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June 26, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
31:37
Newt Gingrich on The Lessons from the 1994 Republican Revolution | The TRUTH Podcast #35
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So I've often said that we're in a 1776 moment today.
We'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.
was done the other way.
In 1776, in this country, we said that it was we the people who decided how we settle our political differences.
Climate change, racial justice, doesn't matter.
We 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.
I think we live in one of those moments today.
I say it's a 1776 moment in this Who governs?
That's the question at issue.
And I think 2024 has an opportunity to be one of those revolutions as well, reviving the ideals of the American Revolution.
We've had certain moments in American history.
The 1980 Reagan Revolution revived some of those ideals from our nation's founding.
One 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.
He's a friend.
He's become a friend over the last couple of years who I'm excited to hear from.
In his latest book, March to the Majority, he talks about the real story of the 1994 Republican Revolution that he led.
And 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.
I'm excited to hear and read that book, hear about it from him today.
Newt, welcome to the podcast and I'm excited to dive into part of our history that we would do well to remember today.
You led it and I'm excited to hear from you on what you think the lessons are that relate to today.
First of all, it's great to be with you because we've done three podcasts on Newt's World with you.
You've always been an amazing guest.
You're one of the smartest people I know.
And 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
I 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.
We're using the examples of history to teach lessons that I think I think your campaign is an example of that.
There's a hunger for people who talk about the basics.
We were just looking at my own podcast, Reach, and our most popular podcast in the last three months was on the Federalist Papers.
You 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.
And March to the Majority was an effort to explain that.
When 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.
So when I set out as a brand new freshman, I was asked to chair a committee on thinking through how to become a majority.
And I remind people we failed in 1980, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, and 92. So we had 16 years of effort.
And it wasn't that we weren't trying.
The mountain was a lot bigger than we thought it was.
It was harder to climb.
And we had to keep learning new lessons.
When we won in 1994, we were standing on Ronald Reagan's shoulders.
Virtually everything we stood for in the contract with America came straight from Reagan.
For example, Reagan first campaigned in the fall of 1965 for governor, advocating welfare reform.
We passed welfare reform in 1996, 31 years later.
And it had an amazing impact just as Reagan had predicted.
Millions of people went to work.
Incomes went up.
Children left poverty.
It was the most successful program at raising children from poverty that we've ever had.
Wow.
And then we went on to, by the way, the left hated it.
The 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.
Because they want you to depend on government to provide you with what they deem the appropriate way forward.
Can I ask you a question on this?
Because I think what's so interesting about this 1994 revolution and your perspective on it is you are still...
Mercifully, alive, well, sharp today.
And so you can uniquely tie some of these lessons to today.
Did 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?
Well, you have to start with understanding that Joe Biden is about 70 miles to the left of Bill Clinton.
So that Biden is basically co-owned by the radical left.
And they hate all of this stuff.
The 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.
They got some limited, real but limited steps in that direction.
But they were hedged around with as many limitations as the left could think of, because the left didn't want to do anything.
I think there's still a great opportunity here for a bill that will provide for even more dramatic and bolder work requirements.
We just got a poll back in.
I run a project called the America's New Majority Project Which you can see at americasnewmajorityproject.com.
And for the last five years, starting in 2018, we've been doing a lot of in-depth surveys.
Just got another survey back in.
Well over 70% of the American people favor having some kind of a work requirement.
Yes.
There's a deep, instinctive American belief that, as Ronald Reagan used to say, work is the best social program.
And the left is just totally wrong about this issue.
So, 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?
At every step, the left has found ways to sort of nibble away at it.
So they passed various bills.
If you were under a certain age, it didn't apply to you.
If you were a single mother, it didn't apply to you.
Their most recent fight was if you had...
You've grown up and gone to some kind of program for foster care.
It didn't apply to you.
I mean, the left believes in the maximum number of victims.
So 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.
That's the heart of the left's approach.
And so you think that that was sort of chipped away at, you know, principally under Obama, I suppose that would have been the case?
Starting under Obama and then accelerated by Biden.
But 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.
And that if you're not a Harvard or Yale or Princeton graduate, you should not be expected to earn a living.
And so this was kind of in the 2008 to 2012 Obama term number one, perhaps, or 2008 to 2010 term.
Yeah, and then when the Democrats regained control, they kept chipping away at it.
You 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.
And then they come back next year, and they write three paragraphs.
And they do this year after year after year.
You know, the other great example, which we have at americasnewmajorityproject.com, is parental rights.
The country is overwhelmingly in favor of parents having the right to know what's happening to their children.
It's like an 84% issue.
And yet the 11% who are opposed, the other five are undecided.
The 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.
Because on the left, your children are wards of the state.
The state should control them.
The state should define them.
If the state tells them that they are transgender, they are.
If the state tells them that, you know, if you're white, that you're inherently a racist, then you are.
