Did Newt Gingrich wreck American politics?

Pundits and scholars looking for someone to blame for the dismal state of our politics often end up pointing their fingers at the same man: former U.S. representative and speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank argues in a recent column (and in his new book “The Destructionists”) that Gingrich “bears a singular responsibility for precipitating the ruin of the American political system.”

It’s an appealing argument, especially to those of us who worked on the Hill when Gingrich was there and witnessed his incendiary style of politics first-hand. But while Gingrich did help change the way congressional parties operate, his critics greatly overstate his influence on American politics.

Even before he was first elected to Congress in 1978, Gingrich believed that the most important objective of the Republican Party should be to win back control of the House from the Democrats, who had been consistently in charge of the chamber since 1955. As we explain in our new book about Gingrich, the freshman congressman devoted his next 16 years in office to establishing himself as a party entrepreneur, dedicating scarce resources to both help advance the goal of a GOP majority and further his own career.

Gingrich believed that a GOP majority would emerge if the party nationalized elections, better differentiated itself from the opposition and undermined the reputation of the Democratic Party. He and his allies were unafraid to use aggressive tactics in the process. They accused some Democrats of being communist sympathizers and others of being un-American (or worse). Gingrich himself masterminded a media campaign against House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas) that suggested (with scant evidence) that Wright was corrupt, leading to the Texan’s resignation from the speakership in 1989. The next year, GOPAC, Gingrich’s campaign organization, urged Republican candidates to use inflammatory words such as “traitors,” “shallow” and “sick” to describe their political opponents.

When Republicans finally won control of the House in 1994, Gingrich pivoted from achieving to preserving his hard-fought majority. But being in charge did not make Gingrich turn soft. Instead, he redirected his energies towards taking on President Clinton, trying – and failing – to get him to agree to GOP spending cuts by forcing two shutdowns of the federal government.

To be sure, many of these tactics helped persuade other Republicans to be more oppositional and internally unified, and to emphasize messaging over legislating. Gingrich also successfully recruited assertive young partisan Republicans to run for Congress, which gradually increased the number of like-minded lawmakers serving in the House.

Moreover, the 1994 election did more than just deliver the majority to Republicans: It convinced lawmakers from both parties that such aggressive tactics were the key to winning power, thus helping to institutionalize these strategies.

In this respect, Gingrich has had a lasting influence over the norms of partisan behavior within Congress.

Still, Gingrich did not singlehandedly coarsen our political oratory. Radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, for example, was a master of provocative language and was heard by far more people than Gingrich. By 1990, Limbaugh’s show aired on close to 300 radio stations and boasted more than 5 million listeners weekly. His success helped boost the careers of other conservative commentators, like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, who are watched by millions of Americans every day.

The rise of rightwing political commentary is just one of several external factors that have encouraged harsh political speech. Modern congressional elections are another. Gerrymandered House districts lead to less competitive elections, with one party holding sway over a particular district for years. Fewer swing districts mean that lawmakers are more likely to lose a primary election than a general election. As a result, they are incentivized to position themselves as more extreme on the assumption that this is what primary voters will prefer.

Another factor is affective polarization – negative attitudes towards people of the opposite party – which is sizable and growing among citizens, creating an additional incentive for politicians to bash their political opponents. And the rise of social media, which is dominated by hateful and angry rhetoric, has almost certainly done more to encourage lawmakers to speak negatively about the opposing party than anything Gingrich may have done three decades ago.

Milbank and others note that Gingrich made baseless, conspiracy-like claims about his opponents, but such behavior has a pedigree that far precedes Gingrich’s time in Congress. Conspiratorial language was a hallmark of the John Birch Society, for example. In a New York Times essay, Robert Draper interviewed a far-right Arizona state party leader who cited as her influence not Gingrich but instead the 1950s Red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.).

What about another common criticism of Gingrich, that he made lawmakers prefer obstruction to bipartisan cooperation? As a backbencher, Gingrich may have pushed hard for his colleagues to stop working with the majority party. But after suffering from years of heavy-handed rule by House Democrats, they hardly needed much encouragement to do so. Nor was obstruction even a particularly new idea, having been used effectively in the Senate by conservative Democrats like James Allen (Ala.) and, in 1968, by House backbencher Donald Rumsfeld (R-Ill.).

Even if Gingrich did make cross-party cooperation an unappealing strategy, the level of partisan conflict in our national legislature is greatly exaggerated. James Curry and Frances Lee have documented how Congress acts in a bipartisan fashion far more than the public realizes, as evidenced by the accomplishments of the 117th Congress in just the past few months.

In short, Gingrich should rightly be credited (or blamed, depending on your perspective) with helping to mold both parties in Congress into more unified entities that emphasize partisan position-taking over bipartisan legislating. Still, despite his lasting influence, no one person – not even Gingrich – can be held singularly responsible for all that plagues our political system.

Jeffrey Crouch is assistant professor of American politics at American University and the author of “The Presidential Pardon Power” and “The Unitary Executive Theory: A Danger to Constitutional Government.” Matthew Green is professor of American politics at The Catholic University of America, a former congressional staffer and author of several books, including “Legislative Hardball: The House Freedom Caucus and the Power of Threat-Making in Congress.” Their new book, “Newt Gingrich: The Rise and Fall of a Party Entrepreneur,” is published by University Press of Kansas.