Tout Newt.

NEWT GINGRICH'S reading list for Republican congressmen is already having an effect. A mover and shaker, one of the Golden Horde that has descended on the capital, told me she had begun Democracy in America. "I'm on page 73," she said gallantly. "Small print!"

What do Newt's books tell us about his mind? We need the help because the mind in question is fertile, quirky, and opaque. I first interviewed Gingrich during the 1984 campaign; custom has not staled his infinite variety. "Learning is hard," he told me then. "The more we tell poor people there is an easy way the more we trap them. . . . The voters of Bavaria Atlanta. . . . Our goal in life is to make Bangladesh resemble Dallas. . . . What is our positive alternative? In the Hegelian sense, what is our antithesis?" In the normal sense, what is his thesis? Newt's books give us a clue.

The list obviously breaks down into Founders and Contemporaries, but there is further division of labor within the sections. The Declaration explains why we are a country; The Federalist describes how to make the count work. Tocqueville is an intelligent foreigner, asking fifty years later how we were doing, and how we were likely to do. The Washington biography tells how the United States actually came to be, through the agency of a hero.

The first thing to notice about the Founders' division is that the country Tocqueville visited was already different from the one Jefferson et al. had made. The Founders thought government had some responsibility for moral education. Washington wanted a national university in the as yet unbuilt capital, where future leaders could attend the debates in Congress and study republican virtue. (He assumed there would be a connection.) By the time Tocqueville made his visit, Americans were strongly moralistic, but their morals percolated up from their religions and their private lives, with little encouragement from the state. Maybe they had learned something. Maybe they had lost something too.

But the most striking thing about Gingrich's first team is the inclusion o Flexner. Verbalists and theorists have a way of assuming that ideas are self-enacting. We think them, therefore they are. But political ideas require statesmen to make them real, and great statesmen must be great men. The Indispensable Man - a one-volume version of Flexner's four-volume biography - understands Washington's greatness moderately well. In one respect, Flexner is the best biographer Washington has ever had, for he brings to the most visual of Presidents the eye of an art historian. Flexner's most serious flaw, however, is a consistent underrating of Washington's interest in ideas. Having just argued that great men are superior to great ideas, I must seem to be contradicting myself. But part of a great man's greatness is his understanding of ideas. A would-be great man without confident access to them ends up like Boris Yeltsin, sliding into a morass of improvisation and bad advice.

It's the modern stuff on Gingrich's list, however - the computer nerds, the business wonks, and the futurists - that has gotten the most attention, and that strikes many people, not all of them liberals, as problematic. The subject of the last four books is the modern organization, whether a single company or a civilization. The authors attack the theme with very different degrees of success.

The best book of the lot is Mary Boone's. She asked 16 executives, from organizations ranging from the Senate to Tootsie Roll Industries, how computers have affected them and their work, and presents their experience with a minimum of hype. Her executives say that e-mail is more flexible than the telephone, and more communicative than letters or memos. Print snobs should realize that e-mail competes not with Jane Austen, but with the typical business memo. Miss Boone's sources also testify that a well designed computer system can act as an extra set of fingertips on the piano keys of information. Miss Boone thinks all this has implications for the structure of businesses - less middle management, flatter organizations that are coached rather than directed from on high - but her conclusions flow believably from her reporting.

Morris Shechtman and Peter Drucker are two management consultants, who frequently disagree. Mr. Drucker believes that if a jerk can do a job, lock him do it, while Mr. Shechtman insists that everyone in an organization should share a common ethos. Drucker, like Mary Boone, favors flatter organizations; Shechtman believes that pyramidal hierarchies are required to give needed guidance. There is an authoritarian streak to Shechtman, only partly concealed by a layer of psychological talk, which is one reason why I prefer Drucker. The other is that Drucker writes better. Shechtman, however, makes the point that the goals of people and of groups must flow from their missions, which arise from their values. This is a necessary antidote to the vertiginous sense one gets that Drucker could as easily advise John Gotti as Mother Teresa.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler, though they are the most abstract of Newt's authors, are very grounded indeed. Before advising a don or a saint, they would want to know what wave of history he or she belonged to. In the Foreword to Creating a New Civilization, Gingrich says the Tofflers have been "writing about the future for a quarter century." Does the futurism of 1970 hold up better than the lava lamp?

The Tofflers make a number of specific predictions and analyses. They see the leaner, meaner organizations discussed by Miss Boone and Mr. Drucker as prototypes for all social units, which can be decentralized, "de-massified," and "deliberately hollowed out." They apply this model to government and to the family, which has gotten them some bad ink during the Republican takeover. Gingrich was echoing the Tofflers when he speculated that majority rule might be passe, and social conservatives have noticed that the Tofflers take shots at "the values and morality of the 1950s, a time before universal television, before the birth-control pill." This book qualifies these pugnacious opinions somewhat: demassified government could lead to devolution along the lines of the Tenth Amendment as well as to balkanization along the lines of Lani Guinier, and the Tofflers call for a revival of extended families, and family autonomy: "forget peripheral issues, accept the diversity, and return important tasks to the household. Oh yes, and make sure the parent keeps control of the remote." Such backing and filling also explains the Tofflers' success as seers: big bull's-eyes make good marksmen.

Everything the Tofflers say is trivialized by their theory of history. Humanity has gone through three waves: agriculture, industrialism, and the wave that's happening now, the information age. I first heard the big theory in my interview with Gingrich ten years ago and that was the best way to be exposed to it. It's the kind of thought you come up with at a dinner party when you've had a few drinks and you're on a roll. It's sweeping, plausible, partly true; in that context, the holes don't matter. But the Tofflers have built an entire world view on it.

It looks like history, but it is really trendology, or the game of threes: posit two eras, and predict a third. If you win, you not only foresee the future, you own it. This is why the witches played the game on Macbeth, hailing him as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and "King hereafter." In the hands of the Tofflers, the game of threes will probably have less drastic results, issuing only in verbiage and confusion.

Trendology ignores the persistence of previous eras into their successors. The Tofflers acknowledge that the clash of one wave and the next causes turbulence, but they don't see that the turbulence lasts for millennia. The era before the first wave, the era of hunting and gathering, still shapes our notions of warfare and masculinity, so that nearly half the men elected President in second-wave America had fought in battle. Dying and reviving gods, the myths of agriculture, haunt Christmas trees and The Waste Land. This is a criticism of trendology on its own terms. The more serious criticism is that trendology's terms ignore the question of truth, whether framed by philosophers, prophets, or poets. Plato, St. Paul, and Shakespeare would all be baffled by the Tofflers. So would the authors on Gingrich's first team, who cared passionately that the United States be not just the coming thing, but the right thing. "We hold these truths to be self-evident. . ."

The lacuna of The Indispensable Man is pertinent here. Although Washington had only the equivalent of a grade-school education, he read all his life, and most of what he read was first rate. He kept up with the political literature of North America for over thirty years, when it was of the highest order. When he needed elaboration he turned to George Mason, Madison, Hamilton. He did not read the prophecies of Condorcet, or Nostradamus.

Why do the critical faculties that guide Gingrich in judging men who lived before 1840 desert him when he comes to the Tofflers? One reason is curiosity. Considering Gingrich's love of dinosaurs, make that boyish curiosity. Boyish curiosity is a good thing; it precedes all inquiry. Washington, D.C., the most timid and status-conscious of cities, starves for lack of it. Tip O'Neill never read the Tofflers, not because he was too wise, but because he was too busy robbing civilians.

Another reason is Gingrich's rise through the ranks since 1978, and the Republicans he had to supplant and outflank. Before Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, the congressional GOP was a party of inertia and self-defeat. I remember once hearing former Minority Leader Bob Michel reminisce about his first political experience: passing out sunflower buttons for Alf Landon. No wonder he expects to get kicked in the head, I thought. In the long years of fretting as the minority of the minority, Gingrich had to sustain himself with the hope that he was the wave of the future - and there were the Tofflers, to tell him that it was so.

Curiosity and hope explain Newt Gingrich's strange weakness for trendology, but they do not excuse it. Statesmanship is hard. The more we tell politicians there is an easy way, the more we trap them. If the Speaker wants to fulfill the mission he has set himself, he and his followers will have to bring the second half of their reading list up to the level of the first.