Gingrich Offers a Complex Vision of America’s Future : Politics: His views are likely to drive policy debates. But some wonder if his beliefs can be translated into law.

“I’ve always told all of you I was not nearly as radical as some of my friends,” Rep. Newt Gingrich said in a post-election speech in which he backed away from a colleague’s proposal to scrap the federal income tax in favor of a national sales tax.

But the very next day, the Georgia Republican who is in line to become Speaker of the House took a strikingly different tack. He talked nonchalantly on a television program about slashing half a trillion dollars from federal spending; dismantling the Americans With Disabilities Act, an ornament of the George Bush Administration, and removing low-income single mothers from the welfare rolls, leaving them dependent on the beneficence of private charity.

Is the 51-year-old Gingrich really the radical conservative his critics see or a self-described moderate one? Or is the former West Georgia College history teacher in a category all his own?

The questions are more than rhetorical. In the aftermath of the Republican takeover of Congress--of which he was a primary orchestrator--Gingrich has emerged as the politician of the moment. His views on a host of crucial subjects--from the value of work to the meaning of family--have recently overshadowed those of both President Clinton, with whom he has refused to compromise on matters of principle, and Senate Republican leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), whom he long ago dismissed as “the tax collector for the welfare state.”

His wide-ranging vision of America is almost certain to drive public-policy debates during the next Congress and perhaps the 1996 presidential campaign and beyond.

Those who know him best attribute Gingrich’s world view in large part to his life as the stepson of an Army officer in the rural South and as an academic in a small Southern college that gave him the freedom to roam intellectually.

Gingrich himself recalls a boyhood visit to the World War I battlefield at Verdun, France, as a experience that impressed on him the potentially enormous consequences of decisions made by those who wield political power.

Jeffrey Eisenach, head of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank that works closely with Gingrich, put it this way: “Newt’s outlook is the result of a remarkable intellect combined with an Army brat who has seen the connection between action and results.” Whatever the reasons, he has gone farther than most of his peers in developing a network of ideas both broad and detailed.”

“His big thing is the big picture,” said Republican strategist Kevin Phillips.

Gingrich contends that the breadth of his beliefs is not just a virtue but a necessity if they are to be fulfilled.

“An opportunity society requires a dynamic, expanding vision of freedom and the future,” he wrote in “Window of Opportunity,” the book he published in 1984 and which he still draws on heavily for his public utterances. “If people . . . see a vision powerful enough, they will commit themselves to a thousand-mile march. Without that vision, they are unlikely to move at all.”

The most conspicuous evidence of that vision during the midterm election campaign was the GOP’s “contract with America.” But this compendium of such Ronald Reagan-inspired ideas as a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, congressional term limits and tax cuts--all of which Gingrich has pledged to take up in the new Congress’ first 100 days--represents only the tip of Gingrich’s ideology.

Here is a brief look at the main pillars of Gingrich’s deeper thinking, based on his utterances and on his book.

Back to the future: Literally defined, “futurism,” one of Gingrich’s favorite buzzwords, is a point of view that seeks life’s meaning in the future, rather than in the present. But Gingrich, who calls himself a “conservative futurist,” takes a somewhat different approach, relying on his faith in the future to recapture the best of the past and redirect the present. Harking back to the GOP’s role as the nation’s dominant and activist party in the closing years of the 19th Century, freshman Rep. Gingrich told an interviewer: “I’m a modernizer who is suggesting (that) we leap back an entire span and claim our own heritage again.”

Looking ahead, Gingrich is dazzled by an abundance of “high-technology options” that he argues can help rid American society of the decadence inflicted upon it by more than half a century of liberal Democratic hegemony. He is particularly engaged by futurist writer Alvin Toffler’s concept of “triliteracy,” combining the traditional three R’s of learning with the mass media and computer technology. Once Americans have mastered triliteracy, Gingrich claims, “there will be a tremendous increase not only in America’s productivity but also in each individual’s creativity as people learn to retrain themselves in order to find their own paths to wisdom and knowledge.”

One path favored by Gingrich is to require the House to file all its official documents electronically, making them generally available by computer and producing, he contends, a better-informed and more active citizenry.

Individual empowerment: By freeing Americans from big government and high taxes, Gingrich hopes to unleash the energies of individual enterprise and ambition. Like Charles Murray, author of “Losing Ground” and “The Bell Curve,” and other critics of the welfare state, Gingrich argues that breaking the back of the welfare bureaucracy would benefit not only middle-class taxpayers but the poor.

Gingrich contends that the current federal approach to welfare is based on what he calls redistributionist economics and counterculture values, and he argues that the inevitable result is to “ruin the poor” and “create a culture of poverty and a culture of violence which is destructive of this civilization.”

The poor stand to gain the most, Gingrich says, if the paralyzing culture of poverty can be replaced with the opportunity for productivity. Meanwhile, middle-class Americans would also get a chance at greater self-fulfillment by being encouraged to work years past the so-called “prime” through the relaxation of current limits on retirement income.

But in Gingrich’s new world, opportunity carries with it an enlarged burden of civic responsibility. “You cannot hire a teacher to teach your child and walk off and then blame the teacher,” he said. “You cannot hire a policeman to protect your neighborhood and then walk off and blame the police.” Citizens who want to reduce the power of Washington “have to take more responsibility back home.”

Traditional values: Certainly the most emotional and probably the most compelling item in Gingrich’s ideological inventory is his emphasis on the restoration of traditional values. Nothing less than the survival of America depends on the success of this effort, he said in his first major address since the election. “It is impossible to maintain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies, with 15-year-olds killing each other, with 17-year-olds dying of AIDS and with 18-year-olds ending up with diplomas they can’t even read,” he said.

