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Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party
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91/100Author:
Julian E. Zelizer
Publisher:
Penguin Press
Date:
July 7, 2020
The story of how Newt Gingrich and his allies tainted American politics, launching an enduring era of brutal partisan warfare.
What The Reviewers Say
As Julian Zelizer shows in his briskly entertaining (if politically dispiriting) new book, Burning Down the House, an ambitious and impatient Republican from Georgia by the name of Newton Leroy Gingrich long ago figured out that corruption was a useful charge for a young upstart to deploy against establishment politicians — a way of turning their vaunted experience against them.
Although Burning Down the House is not the first history to cast Gingrich as lead assassin in the murder of bipartisanship and effective governance, it is an insightful if deeply unflattering portrait of Gingrich himself, highlighting his signature traits of arrogance, ferocity, amorality and shoulder-shrugging indifference to truth. It’s not surprising that Gingrich declined the author’s interview request. And the book’s narrow time frame, which stops well short of Gingrich’s leading the House Republicans to their 1994 electoral triumph and his subsequent elevation as speaker, supplies a detailed and nuanced historical context that makes Gingrich’s actions more understandable if not excusable.
... stops short of the 1994 Gingrich Revolution when Republicans overwhelmingly won the midterms, and also does not analyze how his time as speaker changed the norms of American politics. But by plunging into this early crusade against Wright, Zelizer unfurls how the congressman managed to gain enough power to claim the speakership for himself only five years later.
Zelizer is not the first to suggest that Gingrich 'broke politics,' as a recent article in the Atlantic put it, but his book provides an engaging, unsettling and, alas, timely look at the torch that Gingrich took to our system of self-government.
