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The road to that society is clear-cut, straight and narrow: tear down the liberal welfare state, cut taxes, cut government spending, reduce entitlements, balance the budget, sign the Contract with America, dump Clinton and his liberal friends, give power to the states. Privatize, debureaucratize, downsize! And if America fails to heed his call? "The consequences will be incalculable," he writes. "The underclass of poverty and violence will continue to grow. Our economy will gradually fall farther and farther behind those of our best competitors. Our vision will blur and our civilization continue to lose its focus ..."
No one disputes that America is caught in a thicket of problems. And no one disputes that many of the solutions of the past have done little to solve them. But if we leap into Newt Gingrich's Conservative Opportunity Society, will we, collectively, be better off? Conservatives of various stripes and hues have opposed activist, progressive government for generations. Indeed, the minimalist and maximalist approaches even divided the Founding Fathers. Will less government, as envisioned by Gingrich, then mean more prosperity and well-being for all Americans?
If the Gingrich vision of a brighter future is worth the risk of a radically new direction in American governance, then his call for shared sacrifice is justified. For Newt Gingrich to build something lasting from his pastiche of ideas, the majority of the country must buy in. His vision must offer something better for most people, not just the 40% of the electorate who identify themselves as Republicans. Therefore, it is important to look not only at Gingrich's words. What has he wrought? What does his record portend?
Thus far, Gingrich and his hard-core freshman revolutionaries have failed to persuade working majorities in the Congress to buy more than a few items in the Contract. But they have made a start on the central question of slowing the growth of government. Still, the Republican budget doesn't really cut the size of the government as it exists today. It only reduces the share of gross domestic product that government would have taken if existing spending patterns had gone unchanged. The Republican proposal does promise a balanced budget in 2002, a signal accomplishment. Most important, the argument is settled about whether balance is desirable. Bill Clinton has signed on. But fiscal sanity is not the goal. Reducing the scope of the government is. So there is much more to do. How much, exactly? Newt Gingrich doesn't say. But his chief lieutenant, majority leader Dick Armey of Texas, says the proper goal is to cut the federal share of GDP in half, to 11% from its current share of 22%. That's revolutionary.
What is much more evident, however, is that the Republicans have taken care of their own and penalized those who tend to vote Democratic. Spending cuts in the G.O.P. budget fall most heavily on the poor. The litany of excisions has all the uplift of a requiem mass: reductions in welfare spending, ending welfare and Medicaid as absolute entitlements, reductions in the rate of increase in Medicaid assistance to the poor and in the rate of increase in Medicare, cuts in discretionary spending. All these affect those below the middle rung on the economic ladder.