Does Newt Gingrich want the Constitution to ‘die’?

Completely void of Kirk’s custom-and-habit conservatism, Gingrich has not only always been eager to follow outlandish “coffee-house philosophers” like the Tofflers, he fancies himself as one — and Newt has always been way over-caffeinated. Gingrich is really not the oft-perceived brilliant man brimming with innovative ideas, but a political schizophrenic whose philosophical center never holds because he doesn’t have one. Said former Congressman Mickey Edwards (R-OK), “I’ve known Newt now for 30 years almost. But I wouldn’t be able to describe what his real principles are.”

Business Insider’s Michael Brendan Dougherty explains further:

Newt Gingrich always has ideas. He has 5-point plans for fixing everything. He’s constantly pitching these “solutions.” Ever wonder why Newt Gingrich has so many ideas? It’s pretty simple. Ideas come to you easily when you have no principles to get in the way of your roaming untrained intellect.

National Review’s Yuval Levin has made a similar observation:

[Gingrich] exhibit[s] the technocratic countenance of the Rockefeller Republican — a program for every problem. Conservative humility about human nature and about the potential of technical solutions is not readily discernible …

Gingrich has supported so many liberal policies and ideas, of which conservatives now find so hard to explain, because he has no tangible guiding philosophy. Gingrich possesses the liberal fascination with discarding the past and advancing human “progress” yet none of the “conservative humility about human nature.” Gingrich’s “roaming untrained intellect” has led him to all sorts of fads and bizarre endorsements because he has never had a permanent set of principles to keep him from going off the deep end. In fact, Gingrich lives off the deep end.

Kirk wrote that “conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order …” In this light, Gingrich’s mind is determinedly anti-conservative — ready to revolutionize society on a “futurist” whim, even discarding the United States Constitution if necessary to indulge his intellectual fancy.

It should come as no surprise to keen observers that Gingrich would have endorsed a book that essentially said the Constitution needed to “die.” Still, such sentiment is a complete reversal of what the American right has stood for during most of its existence. And if Gingrich and what he represents is now conservatism, Barry Goldwater no longer has any claim on that term.

Jack Hunter writes at the “Paulitical Ticker,” where he is the official Ron Paul 2012 campaign blogger.