Appendix Concluded

George F. Will, in a recent editorial (Jan 23, Washington Post) characterizes Romney as "the first presidential candidate from the economy’s now deeply unpopular financial sector," though I don't think the financial sector itself is the cause of the anyone but Romney mentality that has been a continuous undercurrent in this primary race.   I think rather Will comes closer when he writes that "Romney is suffering because this sector’s arcane practices and instruments seem to many people, as indecipherable things often do, sinister.  His tax returns perhaps testify to no more than sophisticated exploitation of the baroque tax code’s opportunities for — even encouragement of — tactics to minimize liabilities. This, however, may exacerbate the impression many Republicans seem to have of his slipperiness. And this attribute is related to the suspicion that there is something synthetic about him."  If Gingrich has a saving grace grace relative to Romney, and was able to prevail in North Carolina, it is in part the incipient xenophobia.  As a southerner, Gingrich is on of them, or perhaps more precisely, if not exactly one of them, not a white evangelical Christian, at least he is emphatically NOT a big city Boston or Chicago Yankee, not black or brown, and most emphatically not slippery and synthetic in the way of Romney.  Obama has three strikes against him, and while it is absurd to think of Obama as a socialist, at least in the commonly understood definition of that term, it is somewhat less absurd to think of him as a synthetic product of the secular-scientific machine, one who believes that we can plan and engineer our way out of difficulty -- do it rationally, incrementally, methodically.  Romney has only two strikes against him, and no one is calling him a "socialist," but if the term has expanded to include Obama, it might as well include Romney as well.  He too is a synthetic product of the well greased secular-scientific machine, one who has demonstrated an ability to plan and engineer companies into a personal profitability.  

A recent review of Gingrich's new polemic (Jan 12, NYRB), To Same America, is essentially a re-write of his earlier polemic, To Renew America, and "the main difference between the 'renew' book and the 'save' book," as Bromwich points out, "is the overlay of piety."  Gingrich is a recognizable type -- political opportunist, and the opportunity of the moment lies in an affected piety.  Bromwich tell us that To Renew America is "a work of right wing utilitarianism" and its "whole method and appeal" lay in "its trust in fast-track innovation on the corporate model."  Given the spectacular success or failure of that model (depending of course on whether one is among Romney's income strata or among the expanding low-income sub-strata) it is not surprising that Gingrich has had a change of heart, the sincerity of which need not necessarily be too deeply questioned, in part because it is a political opportunists "representative" change of heart.  It is not surprising that he has taken on some of the apocalyptic tones of the evangelical right, "the phraseology of 'secular oppression'" and the convenient conflation of the Bible with the Constitution -- that  is to say, secular oppressors who "do not merely violate the spirit of the Founders," but who are "holding the constitution hostage."  A good portion of the constitution was framed of course to protect the people, not from "secular oppression," but "theological oppression," but Gingrich's assertions have no more to do with history as it is understood by most historians than the snake oil salesman has to do with medicine as it is understood by most physicians.  It strikes me as odd, not that someone like Gingrich is on the circuit selling the snake oil of revisionist history and pseudo piety and doing it in grandiloquent tones -- there will always be opportunists among us, and they will always bamboozle some.  No, it strikes me as strange rather that so many know it's snake oil and prefer it regardless.  That it will neither renew nor save America seems a wholly secondary concern.