The art of tactics deals with the present, where one's leverage on shaping reality is minimal. Vision is the paradigm needed to shape the future, where the leverage of current action is greatest. Strategy is the art of getting from here to there.
Pundits have compared America's Speaker of the House of Representatives, Congressman Newt Gingrich ( R-Ga), with Sun Tzu of China, the inventor of the science of strategy two millennia ago, and with Karl von Clausewitz and Count Metternich, who ap plied the concept of balance of power that brought an era of peace to a Europe that had experienced a generation of madness during and after the French Revolution.
These classic masters of strategy differ from Gingrich, however, in both vision and strategy. Sun Tsu, as well as Metternich, on whom Kissinger wrote his PhD thesis at Harvard in 1952, both had a vision of a stable world, based on a strategy of their design to eliminate or defuse threats to the continued power of the elites they served. Metternich, furthermore, was an elitist whose vision called for international coordination by the financial elites of the world to orchestrate governmental policies from behind the scenes. This was the strategy of the secret society of The Bavarian Illuminati, in which Metternich was a leading light. Kissinger wrote his M.A. thesis on the vision and strategy of the Illuminati and parlayed this into a job as personal adviser to Nelson Rockefeller and as unofficial guru of the secular religion first invented by the anti-clerical Illuminati and subsequently revived periodically whenever the state of the world required it.
Gingrich from the very beginning was a professed revolutionary and his entire life was devoted to the science and art of capturing power, not keeping it. He turned American politics upside down in November, 1994, by leading the rout of the Democr atic Party from both houses of Congress in a revolution that few thought possible except Gingrich himself and his close associates. Gingrich's vision was not
of stability and the security of the status quo but of revolution to remake the entire system of government in America. And his strategy was to do this by a populism that relied on the magic of the information revolution to overthrow the establishme nt before it even knew what was happening.
After the successful Gingrich revolution, almost every political pundit in America suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, because he threatened to overturn their world. Democrats writhed in bewilderment and agony at their loss of power, be cause they failed to understand the dynamics of power in the modern world. Since exceptionally few Democrats ever did figure out what happened, Gingrich's opponents seemed to agree on only one thing: that the only way to recover their losses would be to wait until Gingrich would make enough mistakes once in power to hang himself. In other words, they lacked precisely what gave Gingrich his power, namely, vision and strategy, even though Clinton won the presidency only two years earlier precisely because both he and his wife, Hillary, had vision, and because his opponent, President Bush, by his own public admission, did not even know what vision is and therefore was incapable of devising any coherent strategy of leadership.
Gingrich is the first professional politician to exploit to the fullest the techniques of acquiring power in the new information age of think-tanks and media-manipulation. He spent many years ``in the trenches'' developing a coherent vision and s upporting it by carefully educating a new generation of thinkers to capture the minds of the ``baby boom'' generation. He very carefully used his skills as a college professor and master of the appropriate educational technology to create a new opini on elite who would be independent of the old elites beholden to the financial barons of what he termed the outmoded industrial age.
As a pioneer in the culture of conservative New Ageism, Gingrich exploited the ideas of professional futurologists, especially Alvin and Heidi Toffler, to convince a new generation of politicians that both wealth and power in the post-industrial a ge will be produced and controlled by a new information elite, by those who understand that the only real wealth is knowledge and the only real power is in those who control it. In a post-Marxian world, the modern revolutionary is to eliminate the po wer of ownership over the means of production merely by broadening access to the new information technologies that constitute the only real wealth and power in the world and by supplying through the geniuses of this new technotronic world the vision n eeded to control this power.
Gingrich's flawless strategy is clearly explained in the book,Contract With America: The Bold Plan of Rep. Newt Gingrich, Rep. Dick Armey, and the House Republicans to Change the Nation. This devoutly read book was published immediately after the political revolution of November 1994 with two clear aims: 1) to make government less costly, less intrusive, and more effective; and 2) to reduce the sphere of government in society in order to expand the sphere of the sacred.
Gingrich's prescription for power is presented on page 184 of this book in a statement reproduced from the proceedings of the Washington Research Group Symposium held three days after the November election:
Part of our problem is the level at which we think. I have used a planning model and a leadership model that is very explicit. The planning model is derived from how George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower managed the Second World War, which was the m ost complex, large human activity ever undertaken. Essentially they had a four-layer model, and it's a hierarchy. The top of it was vision, and after you understood your vision of what you're doing you designed strategies, and once you have your vis ion and strategies clear you designed projects [RDC, courses of action] which were the building blocks of your strategies, and inside the context of those projects you delegated dramatically an entrepreneurial model in which a project was a definable, delegatable achievement. ... At the bottom of the model is tactics, what you do every day. ...
Washington, D.C., is a city so consumed by its own tactical self-amusement that it's very hard for the city to have any sense of projects, and the concept of vision and strategies is almost beyond its comprehension.
