Wichita, Kansas. -- With his graying, Beatle-style haircut and his Jerry-Rubin flair for political theatrics, new House Speaker Newt Gingrich looks and acts like a child of the 1960s and the counterculture he often condemns.
Moreover, much of Mr. Gingrich's political agenda seems to be taken straight from the slogans of the radical New Left -- "Smash the State," "Power to the People," "Up the Revolution."
Indeed, the ideological similarities between the youthful leftist revolutionaries on the college campuses of the 1960s and the middle-aged Republican revolutionaries in the next Congress are amazing. Consider this statement:
"During the Fifties liberal social critics talked of problems of leisure, mass society and abundance. But all the while poverty and racial oppression and public squalor and selfish interests continued to exist, neglected and unsolved by liberal organizations. . . . Organized liberalism must take at least part of the credit for America's political stalemate. A style of politics that emphasizes cocktail parties and seminars rather than protest marches, local reform movements and independent bases of power."
With its bashing of liberals, its implied criticism of the political elite and its endorsement of decentralized government, that statement could be the preamble from the Gingrich Republicans' "Contract with America." Actually, it is from a 1963 position paper published by the Students for a Democratic Society. Mr. Gingrich has portrayed the Clinton administration as the 1960s counterculture come to Washington. But in his ideas and many of his attitudes, Mr. Gingrich is much closer to the New Left than are Bill or Hillary Clinton.
Americans who were politically active in the civil-rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s recognize the Clintons as -- in the phrase of the day -- "limousine liberals." They were the student-council types who wanted to work within the system and would avoid doing anything -- in Bill Clinton's memorable comment regarding the draft -- to hurt their "political viability."
As collegians, the Clintons were the liberal establishment in training. At the height of the student radical movement, Bill Clinton was polishing his resume as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Hillary Rodham graduated from prestigious Wellesley College in 1969, then entered Yale Law School, where she met her husband, and became a congressional staff lawyer. In short, the Clintons charted a clear path toward membership in the liberal elite.
As a young man in the 1960s, Newt Gingrich was the ultimate radical -- a Rockefeller Republican in the South. He entered electoral politics not as a product of the Ivy League, but as a history professor at West Georgia College.
Mr. Gingrich, like the New Left of the 1960s, has a visceral dislike of elites, "the best and the brightest," as represented by the Clintons. The same liberal, Harvard-Yale arrogance that brought America the Vietnam War created a centralized welfare state that the Clintons tried to expand with national health care and that Mr. Gingrich is intent on dismantling.
One of the harshest critiques of liberalism came from the New Left, which denounced President Johnson's Great Society as "bombs, bullets and bull----." Mr. Gingrich uses the same intensity to criticize the current welfare system and the nation's over-dependency on government.
The GOP stress on returning power from Washington to the states and cities is also reminiscent of the New Left. SDS, for example, adopted the tactics of the Chicago activist Saul Alinsky to organize grass-roots groups in the inner cities. What SDS called "participatory democracy" in the 1960s is an ideological cousin of the new populism of the 1990s.
Even on social issues, the 1960s radical left and the 1990s Republican right have some things in common. The National Rifle Association has nothing on the Black Panthers in opposing gun control. The "free" schools of the 1960s could be part of school "choice" in the 1990s. The anti-Vietnam and anti-abortion movements share similar pro-life themes and strong leadership from many Christian ministers.
While some on the left today complain about the religious right, no one mixed faith and politics more persuasively than the Berrigan brothers and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to promote the anti-war and civil-rights causes.
The '60s hippie search for cosmic liberation also lives. Consider LSD-guru Tim Leary: He now sees computers as opening the door to a higher level of consciousness, not much different from the cybernetic "Third Wave" of futurist Alvin Toffler, who has strongly influenced Mr. Gingrich.
Often overlooked in discussions of the 1960s are the hippie capitalists. The small businessmen and women who ran head shops, book and record stores epitomize the free-enterprise spirit praised by the Gingrich right. And no marijuana harvester ever got a government farm subsidy.
Then there are the new media to get around the distortions of the liberal establishment press. Talk radio of the 1990s is the underground press of the 1960s. Rush Limbaugh would find soulmates in the Furry Freak Brothers.
Probably the greatest similarity between the New Leftists and the Gingrich rightists is intellectual smugness. Mr. Gingrich, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and their Senate ally, Sen. Phil Gramm, are former college professors; they believe ideas have consequences, as did most New Leftists. They, like the New Left, claim to speak for the working class -- at times sounding almost like a right-wing "dictatorship of the proletariat" that will lead the masses to freedom.
Mr. Gingrich and Co. would no doubt totally dissociate themselves from the New Left. But the comparison is intriguing, especially in a mutual dislike of liberalism and demand for less government. It may be that the Gingrich revolution is where the far left and the far right finally meet.
David Awbrey is editorial-page editor for the Wichita Eagle.