Burning Down the House, Julian E. Zelizer

 

Burning Down the House:  Newt Gingrich, the fall of a speaker, and the rise of the new Republican party by Julian E. Zelizer is a book that talks about how Newt Gingrich brought on Trump.  It is a concept I have asserted, so I thought it would be good to know it inside and out.

Started: 9/23/2020
Completed: 9/26/2020
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By:  The Washington Post

Review:

I really did not pay much attention to politics below the president until Gingrich became Speaker of the House.  I was very interested in Anderson and participated in an in class debate as Ford in elementary school, but I had only the most superficial understanding of the issues.  Listening to this retrospective on how Gingrich came to power was shocking.  His follow-on behavior seems almost predictable.  The coalescence of events that led to Gingrich's rise to power (including one-sided radio talk shows) were also factors that were below my level of perception at the time.  This book is an excellent review of Gingrich's all-out character assassination approach to opponents.

The gamesmanship that has overcome our political system had its beginnings in the events described in this book.  It is a Republican thing and the character assassination that the Republican party started has also been used by the Democrats, but the scale is always so much different.  The GOP is without shame.  The hypocrisy with which Gingrich deployed his smear campaign (having himself been guilty of some of the things that he accused the Speaker of doing) and the partisan nature of his attacks only on Democrats.