Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich and the Rise of the New Republican Party
- ISBN-10
- 0698402758
- ISBN-13
- 9780698402751
- Series
- Burning Down the House
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 368
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-07-07
- Publisher
- Penguin
- Author
- Julian E. Zelizer
Description
A New York Times Notable Book! A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice The story of how Newt Gingrich and his allies tainted American politics, launching an enduring era of brutal partisan warfare When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, President Obama observed that Trump “is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party.” In Burning Down the House, historian Julian Zelizer pinpoints the moment when our country was set on a path toward an era of bitterly partisan and ruthless politics, an era that was ignited by Newt Gingrich and his allies. In 1989, Gingrich brought down Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright and catapulted himself into the national spotlight. Perhaps more than any other politician, Gingrich introduced the rhetoric and tactics that have shaped Congress and the Republican Party for the last three decades. Elected to Congress in 1978, Gingrich quickly became one of the most powerful figures in America not through innovative ideas or charisma, but through a calculated campaign of attacks against political opponents, casting himself as a savior in a fight of good versus evil. Taking office in the post-Watergate era, he weaponized the good government reforms newly introduced to fight corruption, wielding the rules in ways that shocked the legislators who had created them. His crusade against Democrats culminated in the plot to destroy the political career of Speaker Wright. While some of Gingrich’s fellow Republicans were disturbed by the viciousness of his attacks, party leaders enjoyed his successes so much that they did little collectively to stand in his way. Democrats, for their part, were alarmed, but did not want to sink to his level and took no effective actions to stop him. It didn’t seem to matter that Gingrich’s moral conservatism was hypocritical or that his methods were brazen, his accusations of corruption permanently tarnished his opponents. This brand of warfare worked, not as a strategy for governance but as a path to power, and what Gingrich planted, his fellow Republicans reaped. He led them to their first majority in Congress in decades, and his legacy extends far beyond his tenure in office. From the Contract with America to the rise of the Tea Party and the Trump presidential campaign, his fingerprints can be seen throughout some of the most divisive episodes in contemporary American politics. Burning Down the House presents the alarming narrative of how Gingrich and his allies created a new normal in Washington.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2022-12-30
- 247 pages
- Ebook
- Taylor & Francis
-
- 2022-10-04
- 304 pages
- Paperback
- St. Martin's Press
-
- 2022-02
- 96 pages
- Paperback
- In the National Interest
Similar books
-
Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison
By Nell BernsteinBurning Down the House is a clarion call to shut down our nation’s brutal and counterproductive juvenile prisons and bring our children home.
-
Burning Down the House: A novel
By Jane Mendelsohn“It begins with a child . . .” So opens Jane Mendelsohn’s powerful, riveting new novel. A classic family tale colliding with the twenty-first century, Burning Down the House tells the story of two girls.
-
Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself
By Russell WangerskySome get the chance, and for some of those, the dream becomes a nightmare.Burning Down the House is the story of Wangersky’s eight-year career as a volunteer firefighter, an experience that wound up reaching into every facet of his life ...
-
Burning Down the House
By Jane MendelsohnDescribes the lives of two orphan girls, one from the Caucasus who is sold into the sex trade, the other who is adopted into the wealthy Zane family of New York, whose unwitting involvement in the world of international crime precipitates ...
-
Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
By Charles Baxter"Lately I've been possessed of a singularly unhappy idea: the greatest influence on American fiction for the last twenty years may have been Richard Nixon." What happens to American fiction...
-
Burning Down George Orwell's House: A Novel
By Andrew ErvinA darkly comic novel about advertising, truth, single malt, Scottish hospitality—or lack thereof—and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
-
Burning Down The House: Recycling Domesticity
By Rosemary Marangoly GeorgeThis book views domesticity through multiple frames and surveys the rhetoric and practices of domestication in contemporary cultures. It also examines the consequences and costs of homemaking in various geographic and textual locations.
-
How to Burn Down the House: The Infamous Waiter and Bartender's Scam Bible
By Peter Francis, R. Chip DeGlinktaWritten by two Bourbon Street waiters, it contains humorous step by step discriptions of every scam in the book, with instructions on how to pull them off undetected.
-
Burning Down My Masters' House: My Life at the New York Times
By Jayson BlairThe journalist who was at the center of the journalism scandal involving fabrication and plagiarism at The New York Times offers his own take on his life and career, offering...
-
Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall
By Tim MohrNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Rolling Stone * BookPage * Amazon * Rough Trade Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence “[A] riveting and inspiring history of punk’s hard-fought struggle in East Germany.” —The ...