To Renew America.

Addressing the Republican National Committee last January, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich had this to say about his controversial agreement with Rupert Murdoch's publishing company: "I am going to write a book. I don't know whether it is going to be a good book or a bad book....If people want to buy it, Marianne [his wife] and I will probably do pretty well. If people don't want to buy it, we probably won't do very well. This is a system called free enterprise. The socialists in the Democratic party don't quite get it."

The speaker was half right. To Renew America is a best-selling success for its author. But it is a bad, or at least a mediocre, piece of work, cobbled together from speeches and (presumably) from the materials for the history course he has taught in Georgia and on the Mind Extension TV channel. It must be said, however, that some of Gingrich's more provocative public utterances are omitted--the characterization of Democrats as "socialists," for example, or the bashing of public broadcasting. And there's nary a word about the Christian Right, abortion, or school prayer, just the hope that our social problems will be solved by the "volunteerism" of our "churches, synagogues, and mosques." (Trendy!)

The original portions of the book, dealing with the Contract with America, are surprisingly tepid. The contract may or may not be "the most radical and important conservative manifesto of our times," as Lady Margaret Thatcher has characterized it, but the recounting of its procedural implementation in the House is comparable to a description of grass growing.

Gingrich's thinking reflects several Republican traditions, albeit in my view the wrong ones. He resembles Nixon in his near-paranoid assaults on the "whining" left-wing media, "liberals" (undefined), and vague and sinister "elites." Despite nods to the likes of de Tocqueville and Arnold Toynbee, a Nixonian anti-intellectual tone often surfaces. The history Ph.D. points out gleefully that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were college dropouts, and notes that seven of the last ten presidents did not attend "elite" colleges. (A parlor game for you. There's Harvard and Yale, but what is the third "elite" college? West Point? Georgetown? Michigan?)

Gingrich is Reaganesque m his resort to the unsubstantiated anecdote; there's no vodka-swilling welfare queen, but we do have the welfare mother "punished for sewing her daughter's clothing and saving on food stamps" so she can put money aside for her daughter's education. Like Reagan, he also treats movies as reality, drawing morals from Star Wars and the remake of The Last of the Mohicans.

His "twenty-first-century vision" for America draws on a heady combination of futurism--Alvin Toeffler variety-and science fiction a la Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Thus in health care we can expect a system unfettered by the doctors, "trade guild" (or the Food and Drug Administration for that matter) that will allow the patient, through "telemedicine," to handle most ailments by computerized self-diagnosis. (The legal profession will wither away, too, as people write their wills and contracts aided by programs on their PCs.) As for education, individuals will instruct themselves over a lifetime via computer--a sort of Calvert School in cyberspace. Never mind the absence of the personal element that most would find essential: the doctor who breaks the news of a fatal illness, the lawyer who gives his best judgment as to the pros and cons of a course of action, the teacher who is a role model.

The speaker's book is replete with lists: the six major challenges to our society ("renewing" American civilization; accelerating the Information Age; improving U.S. competitiveness in world trade; replacing the "welfare state"; decentralizing government; and balancing the federal budget), the five principles of our civilization, the eight reforms needed to change the welfare system, and so on and so on. Everything but a twelve-step program for political junkies.

When one strips away the futurism, the anecdotes, the lists, and the occasional personal reminiscences, what is left is a hard-nut reactionary agenda, the goal of which is not just to gut the detested "bureaucracy" and shift power to state and local government. It is more, as we learn in this burst of candor:

We are not simply trying to move

a few offices out of Washington....We

are trying to reestablish

the American value of individual

liberty and the citizens, first claim to

their own money....The last sixty

years has [sic] seen so much centralization

in Washington that at

this point the best we can do is to

start by shifting power back to the

state capitals....Yet our ultimate

goal is to move power even beyond the

state capitals ....[W]hat we really want

to do is devolve power all the way out

of government and back to working

American families. We want to leave

choices and resources in the hands

of individuals and let them decide

if they prefer government, the

profit-making sector, the nonprofit

sector, or even no solution at all to

their problems....[F]reedom ultimately

includes the right to say no"

[emphasis added].

There it is. Good old-fashioned get-off-my-back-and-lower-my-taxes conservative radicalism. Thy brother's keeper? Forget it. The contract, the revolution, the devolution, or whatever one chooses to call it, is a reversion to another Republican tradition going back at least to Calvin Coolidge. But Gingrich the erstwhile history professor might ponder these words of Herbert Hoover, written in 1922:

We have long since abandoned the laissez faire of the eighteenth century--the notion that it is "every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost." We abandoned that when we adopted the ideal of equality of opportunity....We have confirmed its abandonment in terms of legislation, of social and economic justice--in part because we have learned that social injustice is the destruction of justice itself.

(Readers should note that if they call 1-800-TO-RENEW they can order videotapes of the speaker's course lectures on renewing America for a bargain $159.95.)

James Duffy is a writer and former lawyer living in New York. He is the author of Domestic Affairs: American Programs and Priorities. Writing as Haughton Murphy, he is the author of the Reuben Frost mystery novels.