In this episode, Newt Gingrich talks about his new book, March to the Majority, and the lessons he learned from the 1994 Republican Revolution, and how they can apply them to the current political and economic problems we re all facing. He also discusses why he s running for president in 2024, and why he thinks it s a good time to be a presidential candidate in the country we ve all grown up in. He also talks about the lessons we can learn from Ronald Reagan s presidency and the impact it had on our nation s founding ideals, and what they can teach us about how we should be thinking about the challenges we re facing today. And he reminds us that we re not living in a perfect world, but in a world where we re living in moments where we can try to live up to the ideals of our founding. Thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast, and thanks for supporting the podcast and our efforts to make a difference in the world. Tweet Me! with your thoughts, opinions, or suggestions for future episodes. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - Who governs? 2:30 - What are the lessons from Reagan's presidency? 3:15 - How Reagan stood up to President Bill Clinton? 4:20 - What lessons can we learn from Reagan? 5:40 - What would you tell a younger generation? 6:00 7:10 - What should we do in 2020? 8:10 9:00 What are some of the lessons Reagan taught us? 11: How Reagan had an amazing impact on the country? 12: What was the most successful president? 13:20 14: Why you should be an independent? 15:00 Why you need to earn your own way? 16: What are you going to work for yourself? 17:00 How do you have an independent government? 18:00 You should work for it? 19:00 Do you want to get up up in the morning? 21: What does the left do up? 22: What do you believe in the work ethic? 27:00 Does the left? 26:00 Can you get up by the left by the right? 29:30 What does it matter? 30: What should you work up to work up the morning after you should go up the way that you should get up the bed? 31:00 Is it a problem?
Transcript
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00:00:02.000So I've often said that we're in a 1776 moment today.
00:00:29.000We've had an American Revolution 250 years ago fought to restore certain ideals in this country that were different from the way Old World Europe had lived and governed for most of human history.
00:00:55.000We the people settle those differences through our constitutional republic and our form of governance in this country, which is enshrined in the constitution, the strongest guarantors of freedoms in human history.
00:01:07.000I think we live in one of those moments today.
00:01:09.000I say it's a 1776 moment in this Who governs?
00:01:14.000And I think 2024 has an opportunity to be one of those revolutions as well, reviving the ideals of the American Revolution.
00:01:23.000We've had certain moments in American history.
00:01:25.000The 1980 Reagan Revolution revived some of those ideals from our nation's founding.
00:01:30.000One of those moments, though, that we haven't talked about in a long time is a revolution led by a man who I'm going to be talking to on today's episode of the podcast, and I'm excited to.
00:01:42.000He's become a friend over the last couple of years who I'm excited to hear from.
00:01:46.000In his latest book, March to the Majority, he talks about the real story of the 1994 Republican Revolution that he led.
00:01:58.000And as we think about the American Revolution, the revolution that's coming in 2024, that there was no better person to Walk us through the history of the 1994 revolution and the man himself, Newt Gingrich, who wrote his latest book, Laying This Out.
00:02:13.000I'm excited to hear and read that book, hear about it from him today.
00:02:17.000Newt, welcome to the podcast and I'm excited to dive into part of our history that we would do well to remember today.
00:02:24.000You led it and I'm excited to hear from you on what you think the lessons are that relate to today.
00:02:31.000First of all, it's great to be with you because we've done three podcasts on Newt's World with you.
00:02:41.000You're one of the smartest people I know.
00:02:43.000And I think both your profound understanding of what's going on in America right now and your sheer knowledge of the system that we're caught up in, both political and economic, makes you one of the most interesting people in the 2024 campaign. makes you one of the most interesting people in the
00:03:02.000I wrote March to the Majority in part because I think we're at a moment when the lessons we learned in a 16-year project to elect a majority and then four years of negotiating with President Bill Clinton, I think those lessons actually apply directly to today and, And in that sense, March to the Majority is more of a playbook for the present than a history book.
00:03:31.000We're using the examples of history to teach lessons that I think I think your campaign is an example of that.
