Joe Biden ran for president in 2020. He was a pragmatic politician with a moderate record. Biden would unify America under his presidency. The former senator and vice president even said: “There will be no blue states and red states with me.”
America is witnessing a dramatic departure from the 2020 candidate, 18 months into the Biden administration.
Since Day One, the Biden administration has pursued policies that appealed more to the far left and socialists than the working-class Americans. As a result, Americans appear more divided than ever on key questions about our country’s future and the policy decisions confronting us.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a bestselling author who is out with a new book, “Defeating Big Government Socialism: Saving America’s Future,” joins us on “The Daily Signal Podcast” today to tell us about his latest work and what’s at stake. Listen to the interview or view a lightly edited transcript.
Rob Bluey: Speaker Gingrich, we’re grateful to have you with us today. We are grateful for your support of The Heritage Foundation over the years.
Newt Gingrich: I’m delighted to be with you. As you know, my ties to Heritage go all the back to the mid-1970s, when you were founded, to the amazing work that Ed Feulner did in helping shape the Reagan administration and to Heritage’s continued intellectual leadership in helping solve America’s problems. So, I’m thrilled to have a chance to talk with you today.
Bluey: We’re grateful for your contributions with this latest book. I believe that Americans today view Biden’s policies because of your efforts to define big-government socialism in the Biden administration. How did you come up this idea? What can readers learn from your book?
Gingrich: I, first of all, remembered that Margaret Thatcher, when she became leader of the opposition in 1975, set out to destroy the moral legitimacy of socialism.
There’s a brilliant small book by Claire Berlinski called “There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.” Berlinski really outlines that Thatcher went on an all-out campaign to defeat socialism, morally, intellectually, and as a matter of daily behavior.
So as I watched the emergence—not Biden. Biden himself is just a guy in the basement who probably would’ve been better off to stay in the basement. But if you look at the totality of the team that they’ve assembled, it’s kind of an intersectional coalition, to use their language, of every anti-American and anti-normalcy group in the country. They are a deliberate attempt to use large government bureaucracies to impose upon the rest of us the world that they envision.
I think you have to start from that understanding that these are people who really do believe that they have the moral right to dictate to you and me … They’re basically a semi-religious group and their fanaticism grows out of that religious sense of certainty.
I realized that it wasn’t going to be enough just to defeat them for having performed badly. I mean, it was pretty clear to me very early on that they were going to have terrible results because everything they were doing was based on ideas that don’t work.
But I also knew that there was a danger that we would end up defeating them, but not learning any real lessons, and that the next wave of socialists would come along and say, “Well, Biden wasn’t very competent and [House Speaker Nancy]Pelosi and [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer were too old, but this time we’re going to do it right.”
So I wrote “Defeating Big Government Socialism” in the tradition of Lady Thatcher, who had said, “First you win the argument. Then you win the vote.”
And I wanted every citizen to have the tools, the arguments, and the facts to be able to join their friends and neighbors in arguing about how dangerous big government socialism really is and why we should replace it.
Bluey: Let’s start with that term itself. What makes that term so powerful? Not only in the polling that you’ve done, but the way that it encapsulate all of the policies you’ve just talked about, as one of the most effective ways to counter the left, but also describe it.
Gingrich: In 2018, we were offered a rare opportunity. The co-founder of Home Depot came to us, and he knew I’d worked with [Ronald]Reagan started in 1974, leading us to the great win of 1980, where we regained the Senate control for the first time since 1954 and where Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter with the largest electoral defeat for an incumbent president in modern-day history.
Then he knew I’d help put together the Contract with America, which led to the first House Republican majority in 40 years. He asked me to work very carefully to identify issues that would bring Americans closer together and create an American majority.
As I was doing this, we began to investigate how people felt and what language they used. And what we discovered was, if you pit free enterprise capitalism against big government socialism, it’s actually 59% to 16% in favor of free market capitalism, which really surprised us how strong it was.
And what we discovered was that there are a lot of young people who, if you just use the word “socialism,” they’ve been through schools where they’ve been told over and over again that socialism’s good and it’s caring and all that stuff, but they instinctively know that big government’s terrible.
It is a sudden meeting of older people who are antisocialism and younger people that are anti-big government. The result is we couldn’t get support above 18% for big government socialism even under a forced choice.
It struck me that this was the right big argument, that what we wanted to do, as Reagan had done in ’80 and as we did with the Contract with America, is we wanted to create a big argument for ’22 and ’24, not a series of little arguments.
