GOOD NEWT, BAD NEWT

By John F. Stacks

HERE'S THE WAY THE WORLD USED TO WORK:

Liberals dreamed of making things better. They believed human beings, if not perfectible, were at least subject to improvement. History moved positively, onward and upward. The role of government was to engineer progress by spending public money for the common good. Social problems like poverty could be cured through government action.

Conservatives, on the other hand, thought the liberals were hopeless romantics. Conservatives believed human beings were fundamentally flawed. Public spending aimed at correcting these flaws was a waste of money. The best anyone could hope for was that the human condition would get no worse. Conservatives mocked liberals for not recognizing the evil inherent in our souls.

Here's the way the world works today:

Conservatives believe the human condition should get a lot better once the natural good of the populace is unfettered from the dead hand of Big Government. Even poverty can be cured if only government stops spending money on the underclass. Human beings aren't evil; the government is.

Liberals, on the other hand, believe conservatives are dangerous romantics. Liberals have been discouraged by the failure of many of their do-good programs, and they don't believe any of the conservative solutions will work either. Liberals want to keep things as they are, and just tinker at the margins--maybe. And after episodes like Susan Smith's drowning of her children, and the ripping of a child from his murdered mother's womb in Chicago, they are ready to believe some souls are inherently evil and beyond redemption.

More than any other single person, Newt Gingrich has brought about this historic reversal of roles. In the process, he has just about finished off the political consensus initiated 60 years ago by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Gingrich's success was fed by the smoldering anger of a nation suffering from stagnant wages, chronic overspending by the Federal Government, the failure of the public schools, the decline of public decency and the stubborn inability of the American underclass to rise out of poverty. He bundled up these anxieties cleverly, even brilliantly, and set them ablaze. "I want to encourage you to be a little anxious," he writes in his book To Renew America, "and then I want to encourage you to turn that anxiety into energy."

Gingrich has coupled his own campaign for power with the recognition that conservative skepticism was not a sufficiently upbeat message. In chronically optimistic America, he needed something more upon which to build a mass movement. In place of the old conservative caution, Gingrich, one of the most absorbent if not always discriminating minds in national politics, has concocted a stew of beliefs that blends the sunny economics of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, the stern moralism of the Christian right and enough giddy futurism either to excite or to frighten his followers. He dubbed himself a "conservative revolutionary," one of the greatest political oxymorons ever invented. He saw that it simply wouldn't do to carp about the Great Society. He invented something to replace it, something, he says, that is better: the Conservative Opportunity Society.

The road to that society is clear-cut, straight and narrow: tear down the liberal welfare state, cut taxes, cut government spending, reduce entitlements, balance the budget, sign the Contract with America, dump Clinton and his liberal friends, give power to the states. Privatize, debureaucratize, downsize! And if America fails to heed his call? "The consequences will be incalculable," he writes. "The underclass of poverty and violence will continue to grow. Our economy will gradually fall farther and farther behind those of our best competitors. Our vision will blur and our civilization continue to lose its focus ..."

No one disputes that America is caught in a thicket of problems. And no one disputes that many of the solutions of the past have done little to solve them. But if we leap into Newt Gingrich's Conservative Opportunity Society, will we, collectively, be better off? Conservatives of various stripes and hues have opposed activist, progressive government for generations. Indeed, the minimalist and maximalist approaches even divided the Founding Fathers. Will less government, as envisioned by Gingrich, then mean more prosperity and well-being for all Americans?

If the Gingrich vision of a brighter future is worth the risk of a radically new direction in American governance, then his call for shared sacrifice is justified. For Newt Gingrich to build something lasting from his pastiche of ideas, the majority of the country must buy in. His vision must offer something better for most people, not just the 40% of the electorate who identify themselves as Republicans. Therefore, it is important to look not only at Gingrich's words. What has he wrought? What does his record portend?

Thus far, Gingrich and his hard-core freshman revolutionaries have failed to persuade working majorities in the Congress to buy more than a few items in the Contract. But they have made a start on the central question of slowing the growth of government. Still, the Republican budget doesn't really cut the size of the government as it exists today. It only reduces the share of gross domestic product that government would have taken if existing spending patterns had gone unchanged. The Republican proposal does promise a balanced budget in 2002, a signal accomplishment. Most important, the argument is settled about whether balance is desirable. Bill Clinton has signed on. But fiscal sanity is not the goal. Reducing the scope of the government is. So there is much more to do. How much, exactly? Newt Gingrich doesn't say. But his chief lieutenant, majority leader Dick Armey of Texas, says the proper goal is to cut the federal share of GDP in half, to 11% from its current share of 22%. That's revolutionary.

