Newt Gingrich and the Politics of Resentment

2012 GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/22007612@N05/6183049294/">Gage Skidmore</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


As I’m walking to Newt Gingrich’s meet-and-greet at a hunting ranch in Walterboro, South Carolina, a middle-aged woman explains to me why she’s going to vote for the former speaker of the House on Saturday. It’s quite simple, really: “Newt’s salt of the earth.” Salt of the earth is actually something Newt Gingrich has never been accused of being. He likes to name-drop existential writers and Enlightenment philosophers and conservative economists from the 1980s; he doesn’t hunt; he doesn’t farm; he doesn’t get his hands dirty, except to dig up dinosaur bones in Montana.

So how does Gingrich appeal to an interest group he shouldn’t, at least culturally, have anything in common with? By picking fights with their shared enemy. Before launching into his brief stump speech, Gingrich uses the occasion of speaking to sportsmen (many of them dressed in their finest camo threads) to blast “intellectual left-wing environmentalists” for believing that “humans are not part of the world.” As attendees munched on barbecue and coleslaw and sipped sweet tea, Gingrich told them who they should resent, and why:

I want to make one point that I think liberals don’t ever get. And I always sort of reference it when we’re talking about rivers and the low-country. People who hunt and fish are among our most passionate conservationists because they’re actually out in the woods and on the trails and in the streams and in the swamps. And they understand that if we don’t keep areas that are healthy, there is no hunting and fishing. And so the big difference is this: the intellectual, left-wing environmentalists have a theoretical model in which humans are not part of the world.

This is very different from what Theodore Roosevelt and others began at the turn of the last century, when they wanted a conservation that was multiple-use and they wanted natural areas, but they understood they wanted natural areas so that people could join them. We’ve had a tremendous decline for example in forestry. And the result is our trees are sicker today, we lose more trees to fire today, Because we have more beetle infestation, because environmentalists don’t understand nature. They have this idealized model that doesn’t reflect the world. It’s a little bit like the Disney cartoon model of Africa where the elephants and the zebras and the lions all hang out together. Now any of you who know about the real world know that if the lions and zebras hang out together after a while, there are fewer zebras and happier lions.

This gets a lot of laughs, but one thing is missing from Gingrich’s rant: science. In the real world, of course, the biggest threat facing American ecosystems and endangered species isn’t Agenda 21 or a lack of qualified forestry experts; it’s climate change. But for Gingrich, who once joined Nancy Pelosi to urge Americans to take action on climate change, that would be an impossible argument to make. Gingrich’s characterization of environmentalists favoring a world without people may also have a darker meaning. Many conservatives fear that under a UN program called Agenda 21, vast swaths of land, such as eastern Montana, will be cleared of humans entirely. Gingrich has himself mentioned Agenda 21 on the campaign trail.

More so than Romney, Santorum, or Paul, Gingrich sells himself to voters by putting the “bully” in bully pulpit. His stump speech consists largely of giving his audience the illusion that the problem with the current president is that he has substandard intelligence (Gingrich’s most reliable laugh line is the concession that he’d let President Obama use a teleprompter in their never-gonna-happen Lincoln-Douglas debates). In Easley on Wednesday, he explained that the administration’s decision to block the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline was “stupid” (a line he repeats in Walterboro). “It’s one thing to say that a White House doesn’t understand chess,” he says. “It’s another to say they can’t understand checkers. But if they can’t play tic-tac-toe…” Well, you get the picture.

That anger, and his ability to channel the same in others, explains why Gingrich’s performance at Monday’s debate—when he dismissed Fox News’ Juan Williams’ suggestion that he was playing to racial stereotypes by denigrating food stamps—has resonated so deeply. “I am so tired, personally, of racial prejudice,” says Tommie Derry of Walterboro, a Gingrich supporter. “The way blacks are handling it, if you weren’t racially prejudiced, it’d make you racially prejudiced” Gingrich’s retort to Williams went beyond a simple debating coup; it was cathartic. “When I hear the Juans of the world, I get upset.” Her son, Mark, doesn’t go quite so far, but when I ask him how long he’s been on Team Newt, he doesn’t even have to think about it: “Since Monday.” 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate