COMMENTARY | Newt Gingrich who in 1994 was elected Speaker of the House by his peers and crowned himself King of the Republican revolution touts his conservative credentials at every turn. He claims that it was his leadership in 1994 that allowed the Republican Party to win control over both houses of leadership in the congress, reform welfare, and balance the budget, never mentioning that it was his lack of leadership that helped Bill Clinton get re-elected as President of the United States. This lack of leadership eventually led to another Republican revolution, one that forced Newt Gingrich to resign from the House of Representatives by his own party.
Bad press over his narcissistic tantrum-throwing and his infidelity have been largely credited for Speaker Gingrich’s downfall, but what raised the ire of many of his constituents in the GOP were his insipid promotion of futurist ideas from his friends and mentors Alvin and Heidi Toffler. In fact Speaker Gingrich said “I am a conservative futurist,” and peddled the Tofflers’ books and ideas every chance he got. He even put the Tofflers’ book “The Third Wave” on a required reading list for incoming congressmen — a reading list where the constitution was conspicuously absent.
What in a book written by a couple of sociologists raise the ire of conservatives? In the final chapter of “The Third Wave,” Toffler wrote a letter to “our founding parents” that reads:
“For the system of government you fashioned, including the very principles on which you based it, is increasingly obsolete, and hence increasingly, if inadvertently, oppressive and dangerous to our welfare. It must be radically changed and a new system of government invented — a democracy for the twenty-first century…”
Toffler closed his letter to our founding parents with:
“For this wisdom, above all, I thank Mr. Jefferson, who helped create the system that served us so well for so long, and that now must, in its turn, die and be replaced.”
The book also describes our society as entering a post-industrial phase in which abortion, homosexuality, promiscuity, and divorce are perfectly normal, even virtuous. These sentiments are not surprising from someone like Heidi Toffler, who when speaking on the subject of abortion said:
“The fetus is a parasite in my body. Until it’s viable, I have control over it. I would never have an abortion, but I would defend to the death the right of a woman to have that parasite removed.”
Speaker Gingrich also wrote the forward to another of the Tofflers’ books, “Creating a New Civilization.” In this book the Tofflers’ suggest that the new civilization will replace Christianity with secular humanism. In the preface Speaker Gingrich wrote:
“I first began working with the Tofflers in the early 1970s on a concept called anticipatory democracy. I was then a young assistant professor at West Georgia State College, and I was fascinated with the intersection of history and the future which is the essence of politics and government at its best. For twenty years we have worked to develop a future-conscious politics and popular understanding that would make it easier for America to make the transition from the Second Wave civilization – which is clearly dying – to the emerging, but in many ways undefined and not fully understood Third Wave civilization.”
What Speaker Gingrich does not make clear in his foreward is where he feels our Constitution and our Republic fit within the “future-conscious politics” of the “emerging third wave” he and the Tofflers vehemently promote.