On May 19, 2006, Newt Gingrich gave a speech in the House Caucus Room—the same chamber where, twelve years before, his colleagues had selected him to be their Speaker of the House. The occasion was the hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. (Gingrich had been invited by another former congressman, Bob Livingston, who then worked as a lobbyist for the Republic of Turkey, but Newt, of course, appeared in his capacity as a historian.)

Gingrich delivered a passionate summary of Atatürk’s career: how he made his dizzying and unlikely ascent from war hero at Gallipoli to architect of a vital new nation from the scraps of the Ottoman Empire; how his vision for Turkey required that he “modernize the people, not just modernize the government”; and how he proceeded to “turn the whole country into a classroom.” He spoke of the absolute reforms that Atatürk insisted upon, such as the banning of the fez: “When you start interfering with the very things people wear, you are in the heart of challenging their entire life,” Gingrich noted. His speech was apparently extemporaneous, and largely accurate, and it was clear that he meant it when he said that he’d been reading and thinking about Atatürk for many years.

Gingrich has often spoken about his admiration for Atatürk, and, while there’s surely much to admire, it seems unusual that someone running to be President of the United States would make such a point of touting his affinity with the father of modern Turkey. I asked M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, a Princeton professor and the author of the recent “Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography,” what relevance he thought Atatürk had for a U.S. politician. “Atatürk harbored very little tolerance for dissent,” Hanioğlu wrote in an e-mail. “He truly believed that his vision was not just the best one, but also the essential one for Turkish society. He ruled Turkey with a single party under his total control. His style of rule was incompatible with American democracy, based upon checks and balances.” But the professor thought I was being too literal-minded. “My understanding is that he admires Atatürk as a leader,” he said. “I do not think that Gingrich views Atatürk as a role model to emulate.”

That is a perfectly reasonable assumption. But Newt Gingrich is not a reasonable person. He’s left little doubt over the years that, as improbable as it sounds, Atatürk is exactly the kind of leader he imagines himself to be. The two do have some specific enthusiasms in common: Gingrich warns that sharia law is a “mortal threat” to the U.S., and Atatürk abolished Turkey’s sharia courts; Atatürk was a committed adherent to scientism, and Gingrich has a great love of science (or at least science fiction). But Gingrich isn’t ever as interested in specifics as he is in the big picture, and at times he’s explicitly explained his political philosophy by way of Atatürk’s. For example, in Connie Bruck’s long 1995 profile of Gingrich (which is very much worth reading in full), she quoted Gingrich at a fund-raising dinner:

Let me say one last thing, because I sometimes startle people, because I’m so intense and I’m so committed to changing things quickly. In the mid-nineteen-twenties, Kemal Atatürk was in the process of modernizing Turkey…. In six months’ time they transformed Turkish society. It is one of the great heroic acts of the twentieth century… done by an act of inspired emotional and moral leadership by someone who was regarded as the savior of the nation.

As Gingrich has shown in many, many comments over the decades, “savior of the nation” is a role he sees himself inhabiting. A small selection: “If you decide in your freshman year in high school that your job is to spend your lifetime trying to change the future of your people, you’re probably fairly weird,” he told the Washington Post in 1985, referring to himself. “I have enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I’m doing it.” In 1994, he told the paper, “I think I am a transformational figure. I think I am trying to effect a change so large that the people who would be hurt by the change, the liberal machine, have a natural reaction…. I think because I’m so systematically purposeful about changing our world … I’m a much tougher partisan that they’ve seen.” In a campaign speech that year, he called himself “the most serious, systematic revolutionary of modern times.” (It’s fun to imagine Newt’s reaction if Obama were on record saying any of these things.) Perhaps the most Atatürkian of Newt’s pronouncements was a handwritten note, made public in 1997 as part of the House ethics investigation against him, in which he laid out his “personal mission” as follows:

Advocate of civilization

definer of civilization

Teacher of the rules of civilization

arouser of those who form civilization

Organizer of the pro-civilization activists

leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces.

As Atatürk wouldn’t have said, God save us.

When it comes to what needs transforming, or why and how it should be transformed, Newt speaks only vaguely of “the opportunity society” or “classic American civilization”; the thing that matters to him isn’t the actual transformation—it’s that he’s the transformer. When he last held elected office, he often spoke of “sixty-per-cent issues,” in reference to his fondness for policies that would appeal to that proportion of the electorate; it was this strategy on which his heavily poll-tested Contract with America was based. He’s a paradoxical kind of vanguardist: he dearly wants to wage revolution, but only for things that are already popular, and it makes little difference what they are so long as he’s the one leading the charge.

Illustration by Victor Kerlow.