What is much more evident, however, is that the Republicans have taken care of their own and penalized those who tend to vote Democratic. Spending cuts in the G.O.P. budget fall most heavily on the poor. The litany of excisions has all the uplift of a requiem mass: reductions in welfare spending, ending welfare and Medicaid as absolute entitlements, reductions in the rate of increase in Medicaid assistance to the poor and in the rate of increase in Medicare, cuts in discretionary spending. All these affect those below the middle rung on the economic ladder.

Meanwhile, the G.O.P. has left untouched the generous benefits that favor the rich, like home-mortgage deductions for mansions and second homes. Corporate giveaways in the form of specialized tax breaks and farm subsidies to agribusiness remain in place. Defense contracts of questionable utility are protected. When Gingrich ran into heavy lobbying from doctors on Medicare reform, he gave them almost everything they wanted.

To defang government, Gingrich would defund it. He and his party are insisting on $245 billion in tax cuts as a centerpiece of their effort. But is this great tax reduction flowing back into the pockets of all Americans? No. The tax reductions were, in part, a sop to the G.O.P. moralists who bemoan the dissolution of the family. The "family" tax cuts were aimed at people raising children, but not at all people raising children. The credits are worthless to the families in which a third of American children live, because those families don't earn enough to pay income tax. Those families and their employers pay plenty--15.3%--in payroll taxes, but the G.O.P. tax credit doesn't help them there.

The G.O.P. revolutionaries have also voted to reduce taxes on the less than 1% of Americans who inherit property worth more than $600,000, a reduction that would cost the Treasury $27 billion during the next decade. Capital-gains-tax reductions directly benefit only the 7% of mostly wealthy households that profit each year from the sale of stocks, real estate and investments other than their home. Meanwhile, the Republican Congress has voted to raise taxes on the working poor by cutting the earned income-tax credit.

It won't do to be too prissy about absolute fairness, to expect that Newt and his cohort would not reward followers and punish foes. On the other hand, by not demanding some sacrifice from his own supporters, Gingrich and his movement risk being seen as just another engine of interest-group politics, albeit a different set of interest groups. Bill Bennett, the former Education Secretary and maven of the Republican moralists, worries about this. "What's come across quite clearly is that we Republicans are smart and serious and that we are going to shrink the government. What hasn't come across is a lot of compassion. It's not enough to bring down the welfare state; you have to say what replaces it. We lose if we come across as a bunch of mean-hearted creeps. We have to say yes to something. We have to cut welfare for the rich."

Author James Pinkerton, who coined the phrase "the new paradigm" to describe the world that comes after Big Government, agrees. "What the Republicans haven't done," says Pinkerton, a former aide to President Bush, "is convince the people at the bottom half of the economy that there's something there for them. I think they made a vision mistake by not going after corporate welfare more energetically."

What will become of the poor in Gingrich's brave new world? It is the welfare programs themselves that he sees as the problem. Conservative welfare expert Douglas Besharov describes the current system as "a culture of entitlement that has undermined traditional values of education, work and marriage." Gingrich, in his interview with TIME, put it more starkly: "What kind of safety net is it that destroys you? You have a man-eating safety net and a child-eating safety net."

By sending out--or devolving--welfare programs to the states, Gingrich raises the prospect of more experimentation and innovation with a system that has not proved its value to date. But by capping the amount of money Washington is willing to send to the states and by putting limits on the number of years a welfare recipient can draw payments, the G.O.P. is testing the theory that if the poor know they are not automatically getting payments, they will lift themselves out of poverty. Democrats warn that, with caps and limits, the poor will be devastated. Counters Besharov: "Do a lot of states have Governors who want mothers sleeping on grates? No." Could it be that giving the poor less is a way of giving them more? Daniel Bell, professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard, speaks for the skeptics: "These things have real cultural roots. They take generational time to solve. The notion of taking the poor off welfare as a sort of cold bath is nonsense. I'm not arguing for the current situation. No one would. But nobody knows what is going to work. Why take a plunge in the dark? The oldest piece of conservative wisdom is to do things slowly."

Gingrich, however, believes the spirit of private charity will help the neediest cases when the government reduces welfare spending. He buttresses this tenet by borrowing heavily from the work of Marvin Olasky, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas and the editor of a Christian weekly newsmagazine. Olasky's thesis is that giving aid indiscriminately to poor people actually destroys those people, all the while turning taxpayers against the welfare programs. He advocates replacing welfare with private care giving, so that only the "deserving" poor are helped. A giant welfare state can't make the distinction, Gingrich argues; only those close enough to the poor can decide who deserves help and who doesn't.

