Gingrich eventually organized a small group of like-minded House Republicans, which included a fellow he did not particularly like, Texas congressman Tom DeLay. Gingrich’s antipathy for DeLay was understandable, because DeLay is another social dominator authoritarian, and when social dominators are not convinced they can use each other, it is like trying to force the negative ends of magnets together. DeLay was not buying into Gingrich’s strategy, which historian Donald Critchlow described as an effort to “undermin[e] the established order in the House.”[4] In 1984 Gingrich began lining up Republicans to give speeches at night on the House floor when the House was no longer in session, but C-Span cameras were still on. Members of Congress are permitted to say anything about anyone other than fellow members of Congress (they try to protect their own) with no fear of being sued for defamation or invasion of privacy, or of being otherwise held accountable, because such speech is constitutionally privileged. Newt and company took full advantage of that privilege. For example, in one speech he accused Democrats of “being blind to communism,” and he announced he was going to file charges against them for writing a letter to communist leader Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. It was never clear what those charges might be, but that hardly mattered: This was all a show for a growing C-Span audience who did not realize that they were not watching live sessions of the House. When Speaker Tip O’Neill learned what was going on, he ordered C-Span to start panning its cameras across the empty chamber periodically, so the audience would realize these were out-of-session gatherings. A few days later O’Neill, who thought it critical that civility be maintained in politics, scolded Gingrich from the Speaker’s chair high above the floor at the front of the chamber, shaking his finger, “You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House and challenged these people, and challenged their patriotism, and it’s the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my thirty-two years in Congress.”[5]
But things would only get worse. In 1987, after O’Neill retired, Gingrich began throwing bombs at the new Democratic Speaker of the House, Jim Wright.[*] “Gingrich’s strategy called for not only questioning the ethics of individual Democrats but also for denigrating Congress as an institution,” Critchlow wrote. For example, “[H]e pursued a scandal in which many members of the House, including Republicans, had kept large overdrafts at the House bank.”[6] The House banking affair was the kind of scandal the American people understood, and it tarnished the House badly, because it involved both Republicans and Democrats. (None of the members was stealing money, however. They had merely been slow to pay back the bank, and had therefore been effectively receiving interest-free loans. The practice was widespread, although it appears Republicans may have warned one another before the scandal blew up so as few of them as possible would be implicated.)
Gingrich, while claiming to be “a person of faith more than I go to church,” in typical authoritarian fashion sought to define the scandals he created by portraying Republicans as godly and Democrats as antireligious liberals. And he knew how to do it. “Gingrich had come to believe that the politics of perception was everything,” historian Dan Carter explained.[*] “It did not matter what really happened,” only how it was defined for others to perceive. Accordingly, Gingrich distributed to fellow Republicans a list of key words to be used when describing Democrats: “sick, traitors, corrupt, bizarre, cheat, steal, devour, self-serving, and criminal rights.”[7] New Yorker journalist David Remnick concluded, said Carter, that Gingrich was using “good” and “evil” rhetoric to make Republican challenges to Democrats’ domestic policy “as severe and confrontational as the struggle with Soviet Communism at the height of the Cold War.”[8] Gingrich would resign from the House in 1998 under a cloud. From the sidelines, and not long before Gingrich departed, Paul Weyrich had observed admiringly, “Newt Gingrich is the first conservative I have ever known who knows how to use power.”[9] In fact, there was someone else Weyrich would come to know who used power even more aggressively and ruthlessly than Gingrich: Tom DeLay.
Tom DeLay’s Double High authoritarian personality offers an almost textbook example of the four defining elements of a social dominator: the tendency to dominate; opposition to equality; desire for personal power; and amorality. His domination is apparent in his bare-knuckle Machiavellian management of the House. “DeLay has never been subtle about his uses of the power of Love and Fear,” Newsweek reported. “In his majority whip’s office on the Hill, he kept marble tablets of the Ten Commandments and a half-dozen bullwhips. Many politicians are conflict-adverse and avoid confrontation at all cost. Not DeLay.” He was not nicknamed “the Hammer,” “the Exterminator” (he once was in the pest control business), and the “Meanest Man in Congress” because of his compliant charm. DeLay, in a pattern followed by many Double High authoritarians, became a born-again Christian in 1984, when he was first elected to Congress.[10] He also quit drinking and became an outspoken moralist. He famously blamed high school shootings, like those at Columbine, on the availability of birth control for teens and the teaching of evolution. DeLay’s opposition to equality is less conspicuous, but it is certainly evident in the Texas redistricting plan he brokered. Not only did Republicans benefit under DeLay’s plan at the expense of Democrats, but according to briefs filed with the Supreme Court, the plan was a disaster for blacks and Hispanics.[11] DeLay’s drive to climb the House GOP leadership ladder is evidence of his desire for power. His own colleagues have described him as amoral. “If it wasn’t illegal to do it, even if it was clearly wrong and unethical, [he did it]. And in some cases if it was illegal, I think [he] still did it. That’s my view,” said Representative Chris Shays (R-CT).[12] DeLay’s Double High authoritarianism illustrates a host of the negative traits found in these extraordinary people.
Tom DeLay had not supported Gingrich’s climb to the House GOP leadership ranks. In 1984, when Gingrich was lobbying for the job of minority leader, DeLay had only just arrived in Washington. DeLay’s biographers say that he avoided Gingrich’s “back bench bomb throwing” not because he was unwilling to adopt those methods, but because he had been warned off by others who doubted Gingrich’s tactics would prevail. “DeLay goes with winners,” his biographers wrote. “If he had been born in the Soviet Union and elected to the Duma in 1984, he would be a Marxist,” they reported.[13] But in this case DeLay made a bad call, because Gingrich became minority leader in a very close vote (87 to 85), and he would not forget that DeLay had not backed him.
By early 1994 the GOP leadership believed that conditions were right for a possible takeover of the House. A large number of Democrats had retired in 1992, and more were doing so in 1994. In addition, President Clinton’s national health care proposal had backfired, frightening both Republicans and Democrats. Clinton’s protracted fight to permit gays in the military, along with his pro-choice stance, had rallied conservative Christians and started them marching double time. Republican House leaders had spent the previous decade successfully tearing down the House; Gingrich’s campaign to denigrate Congress had largely succeeded. “The number of Americans expressing a great deal of confidence in Congress steadily declined from 1986 to 1994, after having risen in the years after Watergate,” one scholar discovered.[14] Six weeks before the 1994 midterm election, Gingrich and the GOP leadership announced their “Contract with America,” a promise that if Republicans were given control of Congress they would “dramatically change the way Washington does business, and change the business Washington does.”[15] Trashing the Democratic Congress and then promising to clean it up was typical authoritarian-style manipulation, and authoritarian followers accordingly fell in line. Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition alone, which had replaced Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, used churches to distribute thirty-three million voter guides (suggesting whom good Christians should vote for in their districts) in the two weeks preceding the election. Although churches risk losing their tax-exempt status by engaging in electoral politics, Christian conservatives have mastered the art of relaying political messages in the guise of “educational” materials that have a tremendous influence on voting.
4.
Donald T. Critchlow, “When Republicans Become Revolutionaries.” In Julian E. Zelizer, ed.,
*
Gingrich brought his charges against Wright to the House Ethics Committee, which later issued a report suggesting Wright had arranged for bulk sales of his vanity book,
*
Gingrich’s tactics were developed through consultations with communications experts, and soon became standard operating procedure for Republicans. George W. Bush has taken “perception politics” to the extreme, packaging everything he does. This strategy appears to work for conservatives, in part because their right-wing authoritarian followers, as noted earlier, do not often question authority figures.