The big argument is whether or not you believe that a Washington-dominated bureaucratically implemented system that is against American history, against American traditional values, against the work ethic, against traditional patriotism, whether that’s a system you think will work, or in fact, if you want to replace it with something which will work.
I will only give you one number or two numbers. One, we asked, “Do you think it’s important to restore the America that works?” And we got 87% of the country said, “Yes, that is just pragmatic.” Not liberal, conservative, just pragmatic. Get it back to work.
And then second, we asked people, “Do you agree with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that it is the content of your character, not the color of your skin, that really matters?” That’s 91% to 6%. All those people out trying to invent anti-white racism are right in the face of a 91% majority.
Bluey: Thank you for sharing those numbers with us. As you said, there are many hot topics in America today. For example, critical race theory, COVID and climate change. How do we counter the left’s agenda? You’ve given us some tips already, but for the listeners who might be wondering how they talk to their co-workers or people in their community, what tips and advice do you have for them?
Gingrich: There are two types of tips I can offer. One is to keep an eye on Heritage. I mean, despite The New York Times being owned by the left, you can reach hundreds of thousands of people. Fox News is able to reach millions of people. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily Post, the Washington Examiner, The Washington Times—there is a conservative ecosystem that’s been growing for the last 40 years and that actually is a pretty countervailing system now against the hard-left propaganda system.
I like to think of The New York Times and The Washington Post as Pravda and Izvestia. It is important to understand their biases before you can see the rest of the world.
If you start from the beginning and work backwards, I believe we have the ability to communicate in a way that might surprise people.
This particular year is also unusual. The left is so bad this year that I tell every candidate, “Go and campaign in two places. Campaign at gas stations and at grocery stores,” because no matter what the left says, people know in their pocketbook and they know in their own lives that it just isn’t working.
That gives you the starting point for a serious conversation to say to people, “Have you had enough? Are you ready to look at what does work and what we know historically has been proven again and again to work?”
… We’re seeing this with Latinos, with Asian Americans, African Americans, you’re having more people open to this conversation than, I think, in anytime in my lifetime.
Bluey: I’m glad you brought that up because I wanted to ask about some of the changing nature of the Republican Party in terms of the constituencies that make it up; that Mayra Flores’ election in Texas, a surprise I think for many Democrats, maybe a wake-up call, although it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to heed some of those warnings.
What should the Republican Party, the conservative party do right now to appeal the people who are offended by big government socialism and its policies?
Gingrich:I just wrote a newsletter which anyone can get for free. gingrich360.com. I offer three free newsletters and three free podcasts each week. gingrich360.com. The article I just wrote was about the idea of an American tsunami if there is a large campaign.
I would stress both halves of this. Republicans should not be thinking about a Republican tsunami. People talk about a red wave and I say, “No, it’s going to be a red, white, and blue wave. It’s going to be Americans. It’s going to be people, some Democrats, overwhelming Republicans, overwhelming independents.”
Reagan was brilliant at this. Reagan had been a FDR Democrat. He’d actually cut commercials for Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey in 1948, so he still had a residual understanding of the Democratic Party. And Reagan would always say, “To my fellow Republicans and to those independents and Democrats who share our values.” He was just very consistent.
When we signed the contract, it was not with conservatism nor with Republicans. It was a deal with America.
So I would start at the beginning. I would say that the first thing to do is to lay your campaign out for everybody in your district or everybody in your state, and not assume that anybody’s automatically against you.
The second thing I would recommend is that you want a large campaign and not a small one.
Let me give you an illustration. If the Democratic senator from Georgia has his way, he’s going to run a very narrow, small campaign attacking Herschel Walker. But the truth is that the Democratic senator has voted consistently with Joe Biden, and Walker’s job is to make clear that you’re talking now about the guy who brought you 9% inflation, the guy who brought you $5-a-gallon gasoline, the guy who brought you a rising murder rate.
So the more we nationally run on the big national issues, this is true in Arizona, it’s true in Pennsylvania, it’s true in Ohio, everywhere in the country.
If the choice isn’t between two personalities, but between two philosophies and two delivery systems, then I believe we will win this fall.
Bluey: Speaker Gingrich, one of the issues that the left is so passionate about, it’s a religion to them, is climate change. Why should Americans listen to the alarmist warnings almost every day?
Gingrich: The first thing I believe you should recognize is that alarmism was a key component of the left’s way of operating in the 1970s. We were supposed to be concerned about the population time bomb in the 1970s.
