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Newt Gingrich is a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a vocal advocate of right-wing social policies and militarist defense policies. A fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Gingrich has helped shape Republican Party discourse for decades, in particular as the architect of the 1994 “Contract with America.”

After leaving Congress in 1999, Gingrich became a fellow at both AEI and the hawkish Hoover Institution, and joined the “leadership council” of the Clifford May-run Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative pressure group founded in the wake of 9/11 to push for an expansive “war on terror.” He has also served as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, an advisor to the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and a Fox News analyst.

Since the election of President Barack Obama, Gingrich’s rhetoric has grown increasingly strident and hackneyed. For instance, during the heated debate in 2010 over whether to allow construction of a mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks, Gingrich argued that the construction should be prohibited “so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.”[1]

But as Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen pointed out:

[I]t is not the government of Saudi Arabia that seeks to open a mosque in Lower Manhattan, but a private group. In addition, and just for the record, Saudi Arabia does not represent all of Islam and, also just for the record, the al-Qaeda terrorists who murdered nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, would gladly have added the vast Saudi royal family to the list of victims.[2]

Gingrich’s diatribe was published on the website of the group Renewing American Leadership, which he founded in 2009 to unite the conservative base in the United States, and which is "dedicated to defending and advancing American civilization by restoring our Judeo-Christian heritage."[3]

Borrowing from neoconservative discourse honed by Norman Podhoretz and others regarding the “existential” threat of terrorism, Gingrich characterizes “radical Islamism” as a totalitarian ideology. In a July 2010 op-ed for the right-wing Human Events, he wrote:

Radical Islamism is more than simply a religious belief. It is a comprehensive political, economic, and religious movement that seeks to impose sharia—Islamic law—upon all aspects of global society. … Radical Islamists see politics and religion as inseparable in a way it is difficult for Americans to understand. Radical Islamists assert sharia’s supremacy over the freely legislated laws and values of the countries they live in and see it as their sacred duty to achieve this totalitarian supremacy in practice.[4]

After the election of President Obama, Gingrich quickly emerged as one of the administration's harshest and most visible critics, lambasting the president for everything from health care reform to foreign policy. As Josh Marshall of the Talking Points Memo blog wrote in May 2009, “At our editorial meeting this morning we were trying to reason our way through the renewed prominence and media omnipresence of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich—something that actually seems to happen every few years when the GOP starts taking on water. Now, though, Newt's out there calling on Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi to resign, considering running for president, and generally speaking out on every issue under the sun.”[5]

In a May 2009 op-ed for the Washington Examiner, Gingrich argued that worries among elites that the United States is growing increasingly liberal in the “Era of Obama” are unfounded. He wrote: 

Americans are increasingly out of synch with the liberal Washington establishment," Gingrich wrote. "But what are they getting from their leaders in Washington? Plans to send Guantanamo terrorists to American communities and other far left proposals that will damage our national security.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who made the unfortunate decision to call the CIA liars and criminals, has seen her approval rating plummet from 51 percent in January to 39 percent today. The faint hissing sound you are beginning to hear is the air slowly leaking out of the Washington conventional wisdom. The question is, anyone in the elites listening?[6]

Gingrich has long fashioned himself presidential material, based in part on his get-tough stance on national security. In mid-2006, for example, he appeared to be floating a platform for the 2008 presidential race. In a speech at AEI, he called the war on terror “World War III,” and implied he would be a better wartime leader than George W. Bush. The neoconservative mouthpiece the Weekly Standard gave Gingrich's speech a glowing review. “His rivals should take note. The first speech of the 2008 presidential campaign was delivered on the fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001.”[7]

In his 2008 AEI speech, Gingrich highlighted Iran as a primary target for a new U.S. intervention, a favorite neoconservative line. Describing Iran as “a dictatorship dedicated to Islamic Fascism and ... a mortal threat to our survival,” he called for using military force if necessary to change the country's regime, saying, “If we do not stand up against a Holocaust-denying, genocide-proposing, publicly self-defined enemy of the United States, why should we expect anyone else to do so?”[8]

Soon after taking office, President George W. Bush invited Gingrich to serve on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, an advisory body heavily influenced by its neoconservative and hardline Republican members, including Richard Perle (as chair), James Woolsey, Ken Adelman, Eliot Cohen, and Dan Quayle. When appointed in November 2001, Gingrich was one of eight Hoover Institution fellows simultaneously tapped for the thirty-one-member board.

