PLATFORM : Historian Gingrich

In founding the United States, the leaders of the Federal Convention proclaimed themselves students of history. They consulted human experience to help them decide between institutions. It was, for instance, the wars of religion that racked Europe in the Reformation’s wake that caused them to make public life a secular preserve. They read history to indicate that freedom and flourishing of religion depended on keeping this most individual and least compromisable of human expressions free from the inevitable incursions of the state.

Newt Gingrich says we read history to find ourselves back there. He recommends Irving Stone and Tom Clancy as equal to nonfiction. But the historian’s whole point is to distinguish fact from historical fiction. To do so, you have to accept a gap between what history teaches and what people need or want to know. And history is almost always ambiguous in its prescriptions.

You don’t have to be wary of Gingrich the politician to be alarmed by his understanding of history. Plenty of his conservative allies know better than he the dangers of a convenient history as an argument for an expedient public course of action.