Paul Ehrlich was a Stanford tenured faculty member and wrote this book. For example, he predicted that Great Britain would starve by 2000. Totally false, but it doesn’t matter because they’re a religious cult. They’re not an intellectual cult.
Second, acknowledge that virtually everything Al Gore had warned us about in his movie was not true.
Let’s face it, I do believe climates are changing. The sun is the biggest factor in climate change, according to me. You have to adapt constantly, I believe.
People forget that the Gulf Stream was cut off for a time and Northern Europe went into an ice ages. Then the Gulf Stream began back up and Northern Europe began melting. These events took place long before the advent of internal combustion engines.
It’s important to understand the difference. Even if they were sincere, sometimes their solutions are stupid. The fact is, it turns out, and you’re seeing this now, Germany just announced they’re reopening 13 coal-fired electricity plants because in fact, they can’t generate enough electricity to offset Russian natural gas just using wind and solar.
California discovered this recently. Nobody had done this work on the left before. However, solar panels eventually wear down. When they wear out, they’re filled with toxic chemicals, and California’s suddenly discovering it has a huge problem on landfills where people are putting solar panels that have toxic chemicals leaching into the soil.
These solar panels are quite expensive to remove and to make safe. The solar power industry suddenly becomes a major source for pollution in a way nobody could have imagined. This also increases the cost of green energy in a way nobody could have ever imagined.
The other factor you’ve got to remember is a lot of what the climate change people do is yell “climate change,” but then they have a much different motive.
For example, if you’re going to use oil and gas, the most efficient, most environmentally safe oil and gas industry in the world by a huge margin is the United States. So if your only concern was the environment, and you knew that you had to have oil and gas and diesel fuel and heating oil, the place you’d most like to have producing it is the United States, but the left hates the American oil and gas industry.
I always tell people, Biden can go to Saudi Arabia, but he can’t go to Texas. He can talk to the people in Venezuela about oil, but he can’t talk to the people in Western Pennsylvania. He can talk to the Iranians, but he can’t talk to North Dakota.
I mean, you have got to ask yourself what it is about an American president who is consistently anti American in his energy policies.
They started to distribute oil from the National Petroleum Reserve. We just discovered that a million-barrels of it went towards a Chinese company linked to Hunter Biden. Now, how can it possibly be helpful to the American people or lower the price of gasoline in the United States if you’re shipping a million barrels of oil to China?
This is the type of stuff that makes you wonder about the underlying motivations. [are]The reason the left loathes its own country so much
Bluey: Well, Speaker Gingrich, all of those facts that you just gave us are why it’s so critically important to do things not only like purchase your book “Defeating Big Government Socialism,” but subscribe to your podcast and your newsletters and The Daily Signal, because too often, as you write about in “Defeating Big Government Socialism,” Hollywood, the media, the academy are all wrapped up in the left’s agenda as well. So you’re not likely to hear those facts about solar energy or what’s going on with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Gingrich: That’s exactly right. I mean, again, I want to commend Heritage because you have consistently provided the kind of research and the kind of fact-based analysis that allows us to really understand what’s going on and to be directly involved with what we need to do as a country. I think you’re one of the places that I really look for to have the kind of conversation we need to be having.
Bluey: President Biden has the worst poll numbers of any president so far. Even friendly media outlets are starting to question if he’s up for the job. What do you think he will accomplish in the second term? Is it possible that he may run again for office?
Gingrich: Look, I think he would love to run for office again. Let’s be clear. Biden is a nice, friendly guy who would have probably made a great county commissioner.
He was 29 years old when he won a U.S. Senate Seat. This was actually before he was legally allowed to serve. Between the election and his swearing in, he had a birthday. He was in a small, rural state where the incumbent U.S. Senator has many advantages for reelection.
He lost every attempt to run for president the first two times he tried. He had to quit the race for the presidency the first time he tried. It turned out that he had stolen Neil Kinnock from Britain Labour leader who had given a speech about growing-up in a Welsh coal-mining community.
Now, why Biden would’ve thought that it made any sense to compare Scranton to a Welsh coal-mining village is beyond my comprehension. It was obvious that the media had figured it out. He was ridiculed and had to quit.
He dropped out the second time because he couldn’t get any votes. Then finally, he got picked by Barack Obama, who thought he needed a foreign policy person since he clearly didn’t have any foreign policy experience and Biden had been chairman of Foreign Relations.
He was basically very lucky. Biden was the nominee when Bernie Sanders, who was clearly going be defeated in general election, was offered as an alternative. They quickly hid him.