00:03:40.000There's a hunger for people who talk about the basics.
00:03:45.000We were just looking at my own podcast, Reach, and our most popular podcast in the last three months was on the Federalist Papers.
00:03:55.000You wouldn't think of that as a hot selling topic, but I think out there, there are millions of Americans who know that things are not going well, that we have to have some real change.
00:04:07.000And March to the Majority was an effort to explain that.
00:04:11.000When I got elected, I ran twice and lost in 1974 and 76. I finally won in 1978. And when I won, we had been, the Republicans in the House, had been in the minority for 24 years.
00:04:28.000So when I set out as a brand new freshman, I was asked to chair a committee on thinking through how to become a majority.
00:04:38.000And I remind people we failed in 1980, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, and 92. So we had 16 years of effort.
00:05:40.000And then we went on to, by the way, the left hated it.
00:05:43.000The left, for some reason, rejects the work ethic and wants dependency and rejects the idea that you should get up in the morning and go earn your own independent way forward.
00:05:54.000Because they want you to depend on government to provide you with what they deem the appropriate way forward.
00:06:16.000And so you can uniquely tie some of these lessons to today.
00:06:20.000Did those work requirements, like how did that in the so-called work fair in 1996, how did that compare to some of the debates in the most recent bill that was passed as part of the debt ceiling negotiation and the work requirements that were or weren't added in this latest legislation?
00:06:41.000Well, you have to start with understanding that Joe Biden is about 70 miles to the left of Bill Clinton.
00:06:49.000So that Biden is basically co-owned by the radical left.
00:06:57.000The House Republicans, led by Speaker McCarthy, made some kind of work requirement, one of the central provisions of Of getting to an agreement on the debt ceiling.
00:07:07.000They got some limited, real but limited steps in that direction.
00:07:12.000But they were hedged around with as many limitations as the left could think of, because the left didn't want to do anything.
00:07:21.000I think there's still a great opportunity here for a bill that will provide for even more dramatic and bolder work requirements.
00:07:53.000There's a deep, instinctive American belief that, as Ronald Reagan used to say, work is the best social program.
00:08:00.000And the left is just totally wrong about this issue.
00:08:04.000So, would you say that some of the ones you passed in 1996, did those expire or what changed about that in terms of how did those fall away?
00:08:16.000At every step, the left has found ways to sort of nibble away at it.
00:08:48.000I mean, the left believes in the maximum number of victims.
00:08:52.000So tell me in what way you're a victim and I'll tell you why we shouldn't do anything to make you actually be an independent citizen.
00:08:59.000That's the heart of the left's approach.
00:09:02.000And so you think that that was sort of chipped away at, you know, principally under Obama, I suppose that would have been the case?
00:09:08.000Starting under Obama and then accelerated by Biden.
00:09:12.000But it's been a – when the Democrats had the House, the Senate and the President, they did everything they could to roll back welfare reform because it is – Such a fundamental violation of their belief in a government which controls you and takes care of you.
00:09:29.000And that if you're not a Harvard or Yale or Princeton graduate, you should not be expected to earn a living.
00:09:36.000And so this was kind of in the 2008 to 2012 Obama term number one, perhaps, or 2008 to 2010 term.
00:09:44.000Yeah, and then when the Democrats regained control, they kept chipping away at it.
00:09:50.000You know, they have great staff, and they're brilliant at writing three paragraphs that move them a half inch towards where they want to get.
00:09:59.000And then they come back next year, and they write three paragraphs.
00:10:02.000And they do this year after year after year.
00:10:04.000You know, the other great example, which we have at americasnewmajorityproject.com, is parental rights.
00:10:12.000The country is overwhelmingly in favor of parents having the right to know what's happening to their children.
00:10:22.000And yet the 11% who are opposed, the other five are undecided.
00:10:26.000The 11% who are opposed include the teachers' unions, and they fight bitterly In fact, you may have seen the other week there was actually a physical fight between Antifa and a group of Armenian parents in California over whether or not they should have access to knowing what's happening with their children.
00:10:45.000Because on the left, your children are wards of the state.
