NEWT THE BLAMELESS

By ROBERT WRIGHT

NEWT GINGRICH IS FED UP WITH ALL THE FINGER pointing. He is tired, he says, of people blaming their problems on one another or on society at large--rather than taking responsibility for their fates and charging ahead with a can-do attitude. In his new book, To Renew America, Gingrich writes, "When confronted with a problem, a true American doesn't ask, 'Who can I blame this on?' "

Having made this point, Gingrich proceeds to survey America's problems and blame them on various people. If you're familiar with his formidable oeuvre of TV utterances--his book is kind of a Cliffs Notes version--you can guess the culprits. The "bureaucrats" have helped destroy the family, undermine the work ethic and dumb down education. Meanwhile, the liberal "elites" (in a "calculated effort") have helped "discredit this civilization," sapping faith in American values. And so on.

So exhaustive is the finger pointing in Gingrich's book that even the tendency to blame others gets blamed on others. Thus the victim mentality, which encourages people to blame their personal failings on "society," is largely the work of "the countercultural left." A question arises: Does the complicity of the counterculture in this tendency mean that faulting your social environment for your faults isn't really your fault? If so, that's good news for Gingrich. Asked on TV a few months ago about his use of marijuana during the Vietnam period, he said it was merely a sign that he had been "alive and in graduate school in that era." Right. And smoking crack or having a child out of wedlock is merely a sign that you're alive and in the inner city in the 1990s.

Gingrich's usual suspects--the bureaucrats, the elites, the counterculture--are, of course, bound by a common trait: none is exactly a central pillar of his constituency. Indeed, a remarkable feature of America's problems, as analyzed in Gingrich's book, is that they are never the fault of Republicans. Even the slightest misdemeanor, if committed by a Republican, turns out to originate in some external cause. For example, Gingrich once saw some Republicans in Congress "grandstand for the news media." (Imagine that!) But it turns out they had been egged on by "liberals in the Washington press corps."

A naive observer might think Republicans share some blame for the demise of family values. After all, Republicans get divorced just like everybody else, right? Gingrich himself left his first wife--and their two children--for a younger woman.

But in Gingrich's carefully crafted references to family morality, neither divorcing a wife nor leaving your children draws any criticism. Rather, what's wrong is for men not to "support" their children: "Any male who does not take care of his children is a bum and deserves no respect." Presumably, Gingrich is talking about financial support. Thus the moral of the story is: men with money (likely Republican voters) are free to move from wife to wife, but poorer men (unlikely Republican voters) are not. If some underclass man dumps a wife, he's a cause of America's festering moral crisis. But if Gingrich dumps a wife, he's--well, Speaker of the House.

Obviously, any healthy society must deem financial support for children a moral obligation of parenthood. The point, which Gingrich so conveniently glides over, is that in a truly robust society this won't be the only such obligation; the current crisis of the family goes beyond dollars and cents. When journalists note pointedly that Timothy McVeigh was a child of divorce, they aren't suggesting that the attendant financial insecurity is what caused psychological problems.

If Gingrich were just another politician--or just another Speaker of the House--then his self-serving moralizing would be of meager interest. Hypocrisy isn't major news in our species. But Gingrich is making extraordinary claims about the nation and himself. America is "at risk," facing a "genuine crisis," beset by "moral decay"; our very civilization may not "survive." Fortunately, just in the nick of time, comes Gingrich, who by his own account is not just a "genuine revolutionary" but a "transformational figure." You know the type: F.D.R., Lincoln, Moses. Well, people who claim to have a plan for leading us out of the wilderness warrant unusual scrutiny, and so does their plan.

There's no doubt that all is not going swimmingly in America. On bad days, we might even concede that words like crisis and decay apply. But we shouldn't concede that all our problems are the fault of pointy-headed liberals and inner-city blacks. And we shouldn't be fooled into believing salvation can be attained without big sacrifices from other Americans. Even if it's true that mindless bureaucracy ruined the public schools and that welfare-state liberals created the underclass, the fact remains that at this point neither problem will be solved without lots of money, more wisely spent. Of course, that money would come from middle- and upper-class taxpayers--potential Republican voters. So much for that idea.

Newt Gingrich has come down from the mountaintop with this pronouncement: "Either we will pull ourselves together for the effort, or we will continue to decay." That's bad news indeed. For if there's one thing Newt's new bible isn't, it's a recipe for pulling our nation together.