The Politics of Hope (‘Boys Town’) vs. the Politics of Fear (‘Disclosure’)

Newt Gingrich is the World’s Foremost Expert. One subject he has made a show of having mastered is the movies. Time and again, over the years, he has argued on behalf of his policy abstractions with movie references.

Gingrich’s unexpected flourishing of pop-culture knowledge in the middle of a policy discussion is a characteristic gesture, intended to bowl over the listener with the breadth of his encyclopedic intellect. He’s not only a futurist, a management consultant and a theologian, but Roger Ebert.

When Gingrich’s proposal to seize the children of women receiving welfare and deposit them in orphanages (which would increase the cost per child tenfold) received less than universal acclaim, he did not issue a dry document filled with statistics to bolster his position. Rather, he urged skeptics to rent “Boys Town,” a 1938 movie starring Spencer Tracy as the wise and patient Father Flanagan and Mickey Rooney as Whitey Marsh, the juvenile delinquent he reforms. If his critics could only see the movie, they would be convinced of his rightness.

Why a man born with a different name, whose stepfather was cool and distant, who did not meet his natural father until he was grown up and who failed to pay minimal child support to the children and wife he left, prompting his pastor to raise funds for the family from church members, would fix on orphans at his first opportunity to create a public issue as Speaker of the House is a question best left to psychobiographers.

As a sheer political matter, Gingrich’s use of “Boys Town” reveals his effort to package fear as hope. It is fear that drives his politics, but he invokes the atmospherics of hope to deflect attention from the motive force. Gingrich speaks often of his “vision,” and “Boys Town” indeed presents a vision. They happen to be opposites.

“Boys Town” is a New Deal parable of hope. The values it preaches are the inherent goodness of all humanity and the necessity of mutual obligation. Father Flanagan’s faith becomes the slogan of Boys Town: “There’s no such thing as a bad boy.” It is only circumstances and environment that make boys bad. Brother is depicted sacrificing for brother: “He’s not heavy, Father, he’s my brother.” The strong must care for the weak, the healthy for the sick, the well-to-do for the unfortunate. When Whitey sees this he puts his self-seeking and belligerence behind him. He is no longer a bad boy.

“Boys Town,” clearly, is not the movie that most aptly captures the sour mood that lay beneath the 1994 elections. That distinction falls, in real time, to “Disclosure,” which purports to be a thought-provoking tale of the tables turned--with a beautiful young woman sexually harassing a vulnerable middle-aged man.

“Disclosure” is a parable of fear in the 1990s. The villainess is a woman who exists nowhere in a natural state. She is a fantasy predator who will stop at nothing: fellatio as castration anxiety. The leading man is hardly the captain of his fate. He inhabits a virtual reality of free-floating anxiety. Nothing in his environment is remotely controllable. Though he is skilled at his job, his workplace is a jungle. Everyone is, or can be, his enemy. The competition is ferocious--and women are the most dangerous of all. Friends can turn on a dime; everyone has a price. Families can be torn apart at any moment; there is no haven in a world of high-tech survivalism. It’s every confused, angry white man for himself--a dystopian “Boys Town.” The benevolent paternalism of Father Flanagan (and Father Roosevelt, cited recently by Gingrich as one of his long-lost political fathers) is not in evidence.

Hope has become a hard sell, especially when gratification cannot be instant. President Bill Clinton often laments that his achievements have gone unrecognized, and he laboriously makes a substantive case. His program, after all, has sustained and expanded an economic recovery. Inflation has remained negligible. Taxes have been raised slightly on just 1.2% of the population, a thin slice of the upper crust, while they have been significantly lowered on the 13% that constitute the lower end of the working class. Federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product has dipped to less than 22%--a level below Ronald Reagan’s 22% and George Bush’s 24%. The deficit, which seemed to be skyrocketing out of control under Reagan, has rapidly diminished. By next year, the effect of Clinton’s plan will have been to reduce the deficit by half--a feat considered impossible only two years ago. Yet, with all this apparently good news, the President’s party received its greatest repudiation in two generations in November.

The source of the paradox lies ultimately in the stagnation of the standard of living of the middle-income--a condition Clinton is now attempting to address with his “middle class bill of rights.” Clinton’s previous claims about his accomplishments only riled the middle-income, especially white males without college degrees, helping to convince them of his hypocrisy. Where was the change he asserted he was making? His seeming failure to alter their economic estate lent credibility to the personal attacks on him, offering an easy, all-purpose explanation.

Feeling as though they were falling through space, they were eager to latch onto something that seemed clear and strong. The familiar boundaries of the post-World War II had disappeared with the ending of the Cold War. But nothing had firmly replaced the settled past. The hopeful public of 1992 became the fearful public of 1994.

In this environment, Gingrich’s absolute certainty about absolutely everything--which had marked him as marginal--became a cardinal political virtue. To the fearful, the dogmatic can be welcomed as concern, even compassion. It is, at least, definite. Fear gets organized when the dogmatic establishes sharp polarities--us vs. them. Rush Limbaugh’s comedy of contempt, in which “them” are made to seem both ridiculous and evil, helped lay the groundwork. (His obsessive conjurings of “feminazis” was an early model of the female scoundrel in “Disclosure.”)

In the campaign, profound anxieties about race, crime, immigration and sex coalesced. “Taxes” became a chief code-word for a captious politics of resentment. It is respectable but easily grasped shorthand for “them”--the besieging parasites and competitors. In this script, hope consists of promising relief from “them.”

For more than a decade, Gingrich’s strategy was to destroy the image of Congress in order to rise on its ashes. By Election Day, the Gallup Poll recorded the lowest approval rating of Congress--only 20%--in its history. Race after race around the country was driven to the lowest negative denominator.

Without demons, the politics of resentment loses focus. In 1994, the demons included the Congress. Now Gingrich rules the Congress. He can maintain his momentum only by governing as he campaigned. His authority as an Iron Speaker rests on his ability to keep the polarities razor-sharp. His appeal to his base depends on his dogmatism. He is not about to be transformed suddenly by his new responsibilities into a pragmatic technocrat, assessing policies on their costs and benefits, or into an old-style Speaker, seeking collegiality with the minority by granting them their merits.

Gingrich’s sense of hope is almost always ruthlessly reduced to raising fears. With his stream of references to the movies and psychobabble theorists, he is crafting a post-modern Nixonism. Perhaps we should take Gingrich’s suggestion that we study “Boys Town.” The House of Representatives, after all, is about to undergo an unprecedented experiment: “Boys Town” without Father Flanagan. Whitey’s in charge.