00:10:53.000If the state tells them that they are transgender, they are.
00:10:56.000If the state tells them that, you know, if you're white, that you're inherently a racist, then you are.
00:11:06.000I mean, this is literally – we're living through in a very weird way exactly what George Orwell wrote about in 1984. He was in many ways prescient about America actually or where we are today.
00:11:23.000Let me just – just to draw from a positive lesson and this is to actually take nothing away from Kevin McCarthy but you and him were in the same position leading a Republican – It's what you talk about in your book.
00:11:36.000Your book is all about laying this out, which I love is now that we have this space of almost 30 years since you led that revolution, you can kind of view it more objectively where people don't have to see it through the partisan lenses that they saw it at the time.
00:11:49.000So I'm so excited that your book is actually comes at a unique time.
00:11:54.000But you were both Republican majority leaders in the House with a Democrat president.
00:11:59.000Is it fair to say that the workfare requirements that you got across the line in 96 had more robust work requirements than what was in the most recent deal that was reached in the legislation that Biden signed?
00:12:18.000And the point I make to people about the debt ceiling bill is that if it's a first step, then it's worth signing and it's worth fighting for.
00:12:28.000If it is a last step, it's a terrible bill.
00:12:31.000You know, when we entered office in January of 95, we didn't leap to four consecutive balanced budgets.
00:12:37.000We didn't leap to the largest capital gains tax cut in history.
00:12:40.000And we certainly didn't leap to welfare reform.
00:12:43.000All those took a lot of work and a lot of effort.
00:12:45.000I think you'll see the House Republicans move a bill on welfare reform.
00:12:50.000They've already moved one on parental rights.
00:12:52.000And I think you'll see them in the next week or so bringing out a budget proposal, which is very bold and which moves us back towards a balanced budget, which the only four consecutive balanced budgets in your lifetime we did in the Congress when I was speaker.
00:13:12.000But your point was, I think, what do you think it was?
00:13:14.000I mean, do you think the culture, what I'm wondering is that the culture of the Democratic Party itself has changed, where the kinds of changes that you implemented, that Clinton signed, like, what were some of those work requirements?
00:13:25.000Like, can you just be tangible for a second?
00:13:27.000Basically, what it said was that as long as you did not have very, very young children, there was an expectation you would go to work.
00:13:35.000And more importantly, it said that welfare officers would become employment officers.
00:13:41.000Up until then, the welfare workers thought their job was to maximize your ability to get money from the government.
00:13:48.000After we passed our bill in 1996, they were instructed in every state in the country that their job was to help you go find a job.
00:13:56.000And we had been very deeply affected by a program in New York called America Works, which ironically Mario Cuomo had helped start and which was launched by two former social workers.
00:14:10.000And I was focused on taking the hardcore unemployed, retraining them, placing them a job, mentoring them and counseling them.
00:14:19.000And it only got paid if they, in fact, had a job for six months or more.
00:14:24.000So it was a very interesting achievement-oriented program.
00:14:30.000To tell you again, the liberal model, they capped the number of people that they could deal with annually because they didn't want to take too many people off welfare.
00:14:39.000And the two social workers became independently wealthy because this was a private company and it was doing a great job.
00:14:46.000And so the other social workers hated them.
00:14:49.000Because they were out here making money, helping the poor learn how to be productive.
00:14:53.000But I went up and visited with them, studied them, and that was a significant step towards where we ended up.
00:15:00.000And I think it's fair to say that we need another national debate on Like the one we had in the period 93, 94 up through 96. Because by the time we were done debating it, something like 92% of the country favored welfare reform, including 88% of the people on welfare.
00:15:38.000Listen, Margaret Thatcher once said, first you win the argument, then you win the vote.
00:15:46.000And by the way, your candidacy is an example of that.
00:15:48.000I mean, you're out here making a series of bold, different arguments.
00:15:53.000Clearly a step towards saying, you know, if you agree with all this and you are drawing a different vision of where America is and where America needs to go.
