HERE'S THE WAY THE WORLD USED TO WORK:
Liberals dreamed of making things better. They believed human beings, if not perfectible, were at least subject to improvement. History moved positively, onward and upward. The role of government was to engineer progress by spending public money for the common good. Social problems like poverty could be cured through government action.
Conservatives, on the other hand, thought the liberals were hopeless romantics. Conservatives believed human beings were fundamentally flawed. Public spending aimed at correcting these flaws was a waste of money. The best anyone could hope for was that the human condition would get no worse. Conservatives mocked liberals for not recognizing the evil inherent in our souls.
Here's the way the world works today:
Conservatives believe the human condition should get a lot better once the natural good of the populace is unfettered from the dead hand of Big Government. Even poverty can be cured if only government stops spending money on the underclass. Human beings aren't evil; the government is.
Liberals, on the other hand, believe conservatives are dangerous romantics. Liberals have been discouraged by the failure of many of their do-good programs, and they don't believe any of the conservative solutions will work either. Liberals want to keep things as they are, and just tinker at the margins--maybe. And after episodes like Susan Smith's drowning of her children, and the ripping of a child from his murdered mother's womb in Chicago, they are ready to believe some souls are inherently evil and beyond redemption.
More than any other single person, Newt Gingrich has brought about this historic reversal of roles. In the process, he has just about finished off the political consensus initiated 60 years ago by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Gingrich's success was fed by the smoldering anger of a nation suffering from stagnant wages, chronic overspending by the Federal Government, the failure of the public schools, the decline of public decency and the stubborn inability of the American underclass to rise out of poverty. He bundled up these anxieties cleverly, even brilliantly, and set them ablaze. "I want to encourage you to be a little anxious," he writes in his book To Renew America, "and then I want to encourage you to turn that anxiety into energy."
Gingrich has coupled his own campaign for power with the recognition that conservative skepticism was not a sufficiently upbeat message. In chronically optimistic America, he needed something more upon which to build a mass movement. In place of the old conservative caution, Gingrich, one of the most absorbent if not always discriminating minds in national politics, has concocted a stew of beliefs that blends the sunny economics of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, the stern moralism of the Christian right and enough giddy futurism either to excite or to frighten his followers. He dubbed himself a "conservative revolutionary," one of the greatest political oxymorons ever invented. He saw that it simply wouldn't do to carp about the Great Society. He invented something to replace it, something, he says, that is better: the Conservative Opportunity Society.