Say what you will about the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, but give him this: he reads books. In his speeches and press conferences he routinely recommends books to his colleagues and to reporters, complete with bits of bibliographic information and constant reminders that he was once a professor. No sooner did the professor become Speaker than he issued his own crash course in American democracy for the Republican House freshmen. His reading list included some political and historical basics, like the Federalist Papers and Toqueville’s Democracy in America; some high-end how-tos, like Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive and Morris Shechtman’s Working Without a Net: How to Survive & Thrive in Today’s High Risk Business World; and of course some technobabble for laptop-toting revolutionaries, most notably Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave, about the vague new world of digital democracy on demand.

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As with all mass media, many of these books are more about marketing than about ideas. Neither of Limbaugh’s books or even Bennett’s Book of Virtues, for example, goes in for careful argument, documentation, or moral reasoning–the stuff that once distinguished books from newspapers, magazines, and television. They’re more like software, compendiums of sound bites and rhetorical flourishes that lend themselves to spin-off products. But they’ve allowed the GOP to lay claim to being not only the party of ideas, but also the party of books. Liberals continue to write books, but it’s widely known (thanks to conservatives) that liberals are so busy fighting among themselves that they can’t even agree on the basics of a liberal education, to say nothing of a reading list to go with it. For this reason alone Gingrich’s short course in New Age conservatism deserves our grudging respect. His book recommendations, however glib they may be, remind us of historian Henry Steele Commager’s observation that the intellectual foundations of American democracy are more to be found in books than in the popular press, and that in this America is unique among the democracies of the world. Never mind that the former professors now risen to prominence in Congress (Gingrich, Richard Armey, and Phil Gramm) are always getting their facts mixed up, citing events that never happened and people who never existed. In suggesting that our elected representatives read, say, the Federalist Papers, Gingrich makes all too clear that many of the revolutionaries who have eagerly signed their names to the Contract With America have little or no knowledge of the negotiations that produced the existing contract, the federal Constitution. Indeed, when the GOP rolled into Washington in January, Newsweek reported that on average the freshman class had read slightly less than one item each from the Speaker’s list. In most cases that one item was probably the Declaration of Independence, the first item on the list and a short and easy read. Fortunately some of the other books are available on audiotape, a big time-saver for congressmen who are trying to survive and thrive in today’s high-risk political climate while creating a new civilization without benefit of a safety net. But knowing that real revolutionaries never rest, I herewith offer my own reading list for the House freshmen.

  1. The Federalist Papers. The best item on the Speaker’s list and, we may presume, one largely unread by Gingrich’s proteges, this collection of 85 letters, originally published anonymously under the pseudonym Publius, appeared in New York newspapers between October 1787 and late May 1788, an exercise orchestrated by Alexander Hamilton in order to win ratification for the new Constitution in New York State, whose governor’s opposition could have dashed the founders’ hopes for “a more perfect Union.” Only after Hamilton’s death was his role in the Federalist Papers discovered, and only long after that did scholars find that he had considerably overstated his role, taking credit for essays by his two coauthors, John Jay and James Madison.

This who-gets-what version of the public interest is, the GOP leadership maintains, the reason the voters drove the Democrats from their congressional fiefdoms last November. They may be right. Interest-group liberalism is antidemocratic at its core because it avoids the kinds of moral decisions that a free people are supposed to make and for which someone must take responsibility. It is also antireasoning at its core, relying instead on the breezy blather of public relations. “In two peaceful generations,” Lowi wrote, “the American prototype has passed from Andrew Carnegie to Dale Carnegie.”

  1. Tube of Plenty by Erik Barnouw. Here I urge scrapping from the Speaker’s list Alvin and Heidi Toffler and their techno-pop prattle. From time immemorial futurists have been wrong in believing that technological advances are self-sustaining and self-determining in their effects. RCA chief David Sarnoff said in 1939 that television would be the greatest gift of educational enlightenment ever given to free men. A decade later IBM predicted that the world would never need more than five computers. Now we are to believe that the information highway will make everyone with a laptop a fully-informed and active citizen.

But the novel’s noticeably uneven tone and narrative are what make its strengths stand out. Huck lived in an America where a man could uphold his honor by shooting a child in the back, one in which blacks and poor children simply didn’t fit into “civilized” society, and where, as Twain himself later said, the surest keys to success were ignorance and confidence. What’s changed?