Gingrich's entire ten-point Contract With America was this entrepreneurial model. It consisted of ten specific pieces of legislation which he carefully determined are supported by 80% of Americans and which he figured must be passed within the fi rst 100 days of his legislative onslaught in order to maintain the political momentum crucial for strategic success. On the degree of success achieved in passing this contract, at least in the House of Representatives which was the powerhouse of the revolution, would depend the next steps in an expanding model, and on these next steps, to be spelled out at the proper time, would depend the success of the entire strategy.
The 100-day onslaught was designed to introduce the Contract With America, laid out in the book by the same name, by organizing a comprehensive reform movement targeting the entire decisionmaking process. The second, and underlying agenda, howeve r, was not procedural but ideative in the benign sense of ideological, i.e., to set and achieve ideological objectives without imposing a closed ideology.
This underlying agenda was also clearly laid out in the Republicans' Mein Kampf. On page 12-13 of the book, Contract With America, Gingrich's stated goal was ``to reclaim our mantle as the party of the middle class, the party of reform, and the p arty that values individual freedom and individual responsibility over governmental power and government responsibility.'' This was reinforced by the product of the Salisbury Conference, which started the compilation of the Contract With America one year before the election and was included in the book version. The reproduced conference proceedings stated that the ``vanguard of the Republican future'' agreed upon five principles to describe their basic philosophy of American civilization: 1) ind ividual liberty, 2) economic opportunity, 3) limited government, 4) personal responsibility, and 5) security at home and abroad.
For a political tactician, such language is nothing more than boring, but for the consummate futurologist and strategist, which Gingrich claimed to be, this enumeration of goals and values was no less significant than the original Declaration of I ndependence which started the first American revolution and now needs to be revived in order to complete it.
The ideological power of the Gingrich revolution was never clearly stated, but was intuitively understood by the vast majority of the American people. Although Gingrich never disowned the vehemently secular agenda of the Tofflers and their new Pr ogress and Freedom Foundation, he did not need to, because the process of decentralizing and reducing the power of government is inherently anti-secular. As Peter Huber put it in the January 16th, 1995, issue of Forbes:
Tax-and-spend is not just an economic issue. The more government takes from your wallet, the more it takes from your bill of rights down the line. ... Once government has your money, the dollars inevitably drift toward the left and toward the secular . Left, because government action is inherently collectivist, and government bureaucrats exist to collectivize. Secular, because the Constitution excludes government from the realm of the sacred. Desecration of the crucifix is in, creches are out. ... The more the government sphere expands, the more the sacred contracts. It's as simple as that.
The Gingrichian or Newtonian Revolution appealed to the principled or paleo-conservatives because of its ideology, but it also attracted the intellectual class of neo-conservatives who had abandoned liberalism because they sensed that fiscal conse rvatism is an essential means to counter the failed utopia of problem solving through centralized government and to forestall the financial bankruptcy that would necessarily follow such utopianism for both America and the world.
The real appeal of Gingrich, however, was to the non-intellectual middle class, that is, the majority of Americans, who fear the randomness of individual crime and of seemingly random wars around the world and are concerned that America's civiliza tion is disintegrating and with it the future of all mankind. These average Americans are vehemently convinced that the cause of the obvious civilizational disintegration all around them is the moral dissolution of American society, which they blame on the secularization of all institutions of government, the public schools, the media, and both executive and judicial branches of government in Washington. In an intuitive way, they sense that Gingrich is attacking the real cause of all America's p roblems by attacking America's entire system of governance.
Most Americans would be enraged to hear Gingrich's gurus, the Tofflers, attack the American constitution and the great American experiment based upon it, as the Tofflers did in the chapter entitled ``The Coming Super-Struggle'' in their new book, The Third Wave, when they proclaimed that, ``This system, including the principles on which it is based, is increasingly obsolete ... and must die and be replaced.'' Average Americans know that their society was a lot healthier in the past, so they seek the revival of America's religious heritage, including its original system of decentralized governance but excluding the narrow-minded and egotistical sectarianism which to them is ancient history and is no longer a real concern. Perhaps fortuna tely, less than one percent of Republicans, and even less among non-Republicans, have ever heard of the Tofflers, or ever will.
Political pundits seem uniformly to have ignored the conviction of religious leaders from both ``left'' and ``right'' that the political revolution of 1994 was powered by widespread moral concerns based on a spiritual flowering like the one that l ed to the fall of Communism only a few years earlier.
Gingrich was one of the first to recognize, albeit belatedly, the nature of his own revolution. Immediately after completion of the First 100 Days, he emphasized that his approach to religion and government is ``to reestablish the right to teach that there is a Creator from whom our inalienable rights come.'' He opposed a school-prayer constitutional amendment only because he said that even without such an amendment ``we can create a legal framework that allows us to recognize that this is a profoundly religious country, but there is no state church.''
Gingrich may still be naive, however, in his conviction that changing the process of government, like Vice-President Al Gore's campaign to ``reinvent government,'' will improve society. Alexis de Tocqueville concluded that, at least in America, i t is the other way around, and that if government is systematically dysfunctional, this is because people are. Changing the governing institutions of society will not change the people on whom every democratic experiment must depend.