It’s important to remember this. He won this campaign because no one knew what was going on. Had he had to actually campaign, had we understood how cognitively challenged he was and how incapable of coherence he was, I suspect he would’ve lost.
So in that setting, what you have is a guy who I don’t think has very many tools for recovery.
People ask me about Bill Clinton, who, after we won in ’94, switched and collaborated with us and got a lot of stuff done, made the left very mad at him.
It was the Clinton/Gingrich reforms, like the welfare reform, balancing the budget for four years, these things we had to do on a bipartisan basis because you had a Democrat president and a Republican Congress, and if we didn’t find a way to work together, nothing would’ve happened.
Well, I don’t think Biden has that capability. My guess is that he will not be able run for reelection. First of all, he’s already down. If he drops another 4 or 5 percentage points of approval, he will be at the level Harry Truman was at when he left the presidency, and that’s the lowest level achieved by any president in modern times.
Bluey: You mentioned earlier that in 1994 you led the Republican revolution to take control of the House for the first time in 40 years. According to polls, it appears that Republicans could be back in control next year. What should they do if they regain control of the country and take power, given the above scenario?
Gingrich: My hat is off to [House Minority Leader]Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy did a lot of very creative recruiting in 2020. We gained 15 seats when everyone thought we would lose 25 House seats. This was a remarkable feat. That’s a swing of 40 seats from where the experts were. McCarthy’s been out there campaigning, recruiting, raising money.
I fully believe that the Republicans will win and I believe they will have a commitment for America. It will be exactly like the contract. And I think that they’re going to keep it.
I think that they’re going to have positive ideas on energy, positive ideas on inflation, positive ideas on education, and they’re going to go right down the road, developing those kind of ideas and making them really work.
So, my expectation is that you’re going to see a very positive solution-oriented House Republican Party.
Bluey: Speaker Gingrich, I have a couple of just quick topics to cover before we wrap. This summer, the House’s January 6 Committee has attempted to paint a picture about President [Donald]Trump and what happened that day. I’ve listened to your podcast and heard interviews that you’ve done regarding this. I think it would be helpful for you to give your perspective to our listeners about what has just transpired and how they should think about this committee and the work that it’s done.
Gingrich: I believe that the January 6 Committee is a Stalinist show trial. They have over 25,000 documents and more than 1,000 videotaped interviews. They choose what they want to present to support their case. There is no alternative, cross-examination, or attorneys involved. And it’s a totally one-sided, in my judgment, total violation of the Bill of Rights, and total violation of the American spirit of fair play and fair inquiry.
I have a deep dislike for the January 6 Committee’s management. It is also a disgrace that it was run exactly as it should be. [Vladimir]Lenin and [Josef]The Soviet Union’s show trials were conducted by Stalin.
Bluey: In the wake of the Dobbs [v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization] decision, the left is, in many cases, in my opinion, overstepping with its attacks on the Supreme Court, not only as an institution, but some of the antics that are taking place at the justices’ homes and the attacks on them personally.
Do we expect to see more of this? Is there any hope that we can get to the point where the blockade around the court is perhaps removed and the justices don’t have to fear for their lives?
Gingrich: Oh, I think we’re in a very dire situation. You may recall that Lee Zeldin (the Republican candidate for governor) was attacked in New York recently by a man who wanted him to use a knife.
We are in a period where the left has gone crazy, where violence is a reasonable behavior, where the Justice Department is so corrupt, it will not—there is a federal law that says you cannot threaten federal judges. It’s a felony. It’s a one-year jail term. It’s not enforced by the FBI and Justice Department.
I think it’s a very dangerous situation just in terms of the spirit of a free society and I think that we have to really consider what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it in order to return to a decent norm, which we currently don’t have.
Bluey: Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, author of the new book “Defeating Big Government Socialism: Saving America’s Future,” Do you have any closing words about the book that you’d like to share with our listeners?
Gingrich: Sure. I would just say, if you want to know why big government socialism doesn’t work and if you want to know how to win the argument with your friends and your neighbors and help the country get rid of big government socialism, I think you’ll find the book a very, very useful handbook that enables you to really have a real impact on how your friends and neighbors feel about what’s gone wrong.
Bluey: Well, I encourage our listeners to check it out. It’s a fantastic piece of work, and we’re so grateful for the contributions you’ve made and the help you’ve provided, Speaker Gingrich. Thank you for being with us on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
Gingrich: Thank you. It was very enjoyable.
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