00:16:03.000It's exciting to me because when I – it's almost liberating, Newt, when I see – when I study Reagan, when I study what you did in the early 90s, early to mid-90s, it feels liberating because it doesn't feel like you have to – there's not a ton we have to reinvent.
00:16:20.000I mean, there's certainly awakening to the unique threats we face today.
00:16:25.000It doesn't present itself in the same form.
00:16:40.000It presents itself in a different form.
00:16:42.000And so I think that you're an inspiration in that sense to me because it takes a little bit of the burden off where you don't have to feel like you have to come up.
00:16:50.000At times I feel like this, where you have to come up with the solution de novo from scratch again in a vacuum, that's a big burden.
00:16:58.000But if you're able to just study the history, it's why I'm glad you're writing books and putting out, still churning out books like you are.
00:17:04.000It's good because it actually, in the further back you go, I feel like the less distorted the modern readership has to be because there's a proximity bias, right?
00:17:17.000If we're talking about something that happened under Donald Trump, no, no, we can't touch that right now because people couldn't evaluate that argument on its merits because of the proximity of it.
00:17:26.000But if you're talking now about something that you delivered in the 90s, you know, many of the people who are pushing back on that today weren't even born back then.
00:17:34.000So it seems like we have like a certain objectivity that comes from not having an attachment of vitriol to the person you're talking about.
00:18:21.000And by the way, putting an egg in the freezer makes it hard, but it's not boiled.
00:18:25.000And so there are ground rules, there are practical things.
00:18:28.000And we all stand on the shoulders of the founding fathers who may have been as wise a group of secular leaders as we've ever had in the human race.
00:18:43.000Every one of them understood winning elections.
00:18:45.000At the same time, they understood that you had to design a government for human beings, that you weren't designing it for angels and you weren't designing it for some abstract theory.
00:18:56.000You were trying to find a way to protect us.
00:19:01.000You want to protect us from foreign governments by having a strong enough government that it could survive.
00:19:07.000But you want to protect us from our own government by having enough different checks and balances that you could never get to a dictatorship.
00:19:16.000And part of what's truly frightening about what we're living through right now is the degree to which the left is moving towards a dictatorship, at least a dictatorship of ideas, and a willingness to lock up anyone who disagrees with them.
00:19:31.000And that's such a profound violation of the American tradition that it's really pretty scary.
00:20:12.000We lost a few seats when everybody thought we'd gained 15 or 20 seats.
00:20:17.000And by November of 1998, I had been driving the party since the summer of 93. And candidly, people were just tired of me.
00:20:28.000You know, I got up every day and said, we're going to gain another five yards.
00:20:33.000And by the late fall of 1998, they were going, can we have somebody who will let us rest for a while?
00:20:41.000And I had a problem very similar to McCarthy in that there were about 15 or 18 members who were very hardcore who said flatly, they wouldn't vote for me even if I was nominated.
00:20:54.000That they were determined to drive me out of office.
00:20:57.000In a certain way, it's a mark of pride that they're actually taking the principles that you started with in 1993 and they almost want to be the standard bearer of the principles even more than they felt you were.
00:21:11.000So in a certain sense, there's a certain pride in that, right?
00:21:13.000Were you annoyed by them or were you proud of them?
00:21:15.000How did you feel if you had to parse it?
00:21:46.000I mean, I didn't think I realized until probably the summer of 1999 just how exhausted I'd become.
00:21:53.000So in a way, you know, sometimes you must have had this experience once or twice, although you're so dramatically younger than me that you haven't had quite all the, you haven't gotten quite this tired.
00:22:03.000But there are times in life when you know that you need to switch.
00:22:09.000And if it becomes really obvious, the correct thing is do it.
00:22:13.000And so I was at a point in my life where I really felt that the best thing I could do was go and find new projects and do new things.
00:22:24.000I've never regretted it, and it gave me a chance to grow in other areas and to learn other things.
00:22:31.000And I felt, frankly, having accomplished what was really a profound change in the power structure.
00:22:37.000We had not been elected to a majority in 40 years.