As a baby-boomer conservative, who is neither paleo-conservative nor neo-conservative, Gingrich would do well to acquire the wisdom of America's preeminent traditionalists who for two generations have been publishing in the little-known journal, M odern Age, sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. This long has been the only sophisticated journal of functionally Islamic thought in America. In its monumental, 379-page, Summer/Fall l987 issue, entitled ``E ssays on the Crisis of Modernity,'' Henry Regnery defines traditionalism in terms of its opposite, which for more than a century has been known as ``modernism.'' Modernism, he says, is ``the loss or rejection of the divine paradigm'' and as ``the des acralization of life.''
This functional atheism has infected both of the establishment parties with such virulence that it could make them irrelevant to America's future. Without a viable morally-based alternative, many Americans may vote in protest for alternative part ies, even for a secular one like Ross Perot's which is part of the problem not part of the solution to our civilizational malaise.
Perhaps in recognition of this revolutionary fact, Newt Gingrich gave his full support on May 17th, 1995, to the ten-point Contract With the American Family, which Ralph Reed, Jr. of the Christian Coalition unveiled that day. Gingrich finally adm itted that, ``The activity engaged in by the Christian Coalition to educate and make sure the people back home knew what was happening in Washington were a vital part of why we had a revolution at the polls on November 8th.'' Gingrich announced at th e unveiling of this second-generation contract with America that, ``We're committed to implementing the contract,'' and he promised hearings and votes on the House floor for all ten of its provisions.
This commitment promised to bring to center stage the four main social issues which ``pragmatic'' politicians for decades had sought to bury, namely, 1) Religious Equality, designed to end ``hostility toward faith'' by allowing religious expressio n in public places; 2) School Choice, designed to give parents control again over their childrens' education by permitting parents to designate private schools as the recipients of their education tax dollars, with public subsidies for poorer neighbor hoods in order to assure equality of funding for both inner city and suburban schools; 3) Respect for Life, designed to end late-term abortions; and 4) Restrictions on Pornography, designed to protect children from pornography on the Internet and cabl e TV.
By dropping the religious conservatives' two planks on an anti-abortion amendment to the U.S. Constitution and on homosexuals, the coalition was able to bring on board both Gingrich, who was notoriously ``soft on homosexuality,'' and
Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, who told the coalition leaders immediately after the unveiling of the Contract With the American Family, ``We must restore religious expression to its rightful place in our national conversation and our public life.''
Ralph Reed declared that the American people had finally gotten through to the leaders of America, and that, ``As religious conservatives, we have finally gained what we have always sought: a place at the table, a sense of legitimacy, and a voice in the conversation that we call democracy.'' What has been denied to the people of Algeria and most other Muslim countries, was finally achieved in America by a religious revolution that was spearheaded by an unwitting Newt Gingrich and then embrace d by him when he saw that his leadership and that of the Republican Party otherwise might pass into history.
This development of leadership from below contrasts sharply with the failure of leadership from above in the Democratic Party. Despite the influence of the Jewish spiritual leader, Max Lerner, editor of Tikkun, on both William and Hillary Clinton , the Democratic Party seemed to enter the 1994 elections without any commitment to the transcendent source of truth, justice, and love that alone can make compassion for the marginalized in society real. House Minority Leader, Richard Gephard (D-MO) responded to the Gingrich challenge with the somewhat inane remark that, ``This does not address the central challenges our country faces ... the standard of living for the American people.''
The real concern among Americans is not that government has not performed, or that the living standard of middle-class Americans has been declining for many years, but the concern that the very concepts of right and wrong are increasingly rare and even increasingly forbidden in public life.
The elder statesman of the Republican Party, President Richard Nixon, both caught and led the mood of the electorate when he wrote in his book, Beyond Peace, which was widely circulated during the months before the election: ``The real threat in t he world [lies in the fact that] our country may be rich in goods, but we are poor in spirit. ... Poor quality secondary education, rampant crime and violence, growing racial division, pervasive poverty, the drug epidemic, the degenerative culture of moronic entertainment, a decline in the notions of civic duty and responsibility, and the spread of a spiritual emptiness have all disconnected and alienated Americans from their country, their religions, and one another. ... Our crisis of values at h ome, coupled with our lack of a coherent mission abroad, has created an even more deadly spiritual deficit. ... Today, our enemy is within us.''
Gingrich was late in recognizing the spiritual nature of America's problems, but he did address the widely felt danger of big government, and of politics in general, which most Americans have concluded is the real enemy of everything spiritual and of enduring value in their lives. Gingrich will be judged by his success in addressing the underlying concerns, for which his attack on government is considered to be largely symbolic, and he may face bitter opposition if he fails after promising so much. But in his initial revolutionary surge, Gingrich demonstrated what can be done in the modern information age by a movement with a vision and a detailed strategy to transform the world.