The Politics of the Future: Gingrich, Gore, and the Conservative Potential of Futurism

Was futurism good politics? Both Al Gore and Newt Gingrich were convinced it was. From when they entered the U.S. Congress in the 1970s well into their fights over good governance in the 1990s, Gore and Gingrich were committed futurists, often seeking to outflank the other to define what exactly sound futurist policymaking ought to be. Their conflict played out in grand ideological terms and in their relationships with academic and popular futurists. This synthetic paper compares Gingrich and Gore’s approach to futurist policy in three seemingly divergent domains: government reform, communications regulation, and climate science. In each case, futurist thinking presented a moment of ambivalence for would-be futurist legislators as they used futurism to rearticulate progressive and conservative values. These politicians and their interlocutors strongly believed in the potential to politicize these technical issues, as well as the opportunity to benefit from new political constituencies already forming around technical questions. At the risk of taking Gingrich and Gore too seriously, as the philosopher-legislators they often imagined themselves to be, this paper grounds their ideas in their early efforts to anchor futurist policy in rigorous academic-style thinking, including Gingrich’s teaching records, proposing a new master’s degree in future studies, and Gore’s manuscript research. Both men, though singular characters, became representative of consequential efforts within their parties, and the nation at large, to braid conservative and futuristic politics.