Future tense.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia I.

Why Washington can't stand Newt's futurism

I first met newt gingrich in 1983 at the World Science Fiction Convention in Baltimore. He was the only member of Congress who thought the WorldCon worth addressing. I was the only representative of the national media, specifically of The Wall Street Journal, who thought his speech worth covering.

The political establishment - left, right, and center - hates self-described "conservative futurist" Gingrich's fascination with big ideas. Journalists use words like "techno-freak," "dreamy," "grandiose," and "quirky" to describe his departures from approved Washington scripts into speculations about where America and the world are headed. They delight in poking fun at the neologisms of his advisers, from Alvin and Heidi Toffier's "demassification," to Michael Vlahos's "Brain Lords," to the whole notion of the "virtual."

"Predicted with Virtual Certainty: Gingrich & the Technoids Look Into Their Crystal Balls," was the headline on a snide Washington Post Style article poking fun at a conference in which the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a Newt-affiliated think tank, attempted to expand Washington's mind.

An anonymous "leading conservative ideologue," quoted in a New Yorker article called "Lost in Space," best expresses the official line: "For my taste, Gingrich is too futuristic, too psychobabble, too techno-babble - he's a weird mishmash of all kinds of things. There is an ongoing attempt to try to keep Newt from going off the deep end. There is a certain grandiosity to his self-understanding which comes from Toffler, an end-of-an-era, the whole-world-is-changing feeling he projects. The Republican Presidential candidates are really more conventional than Newt."

And we all know that's what Republicans are supposed to be - conventional. Like George Bush.

Gingrich's futurism has its problems, certainly, some obvious, some deep. On the obvious level, it lacks discipline, racing to embrace cool-sounding ideas before analyzing them. It overgeneralizes, selecting from history, business, and technology the data that fit its preconceptions. And it massacres the English language.

But these traits are not unique to Gingrich - as anyone who has ventured into Al Gore's intellectually incoherent and nearly unreadable Earth in the Balance can testify. The culture meisters of Washington and New York are positively gaga over futurism when it takes a properly apocalyptic form - one that makes work for government, or at...