00:22:41.000We had not been re-elected since 1928. And so when I left, we not only had balanced the budget for four years, but we had shifted the balance of power in Washington decisively.
00:23:11.000And the result was the Democrats only held it for four years.
00:23:15.000We then won again in 10, kept it for eight years.
00:23:18.000And at that point, the Democrats won, and we immediately had Kevin McCarthy and others saying, wait a second, I want to get power back.
00:23:25.000So we had changed decisively the psychology of power in Washington by winning in 94 and then winning re-election in 96. And that, frankly, left me feeling pretty good.
00:23:38.000I mean, that was a legacy that would be there no matter what.
00:24:05.000But I looked at it and I thought, you know, I can either be an effective speaker or I can run for president, but I couldn't possibly do both.
00:24:13.000And I felt that the great moment there, we'd look at it later.
00:24:16.000I did finally run, and Clist and I decided to run in 2012. And we had a pretty good campaign for the amount of money we had, but Romney taught us- How much money did you have, if you don't mind me asking?
00:25:06.000So what was that inspiration for you to run in 2012?
00:25:09.000And what were some of those lessons, actually?
00:25:11.000I thought there was a huge vacuum of ideas that the Republican Party had decayed back into being basically a non-idea machine to raise money and go golfing and...
00:25:29.000Second, I really felt that having somebody articulate enough to deal with Obama Would have really, I think, galvanized the country.
00:25:42.000Obama was very vulnerable to people drawing a contrast because he'd run as a moderate.
00:25:48.000He'd run as a guy who you could trust.
00:25:51.000As my younger daughter, Jackie Cushman, who's really smart about this stuff, said one day, you know, that he ran promising to change and then you realize he actually wanted to change you, not change Washington.
00:26:06.000And I think that that had sunk in, and there was an opportunity in 12, but it required somebody who was articulate and who valued ideas.
00:28:22.000And he came in and he watched the rest of the debate with us.
00:28:27.000And you know what happened is we watched the rest of the debates that season with him.
00:28:33.000He became an ardent, committed conservative, and he's a fan of yours, but you convinced this exchange student from China, or not exchange student, but sort of foreign student from China who was a Yale undergrad, he was a junior, into his, I get messages from him, emails from time to time now, and he's like, I mean, it's hard to get to the right of me, but he's now in his years since then found, you don't have to move the bookcase over on the wall to get to the right of me.
00:29:21.000So it's one reason I'm glad you're running, because I think everybody who can bring new ideas, new insights, That's what the country...
00:29:30.000We've got tons of money, but we don't have our tons of ideas.
00:29:34.000I do think we live in these moments, and maybe this is sort of self-serving of me to say, but what you say speaks to me, where there are moments where we can take an executor of other people's ideas.
00:29:45.000In fact, sometimes there may be moments where we're best off separating the two.
00:29:48.000The idea of people over here, the visionary shouldn't be the executor.
00:29:54.000I think there are certain moments, though, that demand...
00:29:58.000The person who leads actually be the visionary rather than the ideas guy who hands it over.
00:30:07.000And I think that right now we live in one of those moments where we have this vacuum of national identity in our country.
00:30:13.000A vacuum not just of ideas, but a vacuum of idealism itself.
00:30:17.000A vacuum of what it means to be an American.
00:30:21.000And part of what calls me into this is that I think that we do live in one of those moments where It's going to take whoever's implementing those ideas to understand bone deep in their own conviction.
00:30:35.000This is actually what it means to be an American, to cut through all of the other obstacles that might otherwise show up in the way of the person who's merely implementing them.
00:30:45.000And that's, for me, what called me into this.
00:30:47.000I think maybe very similar to the way you felt in 2012. Well, look, I think time's a great challenge.
00:30:54.000Require big ideas and people capable of both articulating them and then of persevering and getting them done.
00:31:03.000And I think that that's why Thatcher and Reagan and Pope John Paul II were so astonishing to have all three of them at the same time.
00:31:11.000Because they all three were idea people, but they were all three effective at executing.
00:31:16.000And I think we need a cycle of that kind of knowing where we're going, but knowing how to get us there.