Although Gingrich puts some of the blame for social decay on federal policies and programs, notably welfare, he also condemns what he calls the dominant liberal culture, which he complains has put more emphasis on material goods and systems than on “the power of the mind and the spirit.”

Some of the results he lists are more schoolchildren cheating on tests, more taxpayers cheating on their 1040 tax forms and “more freedom to read pornography,” but “less satisfaction from our personal relationships.”

To revive the nation’s neglected soul, Gingrich calls for a religious renaissance--one reason a constitutional amendment allowing prayer in schools is high on his legislative agenda. Gingrich also contends that time is on the side of boosting moral standards, suggesting that as the baby boomer generation grays, its members, recognizing “the failure of both radical hedonism and economic materialism” will swell the congregations of the country’s churches.

New internationalism: Gingrich sees the need for the United States to assert its interests abroad more effectively, particularly in the field of international economics. Americans must understand, Gingrich says, that only by achieving the world’s highest levels of productivity can they be rewarded with the world’s highest standard of living. Accomplishing this, he declared in a recent speech, requires a sweeping and uncompromising reassessment of government along with the rest of society.

“We have to literally rethink the assumptions that grew up in a self-indulgent national economy and recognize that litigation, taxation, regulation, welfare, education, the very structure of government, the structure of health, all these things have to be re-examined,” he said.

Gingrich did not make clear how much of a role he would want government to play in intensifying the nation’s efforts to compete abroad, and most analysts doubt that he would support much direct involvement along the lines of the industrial policy approach favored by some liberal economists.

But University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles O. Jones, who is familiar with Gingrich’s thinking, said he believes that the lawmaker would favor having the government “facilitate” efforts to bolster U.S. global competitiveness through such measures as selective tax breaks at home and trade agreements abroad.

A redoubtable Cold Warrior all his years in Congress, Gingrich also has long sounded the alarm about international terrorism. It remains a grave threat to the nation’s security in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, he contends. In “Window of Opportunity,” he warned: “A free, open society cannot survive by trading violence for violence. If we kill an Iranian extremist every time Iranians kill an American soldier, we will lose the struggle.”

Instead, Gingrich called for the United States to develop the capacity to strike back directly at the leaders of terrorist movements in a manner that would be so effective it would make them avoid attacks on Americans out of fear for their own lives.

How much of what Gingrich believes can be translated into law will depend on a multitude of factors, some outside his control--such as the strategic thinking of the Democratic opposition in the House and Senate, the Democratic President in the White House and dissenters within his own party.

Much will also depend on his ability to master the skills required of a majority leader. Critics and even some supporters question whether he can curb his tendency to indulge in distracting rhetorical outbursts. They need not search far for an example. In the closing days of the midterm campaigns, he suggested that the case of the South Carolina mother accused of drowning her two young sons demonstrated the sickness of society and a reason to vote Republican.

After he was roundly criticized for the remark, Gingrich claimed that he was quoted out of context. A longtime colleague, former Minnesota Republican Rep. Vin Weber, attributed the lapse to Gingrich’s zeal in finding evidence to support his ideological approach.

“He gets up and reads the paper in the morning and everything that’s in it fits into his world view,” Weber said. “He’s very sincere, but his mind makes leaps and other people can’t make the connections he does.”

Some analysts contend that even if Gingrich can pass much of his program, his success may do him and his party more harm than good. On the values front, he may be building up expectations for change that cannot be accomplished by any statute.

“He’s talking about a series of problems with which national government has never been directly involved and about which the national government finds it very hard to do anything constructive,” said University of North Carolina historian William Leuchtenburg, referring to Gingrich’s lament about teen-age illiteracy, pregnancy and crime.

On the economic front, GOP strategist Phillips contends that the balanced-budget amendment Gingrich is pushing “has the potential to turn into the Republican equivalent of Clinton’s health care.”

“It’s going to sound good when you start out with it,” Phillips said. But he predicted that support would “drop sharply as soon as people find out it’s going to cut into their Social Security or benefits or raise their taxes.”

But whatever happens, some who know Gingrich believe that he is flexible enough to handle it. To reach the pinnacle of power in the House he has already traveled a long and circuitous road.

This national spokesman for militant conservatism broke into the politics of what is now his home state in 1968 as a supporter of the presidential candidacy of then-New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, the chief spokesman for liberal Republicanism and the Republican conservatives most loved to hate.

“That was a year when my first choice, Ronald Reagan, wasn’t running,” Gingrich recalled in an interview.

In his first races for Congress, Gingrich was regarded as a moderate for his positions on race and other issues.

Even today, after nearly two decades of his fighting the right’s fights on Capitol Hill, some conservatives question his dependability. “I think he’s more of a political strategist than an ideologue,” said David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union. “He is not a consistent conservative in the traditional sense. I think his conservatism is more strategic in orientation. I think he would be far more likely to use government if he thought government could do the right things.”

But for all these misgivings, Keene is content to have Gingrich in his present position. “To Gingrich’s credit, he was the only person who saw this (GOP victory) coming. He built for it and was prepared for it. This election result was really a tribute to two people--Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton.”

Times staff writer Melissa Healy in Washington and researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.

Profile: Newt Gingrich

* Born: June 15, 1943.

* Education: Emory University, B.A.; Tulane University, Ph.D. in modern European history.

* Career highlights: Assistant professor of history and coordinator of environmental studies at West Georgia College, Carrollton, 1970-77. Member of Congress, 1979-present.

* Family: Wife, Marianne. Two grown daughters from a previous marriage.

* Quote: “The first thing we’re going to do in the House is keep our word. We invite every American to watch on Jan. 4. On Jan. 4 we will pass the eight reforms that are in the contract . . . starting with the Shays Act, which will apply to the Congress every law which applies to the rest of the country.”

--Speech on Tuesday to the Republican Governors Assn.