Speaker Gingrich's intellectual gurus. (Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich; Alvin and Heidi Toffler)

Alvin and Heidi Toffler, the prolific authors and futurists who are to the third-wave information age what Fred and Ginger were to dance, have no recollection of their first encounter with Newt Gingrich. Gingrich, then an assistant history professor at West Georgia College, traveled to Chicago in the early 1970s to hear a Toffler seminar and introduced himself to the couple. Nor did Gingrich make much of an impression the next time the Tofflers met him, in 1975 at a congressional conference in Washington, D.C. "I remember his long Elvis-like sideburns," recalls Heidi, straining. "He didn't stand out," adds Alvin.

That did not deter Gingrich, who had loved the Tofflers' first book, Future Shock, because it reinforced his own views about the coming information revolution. He started writing the Tofflers and looked them up whenever he was in New York. The three became intimate, if unlikely, friends, doing things together like going to an off-off-Broadway play by Bertolt Brecht, the German Marxist playwright famous for his dialectical theater. "I suggested we see Brecht because it was important for him [Gingrich] to know," recalls Alvin.

Although their books--including Future Shock, The Third Wave and Powershift--have sold millions, the Tofflers have long felt snubbed by American journalists and academics. "Outside the country, we're treated as intellectuals, not blue-sky crystal-ball gazers," says Heidi. But no longer. Gingrich's rise to House speaker has also elevated the stock of the Tofflers, his favorite gurus. Suddenly, they find themselves the darlings of the GOP deep thinkers. "Thanks to Newt," says Alvin, "we're back."

Catch the wave. The Tofflers and their devotees, including Gingrich, see the past, present and future as a succession of rolling waves of changes. The first wave occurred about 10,000 years ago as humans stopped wandering in search of food and began farming; the second wave was the Industrial Revolution that began more than 200 years ago; the third wave is the emerging technology-driven information age. They see civilization as evolving from one defined by smokestack industries to one that is "totally dependent on the instant communication and dissemination of data, ideas, symbols and symbolism." As a result, huge swaths of the present-day bureaucracy, politics and industry are obsolete.

The Tofflers do not see themselves as swamis. They synthesize vast amounts of information, find the interconnections and plot models to explain the "possible, probable and preferable" scenarios for the future. Some of their predictions--although they hate the word--are impressive. Long before it became fashionable, they wrote about telecommuting and surfing the Internet, for example.

Still, critics dismiss their notions as vague and simplistic. In Powershift, for example, the Tofflers suggested that because ordinary people now have access to computerized medical databases, "the doctor is no longer god." But downloading medical data on a computer is one thing and understanding medical principles and jargon quite another entirely. The Tofflers can also appear impractical. In a recent op-ed piece, they criticized a 1991 federal infrastructure bill for allocating $150 billion to roads, highways and bridges and a "trivial" $1 billion to the much touted information superhighway. Such criticism ignores the mundane fact that the vast majority of Americans need roads to get to work.

Nevertheless, it is easy to see how those in certain GOP circles would find the Tofflerian vision attractive. One of their pet phrases is "demassification"--that is, the notion that mass production, mass distribution and assembly lines are giving way to more individualism and greater diversity. "The Tofflers' core message is the massive devolution of power from central government," says Jeff Eisenach, who heads the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which is Gingrich's favorite think tank.

Radical start. The irony is that the Tofflers began as self- described left-wing radicals. Alvin, 66, once worked in a steel mill and Heidi, 65, was a union steward in a Cleveland car plant; both fought for desegregation in the South. Today, they consider themselves neither Republican nor Democrat. Indeed, Alvin describes the GOP Contract With America in the worst possible terms a futurist can--as a second-wave document. "I believe the contract is basic, second-wave underbrush that needs to be cleared away," he says. "The only third-wave aspect of it is the emphasis on devolution."

They are also quick to point out their long-standing arguments-- Heidi calls them screaming matches--with Gingrich over abortion (the Tofflers support abortion rights) and school prayer (the Tofflers are against it). They say Gingrich's positions on these issues have hardened over the years. "Newt uses phrases like `This is a Christian country,'" says Alvin, disdainfully.

Gingrich and other GOP devotees also appear highly selective in embracing the Tofflerian vision. The Tofflers have outlined three principles for the 21st century. One of them--the notion of "minority power"--would surely make some traditional conservatives blanch. In keeping with their theme of demassification, the Tofflers contend that "it is not majorities but minorities that count" in the information age. The economy will evolve from mass production to boutique production; society will turn from mass culture to multicultures, they argue. Temporary coalitions of minorities (racial, ethnic, community based or topically organized) will come together to solve problems, they think. To help that process, they suggest that "weighted voting" should be used to empower minorities. The Tofflers make Lani Guinier, whose speculations about voting reforms created an uproar that scuttled her nomination as assistant attorney general for civil rights, "look timid in comparison," argues Robert Borosage, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.

Another of the Tofflers' principles for the 21st century is "decision division," by which they mean dividing up decisions and putting them at their appropriate level--international, regional or local. While many conservatives love power sharing between Washington and states or localities, they are contemptuous of international shared-power arrangements such as the peacekeeping operations of the United Nations or the newly created World Trade Organization.

The Tofflers don't care if their views antagonize or inspire conservatives or liberals. To them, both parties are strictly second wave. The third-wave constituency, they write, "increasingly expresses itself outside the conventional political parties because neither party has so far noticed its existence." But Gingrich has guaranteed that the Tofflers are getting noticed again--big time.