Triumph of the counterculture
NEWT Gingrich plays an odd role in Reassessing the Sixties, † a new collection of essays edited by Stephen Macedo presenting a mix of viewpoints on women, universities, and race. For his declaration of war—not just war, but revolution-against the sixties following the 1994 Republican congressional victory, the Speaker is invoked by essayists on the left and the right; his exhortations against the legacies of the sixties—most notably, his styling of Bill and Hillary Clinton as “countercultural McGoverniks”—recur throughout the book, usually cited as evidence of a juggernaut on the right. (One contributor not-so-elliptically connects Gingrich to the Oklahoma City bombing.)