This Week In Irony: Gingrich goes "anti-establishment"

Generic Script

In an interview on “CBS this Morning” earlier this week, Gingrich blamed his unpopularity on “the establishment” (whoever they are). According to Gingrich, his opponents often attack him because “they’re part of the establishment…They'll say and do virtually anything to keep the system alive, and I think they recognize that I'm a genuine outsider…I have none of the establishment ties.”

Apparently, you don't develop any establishment ties from being in Congress for two decades (four years of which were spent as the Speaker of the House and thus second in the presidential line of succession). Neither does offering consulting services to Freddie Mac—a relationship that lasted eight years and brought $1.6 million to The Gingrich Group. Building what The Washington Post called “an empire of companies and nonprofits that took in about $150 million over the past decade” certainly doesn’t make you an insider, either.

Sarcasm aside, Gingrich’s rhetoric amounts to an establishment candidate getting away with packaging himself as a grassroots, anti-establishment, average-Joe type of guy. Regardless of whether or not one thinks that Gingrich did a good job in Congress and supplied useful advice to Freddie Mac, it is still the case that he is about as “establishment” as they come. Admittedly, the meaning of “anti-establishment” can be—and often is—stretched. But even if you, say, lived on a permanent moon base your whole life, a quick look at the dictionary and Gingrich’s Wikipedia page would make it readily apparent that Newt does not fit the bill.

The anti-establishment rhetoric has proven to be an extremely powerful political tool in the past few years. In 2008, it worked for then-candidate Barack Obama, and even for Sarah Palin (at least for a while). It helped a number of tea party candidates get elected in the 2010 midterm elections. As many tea party candidates discovered, labeling yourself anti-establishment is particularly successful because you can then dismiss negative publicity as an unfair attack engineered by The Establishment.

Gingrich’s move to employ this kind of rhetoric will, in my opinion, ultimately demean the argument’s power. By calling himself “anti-establishment,” Gingrich ironically stretches the definition so far that it becomes meaningless.