During the immediate aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Gingrich joined many of his AEI colleagues in blaming the State Department and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell for undermining the Bush administration's foreign policy, and for Washington's troubled relations with many U.S. allies.

He also called Powell's stated plan to visit Syria “ludicrous,” despite the fact that Powell would be doing so at Bush's request. When asked about Gingrich's characterization, a Pentagon spokesperson said, “Plain and simple, Gingrich speaks for Gingrich.” Paul Begala, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, remarked, “There's nothing the Democrats would like more” than to see Gingrich reemerge in the spotlight. “He's terribly bright, but he's more far right than he is bright. He's become the embodiment of what most Americans hate about right-wingers.”[9]

Gingrich has argued that the United States is confronting an existential threat in the war on terror. In a 2006 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Gingrich compared President Abraham Lincoln's preparations for the Civil War to President George W. Bush's efforts to prosecute the war on terror, arguing that where Lincoln succeeded, Bush failed.

Bush's strategies had three flaws, Gingrich opined:

(1) They do not define the scale of the emerging World War III, between the West and the forces of militant Islam. ... (2) They do not define victory in this larger war as our goal, and so the energy, resources, and intensity needed to win cannot be mobilized. (3) They do not establish clear metrics of achievement and then replace leaders, bureaucrats, and bureaucracies as needed to achieve those goals.[10]

In a September 14, 2006 Fox News appearance, Gingrich said:

I think we're seeing around the world an emerging Third World War from North Korea to Pakistan to India to Afghanistan to Iraq and Iran to the increasing alliance between Venezuela and Iran to the British terrorists who are getting trained in Pakistan. But I think if we could design powerful enough strategies, as we did in the Cold War to contain the Soviets, we might be able to avoid it actually degenerating into a world war.[11]

Gingrich went on to call for regime change in Iran and North Korea and criticize the Bush administration's handling of the war on terror. “I don't think that the administration has yet come to grips with how big and complex this is,” he told news anchor Greta van Sustern.[12]

Gingrich's primary claim to fame has been the 1994 “Contract with America,” a slate of Republican legislative proposals, which liberal critics called the "Contract on America." In promoting the so-called contract, Gingrich used existential language similar to his current war on terror rhetoric—claiming, for instance, that “what is ultimately at stake ... is literally the future of American civilization as it has existed for the last several hundred years.” Such language, scholar Shadia Drury wrote, is eerily reminiscent of the “sense of crisis” in Western civilization that political philosopher Leo Strauss, an early influence on Irving Kristol and many other neoconservatives, once promulgated.[13]

Gingrich has written several books on politics and history. His 2005 Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with Americaexpanded his ideas from the previous decade. A description of the book on the AEI website says, “Newt is back with a plan for American greatness that includes how to win the war on terror … how to reestablish God in American public life … how to reform Social Security … [and] how to restore patriotism to American schools...”[14]

AEI’s summary of Gingrich's Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less(Regnery, 2008) says the book:

[A]rgues that the pinch Americans are feeling at the pump is not a blip in the economy but a looming crisis—affecting not only the price of gas, but the price of food, the strength of our economy, and our national security. To meet this crisis, Gingrich lays out a national strategy that will  ... require Congress to unlock our oil reserves and remove all the impediments and disincentives that unnecessary government regulation has put in the way of American energy independence.[15]

Rediscovering God in America(2006, Integrity Publishers), is a paean to Christian Right arguments that liberals have weakened the United States by undermining the role of religion. In the opening of the book, which was a 2007 New York Timesbestseller, Gingrich argues, “There is no attack on American culture more deadly and more historically dishonest than the secular effort to drive God out of America's public life.”

According to Publishers Weekly:

The book's arguments are predictable: Gingrich claims that references to God are sprinkled everywhere in our nation's founding documents; that most Americans believe in God; and our classrooms and courtrooms are the laboratories where such belief is being irrevocably eroded. He trots out quotations from founding fathers that suggest their allegiance to Christianity, or at least to theism, but conveniently ignores evidence that some of these men—particularly Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson—believed religion should have little, if any, role in the nation's government.[16]