Isaac Asimov’s influence on Newt Gingrich.

Here is a fascinating essay by Ray Smock on the influence of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy on the thought of Newt Gingrich.  Smock was the historian of the House of Representatives from 1983 to 1995, but was fired immediately when Gingrich became House Speaker. 

Gingrich has written about Asimov’s influence on him.  In his 1996 book To Renew America, Gingrich wrote:

While Toynbee was impressing me with the history of civilizations, Isaac Asimov was shaping my view of the future in equally profound ways….For a high school student who loved history, Asimov’s most exhilarating invention was the ‘psychohistorian’ Hari Seldon.  The term does not refer to Freudian analysis but to a kind of probabilistic forecasting of the future of whole civilizations.  The premise was that, while you cannot predict individual behavior, you can develop a pretty accurate sense of mass behavior.  Pollsters and advertisers now make a good living off the same theory.

Here are some excerpts from Smock’s essay (which is partisan, but interesting):

Trying to figure out Newt Gingrich has become a cottage industry now that he is running for president.  He is a self-confessed revolutionary who wants to fundamentally change America.  He is ambitious, power hungry, and ruthlessly focused.  He is a natural for Washington, where such attributes are both feared and admired. How did Newt get this way?  What makes him tick?…

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, Newt Gingrich is from the planet Trantor, a fictional world created by Isaac Asimov in his classic Foundation series about galactic empire.   Newt’s master plan for America does not come from a Republican Party playbook.  It comes from the science fiction that he read in high school.  He is playing out, on a national and global scale, dreams he had as a teenager with his nose buried in pulp fiction.

Newt is an avid reader of both history and science fiction.  About the time he finished reading Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, the sweeping story of the entire human race, and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he discovered Isaac Asimov’s three books Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953).  To Newt’s amazement the Foundation series was an inspired version of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall set thousands of years in the future rather than the past.  Newt was more fascinated by the fictional decline of an empire of a million planets than he was the real decline of ancient Rome.

Asimov’s fiction had greater sweep than the historical works of Toynbee and Gibbon.  To an impressionable young man, the fate of one planet was nothing compared to an entire galaxy of worlds.  As one paperback cover of Foundation proclaimed: “In a future century the Galactic Empire dies and one man creates a new force for civilized life.”  Newt liked the idea of one man shaping the destiny of entire civilizations.  That fictional man, Hari Seldon, was a special breed of historian who frequented a far-off planet called Trantor.  Newt found his role model not in his stern stepfather, but in a historian from another planet, a great historian and teacher who thought really big galactic-size thoughts….

Edward Gibbon saw the decline of Rome, Hari Seldon saw the decline of the galactic empire, and Newt Gingrich saw the decline of America.  Newt says America’s decline began in the 1960s with liberal hippies and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.  History and fiction seem more exciting when there is decline.  This gives heroes, visionaries, demagogues, and politicians something to fix.  People on Planet Earth have different views about exactly what parts of our civilization are in decay.  Hari Seldon had the same problem trying to convince a commission on Trantor that things were going sour in the Galactic Empire.  Newt learned that Hari Seldon could not save the Galactic Empire from decay but that he could predict its decline.  Likewise, Newt alone could not save America from decline, but he could alert people to the decline and find ways to minimize it….

Scribbled in Newt’s own hand are notes he made during a 1992 meeting with a major contributor of GOPAC. He outlined his role as a visionary leader.  His “primary mission” was to be an “advocate of civilization”—a “definer of civilization”—the “teacher of the rules of civilization”—and “leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces.”  Newt saw his mission as “universal rather than national.”…

Newt Gingrich assumes the mantle of the history professor when it suits the occasion.  Other times he plays down his academic background.  When in professor mode he likes to recommend books.  None carry more weight in understanding his political and personal drive and his strategy to transform America more than the science fiction of Isaac Asimov.  The greatest influence on Newt Gingrich, the conservative Republican, was the liberal atheist Isaac Asimov.  Many in Newt’s generation, including me, read that stuff with great gusto and fascination.  It was marvelous entertainment.  Newt saw not just entertainment but a master plan using the Foundation trilogy as his political handbook, a guide to how one man creates a new force for civilized life….

The entire essay is well-worth reading.