Michael Wolfe

Update: Having recently finished reading the politics of the third wave, I can summarize all but the last chapter of the book like this: Change is always resisted, We are on the verge of a massive change in civilization to the third wave, family, government, economics, everything is second wave (free market, constitutions, man-woman marriage, energy etc) and must be changed to avoid the bloodshed and chaos that typically ensues with a revolution. The final chapter presents that our government and constitution must be changed, or fundamentally transformed. The Tofflers believe hijacking the republican party is the best way to do this.

Its been a hard month for Newt. From attacking Paul Ryan to defending variant forms of health care mandates, Newt has been showing openly than ever his progressive side. Or has he? Newt has been an advocate of the “third wave,” a progressive post-constitutional movement. According to the New American Magazine:

In 1994, Gingrich described himself as “a conservative futurist.” He said that those who were trying to define him should look no further than The Third Wave, a 1980 book written by Alvin Toffler. The book describes our society as entering a post-industrial phase in which abortion, homosexuality, promiscuity, and divorce are perfectly normal, even virtuous. Toffler penned a letter to America’s “founding parents,” in which he said: “The system of government you fashioned, including the very principles on which you based it, is increasingly obsolete, and hence increasingly, if inadvertently, oppressive and dangerous to our welfare. It must be radically changed and a new system of government invented — a democracy for the 21st century.” He went on to describe our constitutional system as one that “served us so well for so long, and that now must, in its turn, die and be replaced.”

In short, the man who has been running around trying to put out all the fires caused by his unexpected candid speech, has not been acting out of character. In fact, since 1990 he has been a member of the progressive Council on Foreign Relations, a powerful think tank dedicated to a post-national future where America surrenders its identity as a sovereign nation to the internal progressives behind the United Nations, which itself was founded in part by American traitor/Soviet Communist Alger Hiss.

The Mises Institute sums up the third wave like this: “If their (Alvin Toffler’s and Heidi Toffler’s) predictions are banal, and their social theory unfounded and simplistic, their recommendations for political change are more than a little sinister. Although constantly calling for decentralization, they also complain that we are “politically primitive and undeveloped” at the “transnational level.” Decisions must be transferred “up” from the nation-state (p. 100). Translating the Tofflers’ Third Wave argot into English, this is a call for global government. Not surprisingly, those who oppose Nafta are prisoners of the outmoded Second Wave. This is in reference to the progressive book to which Gingrich authored a forward: Creating A New Civilization: The Politics Of The Third Wave.

Of course, this “Third Wave” goes way beyond government structures and economic theory. In fact, Third Wave philosophy may explain Gingrich’s personal morals and outlook on family values in general:

Today, once more, egos are breaking like eggshells against the wall. Now, however, the guilt is associated with the frac- ture of the family rather than the economy. As millions of men and women clamber out of the strewn wreckage of their marriages they, too, suffer agonies of self-blame. And once more, much of the guilt is misplaced. When a tiny minority is involved, the crack-up of their families may reflect individual failures. But when divorce, separation, and other forms of familial disaster overtake millions at once in many countries, it is absurd to think the causes are purely personal. The fracture of the family today is, in fact, part of the general crisis of industrialism—the crack-up of all the institutions spawned by the Second Wave. It is part of the ground-clearing for a new Third Wave socio-sphere. – Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave p. 208.

Toffler, in this book Newt once called required reading, goes on in the pages immediately following the above quote, to suggest that the only way to preserve the traditional family is to destroy modern technology and reintroduce poverty! But wait, there’s more. He also implies that contraceptives are the source of a woman’s freedom. It also goes on to praise the formation of new kinds of “families” saying that such things as homosexual couples, and “couples of various numbers, joint spouse sharing and other such things should be welcomed as a celebration of diversity and normalized! Does this sound like a book any genuine conservative would recommend?

But that’s not all. In the chapter titles “the invisible wedge,” Toffler places a very low value on maintaining a home and the raising of children: “The man took responsibility for the historically more advanced form of work; the woman was left behind to take care of the older, more backward form of work. He moved, as it were, into the future; she remained in the past.”

Let me me ask you, would any conservative endorse the idea that raising children is “backward” or a relic of the past? At every point progressive Newt must be challenged and confronted with his record of betraying conservatives. He is, like one man suggested “an embarrassment” to the party.

Required Reading:

A great summary of Newt’s record, followed by a top-notch detailed analysis:

An interesting study on the historical “third wave”