I 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.
Let 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.
Your 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.
So I'm so excited that your book is actually comes at a unique time.
But you were both Republican majority leaders in the House with a Democrat president.
Is 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?
Yeah, I think that's fair to say.
And 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.
If it is a last step, it's a terrible bill.
You know, when we entered office in January of 95, we didn't leap to four consecutive balanced budgets.
We didn't leap to the largest capital gains tax cut in history.
And we certainly didn't leap to welfare reform.
All those took a lot of work and a lot of effort.
I think you'll see the House Republicans move a bill on welfare reform.
They've already moved one on parental rights.
And 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.
So gradual changes is not always bad.
But your point was, I think, what do you think it was?
I 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?
Like, can you just be tangible for a second?
Basically, 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.
And more importantly, it said that welfare officers would become employment officers.
Up until then, the welfare workers thought their job was to maximize your ability to get money from the government.
After 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.
And 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.
And I was focused on taking the hardcore unemployed, retraining them, placing them a job, mentoring them and counseling them.
And it only got paid if they, in fact, had a job for six months or more.
So it was a very interesting achievement-oriented program.
To 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.
And the two social workers became independently wealthy because this was a private company and it was doing a great job.
And so the other social workers hated them.
Because they were out here making money, helping the poor learn how to be productive.
But I went up and visited with them, studied them, and that was a significant step towards where we ended up.
And 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.
Including how many?
88% of the people on welfare.
By when?
By the time you passed it?
By the time we passed it in 96. Wow.
So you won by way of debate.
A rare thing that ever happens these days.
No, no, no.
Listen, Margaret Thatcher once said, first you win the argument, then you win the vote.
And by the way, your candidacy is an example of that.
I mean, you're out here making a series of bold, different arguments.
Clearly 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.
It'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.
I mean, there's certainly awakening to the unique threats we face today.
It doesn't present itself in the same form.
But it's been done before.
It's been done before.
I think that's a profound insight.
The solutions are all the same.
The challenges may be different.
Yes.
Yes, that's how I feel.
Exactly.
It presents itself in a different form.
And 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.
At 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.
But 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.
It'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?
If 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.
But 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.
So 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.
There's also a continuity.
I tell everybody to go to YouTube and pull up Ronald Reagan's October 1964 televised speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater.
It's called A Time for Choosing.
It's pure Reagan.
I mean, it's everything, as he once said, he didn't change what he was saying, but the world came around.
And Reagan, of course, was largely quoting Lincoln and the Founding Fathers.
So the lineage of the things that work is sort of like you boil an egg by boiling an egg.
You don't have to reinvent it.
And by the way, putting an egg in the freezer makes it hard, but it's not boiled.
And so there are ground rules, there are practical things.
And 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.
They had studied a long time.
They were very practical politicians.
Every one of them understood winning elections.
At 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.
You were trying to find a way to protect us.
It's a very careful balance.
You want to protect us from foreign governments by having a strong enough government that it could survive.
But you want to protect us from our own government by having enough different checks and balances that you could never get to a dictatorship.
And 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.
And that's such a profound violation of the American tradition that it's really pretty scary.
I do think it's scary.
That's an example of the threats presenting themselves in new forms.
But the right answers have been with us since 1776. We just need to revive them.
Let me – you might have asked kind of on a personal note for you, right?
So in 1994, you delivered these major successes, many of which are signed into law in the couple of years subsequently.
When did you step down from your job?
When did you cease being Speaker of the House?
Well, in 1998, we didn't do as well in the election.
We won, but we did not win.
We lost a few seats when everybody thought we'd gained 15 or 20 seats.
And by November of 1998, I had been driving the party since the summer of 93. And candidly, people were just tired of me.
You know, I got up every day and said, we're going to gain another five yards.
And by the late fall of 1998, they were going, can we have somebody who will let us rest for a while?
And 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.
That they were determined to drive me out of office.
In 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.
So in a certain sense, there's a certain pride in that, right?
Were you annoyed by them or were you proud of them?
How did you feel if you had to parse it?
Both.
I mean, I was an annoyed person.
Look, in a way, they reminded me of me.
That's what I'm saying.
And I was really tired.
I mean, I didn't think I realized until probably the summer of 1999 just how exhausted I'd become.
So 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.
But there are times in life when you know that you need to switch.
You need to do something different.
And if it becomes really obvious, the correct thing is do it.
And 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.
I've never regretted it, and it gave me a chance to grow in other areas and to learn other things.
And I felt, frankly, having accomplished what was really a profound change in the power structure.
We had not been elected to a majority in 40 years.
We 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.
We kept the house for 12 years.
And what was really important was when we lost it in 2006, We had a whole lot of Republicans who knew you could regain it.
So you didn't have the defeatism and the apathy.
