Atari Politics: Newt Gingrich and the Technoliberal Promise of Cyber Republicanism

Recent scholarship on the Democratic Party’s transformation in the last decades of the twentieth century has shed new light on the party’s deliberate abandonment of the New Deal past for a Neoliberal future. This work has challenged the staid narrative of liberal reactivity to the conservative/rightward march of Republican politics and demonstrated how the ascent of the ‘Atari Democrats’—a group of young, energetic “Watergate Babies” who consciously embraced entrepreneurialism, individualism, meritocracy and, above all else, the power and promises of government-supported technological change—signaled a generational and ideological shift in the party. Such a historical corrective was past due, however, the singular focus on the Democrats has obscured the emergence of a similarly oriented cadre within the Republican Party. Like their colleagues across the aisle, these “Atari Republicans” also imagined government-supported technology as both a path to reform the party and as a powerful solution to the country’s political and socioeconomic ills. Led by Newt Gingrich in the House of Representatives, the cadre practiced a particularly unique breed of politics that challenged Republican orthodoxies such as “free markets” and “small government,” and blurred the boundaries of the conservative-liberal binary. As Gingrich pithily described the Atari Republicans’ platform: “New technology, old commandments.” These party vanguards support for an active American state to foster political change through technological innovation signaled a new era of ‘Atari Politics’ and the popular emergence of technoliberalism, a latent but growing ideological commitment to government-supported high-tech entrepreneurialism as a solvent for both the contradictions of ‘post industrial’ capitalism and the tensions of democracy in the ‘Information Age.’ This paper will explore Gingrich’s technoliberal vision and how, in an effort to complete the “Reagan Revolution” and cybernate the republic, he and a variety of his purported opponents in the Democratic party practiced “Atari Politics” during the Clinton years.