BERLIN – In June 1978, while running for Congress, Newt Gingrich gave a speech to a crowd of College Republicans in Atlanta. He warned them and the wider party: “You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power… What we really need are people who are willing to stand up in a slug-fest.” When he arrived in Washington, DC, the following year this approach was beginning to spread.
Gingrich accused Democrats of seeking to “destroy our country” and called Congress “corrupt” and “sick”. Over the following decades, this “politics as warfare” became the Republicans’ dominant strategy, write political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their 2018 book How Democracies Die. A straight line runs from there to Donald Trump, and whatever follows.
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