You had people who woke up every morning thinking, I want to be a chairman.
I want to win.
And the result was the Democrats only held it for four years.
We then won again in 10, kept it for eight years.
And at that point, the Democrats won, and we immediately had Kevin McCarthy and others saying, wait a second, I want to get power back.
So 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.
I mean, that was a legacy that would be there no matter what.
That's a powerful story.
I mean, I think that answered my question, which was...
Did you consider running in that 2000 presidential election?
No.
The time I might have considered was rather 1996 because the wave had been so big.
We picked up 54 seats.
People were so enthusiastic.
But 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.
And I felt that the great moment there, we'd look at it later.
I 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?
We probably spent about $14 million.
In the whole campaign?
Yes.
Romney spent $15 million in Florida alone.
So you spent $14 million in that whole campaign?
I think that's about right.
Don't hold me to that.
No, no, no.
I'm just saying ballpark.
And then Romney spent how much?
Well, he spent $15 million in Florida alone.
Okay.
Do you know how much he spent over?
I could probably look it up.
Yeah, I have no idea.
But he spent a lot.
I mean, look, we each had advantages.
I'm a really good debater.
He's really good at raising money.
And so you work to your strength.
Yeah.
That's funny.
So what was that inspiration for you to run in 2012?
And what were some of those lessons, actually?
I 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...
Hire consultants to run negative ads.
Second, I really felt that having somebody articulate enough to deal with Obama Would have really, I think, galvanized the country.
Obama was very vulnerable to people drawing a contrast because he'd run as a moderate.
He'd run as a guy who you could trust.
As 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.
And 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.
And Mitt's a very smart guy.
It's not that he's not smart.
But he never had developed a political philosophy, and he had never practiced debating.
I'd spent my whole career there.
Debating in the Congress and on television, what have you.
And so we were just – there's an amazing contrast in styles.
I remember I was in law school back then and we would watch those debates in the primary.
And I'm not saying this to flatter you or whatever, but I was a vehement fan and supporter because of what I saw on that debate stage.
There's a funny story where – You kind of made some jokes up there that were kind of quite funny at times, too.
I just remember laughing during those debates.
We were in law school at Yale.
This is where my wife and I met.
She was in med school.
I was in law school.
She lived diagonally across from me.
This is neither here nor there, but just a random story.
We're watching with a few friends in my apartment.
We're watching the debate, and you and Mitt are going at it.
And we were really laughing, like we were like kind of boisterously, kind of enjoying it, laughing and taking in.
And then we get a knock on the door and it's from the other guy who lives next door.
And he was just like, excuse me, like it's a little bit loud.
Do you mind turning it down?
And so the TV we thought was a little loud.
So we turned down the television and then like about this in the second half of the debate now, we get a knock on the door again.
And he says, excuse me, it's a little loud.
I said, what do you mean?
We turned down the debate.
So your voice, Mitt's voice, you know, are all down on the television.
He's like, no, it's not the TV. It's you guys.
And so, because our reactions to you were so loud.
So he said, I was kind of annoyed, but this guy has the gall.
So he was an undergrad.
He's actually from China.
And so we just invited him in.
We said, come on in and watch with us and check it out.
And so his English was sort of broken, but he was a smart guy.
Eric was his name.
And he came in and he watched the rest of the debate with us.
And you know what happened is we watched the rest of the debates that season with him.
He 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.
And this guy found his way there.
So anyway, funny story from those debates.
And you ended up having the impact, maybe not the impact you wanted to have, which is to win, which is what I was rooting for.
But nonetheless, you impacted people in ways you may not have known.
That's right.
No, I think ideas really matter.
They do.
And they're powerful.
They move people.
Yeah, they move people in their heart.
Yeah.
So 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...
We've got tons of money, but we don't have our tons of ideas.
I 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.
In fact, sometimes there may be moments where we're best off separating the two.
The idea of people over here, the visionary shouldn't be the executor.
The executor needs to get it done.
I think there are certain moments, though, that demand...
The person who leads actually be the visionary rather than the ideas guy who hands it over.
And I think that right now we live in one of those moments where we have this vacuum of national identity in our country.
A vacuum not just of ideas, but a vacuum of idealism itself.
A vacuum of what it means to be an American.
And 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.
This 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.
And that's, for me, what called me into this.
I think maybe very similar to the way you felt in 2012. Well, look, I think time's a great challenge.
Require big ideas and people capable of both articulating them and then of persevering and getting them done.
And 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.
Because they all three were idea people, but they were all three effective at executing.
And I think we need a cycle of that kind of knowing where we're going, but knowing how to get us there.
Brilliant.
Well, I'm looking forward to digging into that book.
I'll find some time during the campaign trail to do it in the buses of Iowa or New Hampshire.
And I thank you.
It's been a joy, you know, continuing our conversations over the last couple of years.
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