the subject.

Before clicking "publish" on my post last night I lingered over the title, "When Newt crashes and burns, will the GOP be sending out for a new batch of "front-runners"?" I did wonder whether that shouldn't be "if Newt crashes and burns." After all, while I did "offer the observation that ol' Newt's front-runner status may be no more long-lasting than that of any of the front-runners who've preceded him in this campaign cycle," I preceded this observation with the qualification: "Far be it from me to predict what's going to come out of a process with such heavy input from the Republican 'base.' "

At the time of writing I hadn't yet read Hendrik Hertzberg's "Comment" piece on Newt in this week's New Yorker, "Alt-Newt." But when I got home yesterday, there in the mailbox, now that I've gotten used to Tuesday (or even Wednesday or, like last week, Thursday) delivery, there in the mailbox, on a Monday, just like in oldent times, was the new issue!

As I pointed out recently, Paul Krugman in his December 4 NYT column, "Send in the Clueless," offered one theory of why Newt "may not implode like his predecessors" as GOP front-runner. After delivering one of my very favorite lines about the pustule, "He is by no means the deep thinker he imagines himself to be," and qualifying that with the observation that "he's a glib speaker, even when he has no idea what he's talking about," he added: "[M]y sense is that he's also very good at doublethink -- that even when he knows what he's saying isn't true, he manages to believe it while he's saying it." This certainly rings true to me.

Hertzberg offers a simpler -- and uglier -- thought, namely the one I quoted at the top of this post: "Gingrich's sudden rise and special appeal to the emotions of "the base," one suspects, stem less from his vaunted 'big ideas' than from his long-cultivated, unparalleled talent for contempt."

HH takes us through the necessarily squalid journey of Newt Gingrich through the particular cesspool of American politics that he's made his own, using as a reference point the phony history professor's own fondness for, and actual practice -- however grotestquely inept -- of the genre of "alt-history," which is to say alternative versions of history imagined with "counterfactual" switches in circumstances in that history. (Strangely, HH doesn't mention that his magazine just published an extensive Critic at Large piece on the subject by an actual practitioner, Thomas Mallon, "Never Happened," of which only an abstract is available free online.) And then as he takes us through the high/low points of the Newtly CV, he repeatedly asks us to "imagine" such surely imaginary historical circumstances, all of which are of course not counterfactual but shockingly factual.

Eventually HH comes to this (boldface emphasis added):

Gingrich's sudden rise and special appeal to the emotions of "the base," one suspects, stem less from his vaunted "big ideas" than from his long-cultivated, unparalleled talent for contempt. In 1990, when he was not yet Speaker, he pressed a memo on Republican candidates for office, instructing them to use certain words when talking about the Democratic enemy: "betray," "bizarre," "decay," "anti-flag," "anti-family," "pathetic," "lie," "cheat," "radical," "sick," "traitors," and more. His own vocabulary of contempt has grown only more poisonously flowery. President Obama's actions cannot be understood except as an expression of "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior." Liberals constitute a "secular-socialist machine" that is "as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union." There is "a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us" and "is prepared to use violence." In this campaign, Gingrich's performances in televised debates have been widely deemed effective. But what has won him his most visceral cheers from the audiences in the halls -- audiences shaped and coarsened by years of listening to talk radio and watching Fox News -- is his sneering attacks on moderators, especially those representing the hated "liberal" media.

In March, at the Cornerstone Church, in San Antonio, Gingrich declared, "I am convinced that, if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America," his grandchildren will live "in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American." Last spring, this was a kind of right-wing performance art. Now it is the language of the man leading in the Republican polls, a man who -- in the real world, not the alt-world -- could, not inconceivably, become President of the United States. Imagine that.

I can understand two perfectly logical responses to the reappearance of the Newtster in public, as a candidate for attention, let alone public office: violent nausea, or engulfing rage. Any other response confounds me totally. Perhaps there's at least a partial explanation in the lovely line I quoted last night from a blogpost of Paul Krugman's yesterday:

"Truly, it is amazing how our political landscape continues to be dominated by people who have been wrong about everything for years."

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