“Since Watergate — a mistrustful electorate, a generation of reporters hungry for stories that carried a whiff of political malfeasance.”

From a New York Times review by Jennifer Szalai headlined “Newt Gingrich and the Dawn of a Toxic Political Era”—the book reviewed is Burning Down the House by Julian E. Zelizer:

To hear President Trump use the term, “corruption” can do double duty as a hand grenade and a safe word — a ready-made epithet to yell out whenever he’s feeling the squeeze.

It’s a tried-and-true strategy in the frantic trajectory of American politics since the 1970s. As Julian Zelizer shows in his briskly entertaining (if politically dispiriting) new book, “Burning Down the House,” an ambitious and impatient Republican from Georgia by the name of Newton Leroy Gingrich long ago figured out that corruption was a useful charge for a young upstart to deploy against establishment politicians — a way of turning their vaunted experience against them. More political experience meant more connections with powerful constituents, which meant more of a chance that some of those connections smelled bad, or could be made to seem that way.

Gingrich’s lasting innovation, Zelizer says, was to turn a rhetorical gambit into an actionable weapon. . . .

So much that’s associated with the Republican Party under Trump, Zelizer argues — the rowdiness, the bare-knuckle name-calling, the white-knuckle clinging to power at all cost — dates back to Gingrich’s ascent in the late ’80s. . . .

But the demands of actual policymaking were too slow and painstaking to hold a restless Gingrich’s attention for very long. He preferred the thrill of the fight, and fashioned himself into an egghead brawler, reminding everyone that he was a trained historian at one moment and railing against the infernal intellectual elites the next. During one of his tirades, he likened Wright to Mussolini. Gingrich later compared himself to Martin Luther. . . .

In “Burning Down the House,” Zelizer shows how Gingrich was able to exploit the profound developments since Watergate — a mistrustful electorate, a generation of reporters hungry for stories that carried a whiff of political malfeasance, a set of well-meaning but manipulable good-government reforms — to his lasting advantage.

Gingrich turned C-SPAN, the relentlessly bland public network that was supposed to make Americans better informed about the nuts and bolts of policymaking, into an unlikely broadcaster of hammy theater. He and his allies would deliver a coordinated set of speeches attacking Democrats before a mostly empty chamber, knowing that C-SPAN’s cameras were rolling, and that anything outrageous would get picked up and amplified by mainstream outlets. . . .

He happened to seize power at a moment when a post-Watergate ecosystem paradoxically selected for politicians like him — legislatively useless, for the most part, but freakishly talented at political warfare and self-promotion, wielding idealism as a cudgel while never deigning to be idealistic themselves. You don’t have to be nostalgic for the old political era of smoke-filled back rooms to wonder if the public was better served by an arsonist bearing a blowtorch and a Cheshire cat grin.