For decades, analysts and pundits have tried to trace the origins of the polarization, intense partisanship, and the “politics of personal destruction” that characterize so much of contemporary American politics. In Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party, Julian Zelizer attributes much of it to the rise of Newt Gingrich, from backbencher in the minority party to the first speaker of the first Republican House of Representatives in 40 years. That is a tall order for anyone to fill, even someone with the audacity, ambition, vision, and inexhaustible energy of Newt Gingrich.
Zelizer’s book purports to tell the tale of how Gingrich took down Jim Wright, the Democratic speaker of the House from 1987 to 1989. Gingrich is presumed to have accomplished this by cynically exploiting the ethics reforms enacted in the post-Watergate era. He is also said in these pages to have left in his wake a vicious new kind of slash-and-burn politics that resulted in the election of Donald Trump as president. To accept at least the first part of this thesis, one would almost have to think that the “old order” (a term Arthur Schlesinger Jr. used to describe the political establishment that preceded the one Franklin D. Roosevelt created) that Gingrich allegedly brought down was devoid of all but the most petty and benign forms of corruption, and was dedicated to advancing the public interest. Not even Zelizer believes that. He knows that the rehabilitation of Wright and the other “good ole boys” who ran the House for their own purposes, rendering themselves impervious to any discernible form of accountability, would pose insurmountable challenges to the most thorough and creative of revisionists.
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