James Poulos tries to understand Newt's appeal:
The Gingrich Proposition, as he likes to put it, is that you have to “go up a couple of levels” in your categories of thought. And when you do, you come to the substance of The Gingrich Proposition — his very own master category of thought, which he has maintained at least since 1992, when he wrote it down in a note-to-self now making the rounds on TV and the Web: advocate of civilization, defender of civilization, teacher of the rules of civilization, arouser of those who form civilization, organizer of the pro-civilization activists, and leader “possibly” of the civilizing forces. …
Most people are unaccustomed to fellow human beings thinking — much less speaking — of themselves in this way. But The Gingrich Proposition holds that this species of small-mindedness characteristically misses the point.
Shorter Poulos: Gingrich is definitionally what conservatism, properly speaking, opposes. Conservatism was born in the eighteenth century against the grand pronouncements of the French philosophes; it roots itself in practice not theory; it distrusts massive, profound reorganization of anything. In all of this, Gingrich is, in fact, conservatism's nemesis: an autodidact megalomaniac, contemptuous of existing institutions, and bent on dragging an entire culture, country and, yes, civilization into a fantastic pocket of his own small mind.
Maybe this is how American conservatism truly ends: in the fantastic utopian nightmare of Newtism.
(Photo: Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich speaks in the Strong America Now tent outside the Hilton Coliseum, where Iowans will vote in the Iowa Straw Poll at Iowa State University August 13, 2011 in Ames, Iowa. Nine GOP presidential candidates are competing for votes in the straw poll, an important step for gaining momentum in a crowded field of hopefuls.B y Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)
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