Contract Republican Rhetorical Style: An Environmental Example

In the prior essay, The Contract Republicans and the Tragedy of the Commons, I examined the substance of what Newt Gingrich said about the environment in To Renew America. His process--the choice and order of arguments and the vocabulary used to advance them--is equally interesting.

Gingrich's bag of tricks includes the following:

• Pre-emption. He announces that he is an environmentalist. "My interest in the environment goes back to childhood....I participated in the first Earth Day....I introduced students to the concept of ecosystems...." This is the same tactic used by Hitler when he called himself a Socialist.

• Demonization. His adversaries are not true environmentalists; they are left-wing Democrats with a hidden agenda. "They wanted to defeat Republicans and elect Democrats, no matter what the substance of the issues." By now, there is only one true environmentalist in the picture, and it is Mr. Gingrich.

• Combining complacency with hopelessness. Having claimed the mantle of environmentalist, and stripped it from the shoulders of his adversaries, Mr. Gingrich next tells us that nothing can be done. Every prior environmental program represented a waste of effort. "[T]he asbestos program probably wasted $5 billion without significantly inmproving public health....The Superfund program spent nearly 40 percent of its billions on lawyers and bureaucrats....Many environmental regulations hatched in Washington put a ridiculous burden on small communities."

• Avoidance. Mr. Gingrich, even while praising clean air and water as environmental benefits, never acknowledges that government had anything to do with obtaining these. Similarly, he skirts making any substantive recommendations to better the situation; instead, he recommends placebos: captive breeding instead of "blocking all change in the environment"; "encouraging pro-environmental technologies" instead of "clumsy...cleanup-type approaches." Of course, the Contract contained no proposals in support of the environment, but several major attacks on it, including the takings and unfunded mandate bills. This Congress has unleashed an unprecedented number of environmentally destructive measures, including takings, unfunded mandates, a moratorium on EPA veto of wetlands projects, indiscriminate logging on public lands, and the opening of public parks to other types of exploitation.

• Non-sequiturs. Mr. Gingrich is fond of diverting attention away from substantive issues by telling fuzzy anecdotes, like that of his constituent, Linda, who "has a good chance of doing well financially" by converting Coke bottles to T-shirts.

• Speaking in code. Mr. Gingrich, and conservative Republicans in general, favor certain code phrases which express radical ideas. Their supporters understand the code, while, to everyone else, the language sounds quite innocuous. For example, Gingrich says, "We should also recognize that there are a lot of natural rhythms (including weather and geologic rhythms of which we may not be aware) that guarantee the planet will be changing all the time." Translation: global warming is a natural phenomenon, and the release of chemicals into the atmosphere has nothing to do with it. Similarly, the description of the takings bill in the Contract with America is quite bland: The act "allows private property owners to receive compensation.... from the federal government for any reduction in the value of their property." Nowhere does the Contract indicate that the government may end up compensating a landowner, for example, for his inability to use the land as a toxic waste dump.

  Although politicians in general use rhetorical tricks, those who do not represent mainstream views are more prone to do so. Conservative Republicans have always spoken in code on issues such as race--where for thirty years they have been unable to admit publicly their own racism--the environment and gun control, where their agenda is to roll back measures that have proved fairly popular with the public. Naturally, when you are about to do something vicious and unpopular, you cannot speak of it openly, in terms everyone can understand.