Nevertheless, the Speaker of the House has neither done much nor said much to challenge his rich core constituency to shoulder more of the burden in curing poverty. His friend and sometime guru Arianna Huffington regularly urges her Republican friends to tithe 10% of their income to the poor. She has urged Gingrich to join her, but he has not. Nor has he explained why, even as the top marginal tax rate has fallen for the past 14 years, the taxpayers who have benefited the most--those who earn $125,000 or more a year--still give only 3.3% to charity, including cultural institutions like orchestras that do not address the plight of the poor.

Skeptical that private charity, unassisted, can really replace government, even a rock-ribbed conservative like Senator Dan Coats of Indiana has offered legislation to try to pump up giving. He has proposed a $500 tax credit for donations to institutions that devote 70% of their work to helping the poor directly. Unhappily, the cost of that measure alone would be $120 billion during the next seven years.

Taking all the revolution's assaults on antipoverty programs together, the Clinton Administration claims that an additional 1.5 million children will fall into poverty. On the other hand, liberals, Clinton included, don't have any good new ideas about how to solve the problems of the culture of dependence in America's ghettos. They have only the old ones that bankrupt the treasury and enrage the taxpayers.

Gingrich insists in his interview with TIME that his revolution begins with a grand vision and then proceeds to strategy and tactics. But there was little disguising the fact that the items in his Contract were polled for popular palatability--hardly in character for the brave manifesto of a new social and political order. Newt Gingrich is not a philosopher nor, despite his pretensions, a political theorist of the first rank. The Speaker is a politician who uses words and ideas to gain power. There is no particular shame in this. All the great leaders who changed the direction of America made it up as they went along. Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan acted and gave meaning to their action by their words. The result was never a pure philosophy, only a working theory that gave plausible explanation to what they were doing and where they were going.

Perhaps the best thing about this conservative revolution is that it has broken the intellectual gridlock in Washington. The liberal welfare-state model of American government has run its course; it has not ended poverty and has lost the faith of the American people. Nowhere near a majority of the electorate still believe the Federal Government works well or even works for them. The politics and policies of Washington have become a giant money-gathering and money-spending machine, the chief purpose of which seems increasingly to be to pay off the interest groups that vote for the party in power.

Newt Gingrich and his followers have not yet risen above this pattern. They have dislodged one entrenched set of interests only to replace it with a new set of interests. The test of Gingrich's revolution won't be whether it can propound a coherent ideology but whether it can create a broad sense of national purpose.

Gingrich has begun to tear down the old structures. Says political analyst Kevin Phillips: "This is a necessary precursor for some useful and provocative change that wasn't going to happen with a Democratic Congress." But from there, Phillips' analysis turns harsh, citing especially the growing sense that the Republicans are simply favoring the rich and the people who can afford lobbyists. "Gingrich," he concludes, "is this interesting half-phony, half-historic figure who lacks discipline and talks too much to be an effective leader."

Worse, from the point of view of Gingrich's disciples, there is a backlash setting in, based partly on disgust with the Speaker. Declares California Democratic Party chairman Bill Press: "It's the biggest con job ever foisted on the American people. If there was a revolution, it's peaked. People have seen what Newt is all about, and they don't like it." It's doubtful Press would have said that a year ago, in the wake of the 1994 elections.

Still, attempts to demonize Gingrich are of limited efficacy to the Democrats. In the race for a vacant House seat in California, they cast the G.O.P. candidate Tom Campbell as a stand-in for Newt. Last week Campbell won by a landslide.

The Moses from Marietta has pieced together a set of political ideas to offer a hopeful if hazy vision of the future and to provide conservatives with an agenda that is not simply the opposite number of their opponents'. But his chief accomplishment thus far is the destruction of the status quo. That may be the limit of his historic role. Every movement of ideas must have a human face, a person in whose integrity and wisdom people can believe sufficiently to overlook the risks and the inconsistencies contained in the new ideology.

For an increasing number of Americans, Newt Gingrich does not inspire confidence as the chosen leader to drive radicalized conservative ideals toward a new way of governing. In a new TIME/CNN poll of adult Americans, 60% of those surveyed said Gingrich is not "someone you can trust," and 49% said he is "scary." It may be that Gingrich will end up like Moses, the prophet who delivered his people to the promised land but was not allowed to join them there.

--Reported by Dan Goodgame/Washington, Richard Lacayo/New York and Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles

With reporting by DAN GOODGAME/WASHINGTON, RICHARD LACAYO/NEW YORK AND SYLVESTER MONROE/LOS ANGELES