Newt Gingrich, provocateur in chief

"He has a doctorate in the social sciences and taught briefly at the college level. He has been married three times, divorced twice and confessed to an extramarital affair. He has never worked for a profit-making organization, never served in the military and lives in one of Washington's poshest suburbs. He is the very personification of his much-reviled "cultural elite." He is Newt Gingrich, and he is out to get himself.

Gingrich has been on something of a tear lately, brandishing the term "secular-socialist machine" with the elan of William Jennings Bryan declaiming about a Cross of Gold -- and, God willing, with the same effect. He used it recently in a Washington Post op-ed laced with the sort of gloating demagoguery that makes Gingrich his own acolyte. The man rides a pogo stick. When he is over the top, he just keeps going.

The most obvious repellent characteristic of the cultural elite is that it is out of step with the views of most Americans -- or, as Gingrich put it, "Americans oppose the views of academic elites." This nimble grammatical construction makes the academic elite something other than Americans, even though some of them may well have served in the military -- always proof of red-bloodedness. The argument presupposes, also, that what is popular is right, when, as suffragettes could once attest, this is not always the case.

Neither "socialism" nor "secularism" comes close to describing America or the Obama administration's programs. In fact, the very reason most Americans find secularism a strange and useless term is that this country has never had a state religion. If Gingrich wants to see what secularism looks like, he should read a history of France. There, a suffocating state religion produced a nasty sort of secularism that on May 24, 1871, resulted in the execution of Georges Darboy, no less than the archbishop of Paris. In this country, by contrast, the Pentagon celebrates National Prayer Day, and the winner of a nationally televised bull-riding event credits his triumph neither to his own skills nor to the lack of them by the bull, but to God. It must have been as slow a Sunday for God as it was for me."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/03/AR2010050303384.html?hpid=opinionsbox1