The odd trio The Tofflers, Gingrich look to crest on the Third Wave

WASHINGTON -- Frederick the Great had Voltaire, Franklin Roosevelt had Felix Frankfurter, and John Kennedy had Arthur Schlesinger Jr., but never in the history of political mentors has there been a relationship quite like that of House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Alvin and Heidi Toffler.

For decades the Tofflers have been heroes to a cult of futurists, many of them on the left. But in the past several months they have emerged as perhaps the leading theorists to Gingrich and the revolutionaries on the right who just took over the House.

The Tofflers speak of "the demassification of mass-production," of the "growing noninterchangeability of labor" and of "the precybernetic machine." They assert that "as the super-symbolic economy unfolds, the proletariat becomes a cognitariat."

But as inscrutable as some of their rhetoric may seem, the Tofflers, who began conducting a dialogue with Gingrich long before he entered the House, are speaking the language of the new Republican Party and the future its insurgents hope to make for themselves.

At the heart of the Toffler ethos is the notion that the world is in the throes of a transition to civilization's "third wave," a revolution of information technology and rapid change that follows the first two waves, the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. "The third wave," the Tofflers write, "will sweep across history and complete itself in a few decades."

The Tofflers have promoted the "third wave" theory since his book by the same name appeared in 1980. The volume has been translated into nearly two dozen languages and attracted enthusiastic attention among futurists, but the Tofflers' theory didn't cause waves in mainstream political circles until Gingrich became speaker and until the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a group that sponsors Gingrich's college course, promoted their views.

Like much of their thinking, the Tofflers' association with Gingrich shatters conventional assumptions. American conservatives traditionally have talked of a bright future but have found comfort in the past, its simple verities, its alluring folklore. Gingrich, by contrast, is a conservative whose obsession with the future has made him almost a caricature.

Despite their differences, the Tofflers, who traffic in high-toned rhetoric, and Gingrich, whose language has mobilized a suburban, middle-class constituency, have much in common. They are future-oriented, but also iconoclastic, rebels by temperament and choice. They share a strategy: Seize the future by identifying what it will be.

"The Third Wave forces in America have yet to find their voice," the Tofflers wrote last year. "The political party that gives it to them will dominate the American future. And when that happens a new, dramatically different America will rise from the ruins of the late 20th century."

Many critics, particularly in Washington, dismiss the Tofflers variously as vague, as masters of the obvious or even as cranks.

"Most of this is an excuse for very sloppy thinking," says Bruce Freed, a Washington consultant and former Democratic leadership aide. "When you're talking about blue skies, you don't have to be very specific."

Robert L. Borosage, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal Washington think tank, adds: "The Tofflers' ideas can be goofy and fun, but you wouldn't want to base your country's policy on it."

Even some Republicans are uncomfortable with the Tofflers and are troubled about their relationship with Gingrich, particularly after Heidi Toffler and Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, the new-age wife of former Rep. Michael Huffington, engaged in a colloquy at a Washington conference this month about the role of women in politics. "It drives some people nuts that Newt's so close to them," says Frank Luntz, the GOP pollster.

But Gingrich's intellectual life is like a salad bar: He samples from a variety of bowls and bins. He has seized upon the thinking of the Tofflers both for the substance of their views and for the value of their thinking as a metaphor, permitting those in his circle to dismiss opponents by saying, disparagingly, that they are "second wave" -- the put-down of choice on the new Capitol Hill.

"The Tofflers give Newt a paradigm for thinking about what he'd like the country to look like," says David Rehr, who is close to Gingrich and who serves as vice president of government relations for the National Association of Beer Wholesalers.

But Gingrich is also attracted to the Tofflers because of the way they think, attacking a problem with unusual methods of analysis. They first burst on the scene with "Future Shock," a 1970 book about the increasingly rapid pace of change that gave voice to the difficulties of life in the modern age and made such an impression on contemporary culture that the title phrase is listed in Webster's New World Dictionary.

"It's less the specifics than the way of thinking that attracts Newt," Luntz says. "It's not to allow yourself to think that just because things have been done one way they always have to be done that way."

The Tofflers have in mind an America whose differences from the present are more dramatic than simply the fact that one 140-year-old political party, the Republican Party, has replaced another ancient political party, the Democrat Party, at the top of the legislative branch of the world's longest-running democracy. They envision fundamental change, not only in the content of our politics but in the nature of our politics.

They believe, for example, that contemporary American political institutions are unsuited for a plugged-in, wired-up world. "The fact is," they write, "that building a Third Wave civilization on the wreckage of Second Wave institutions involves the design of new, more appropriate political structures." They envision "a protracted battle to radically overhaul" not only the Congress but the British House of Commons, the French Chamber of Deputies, the German Bundestag, Japan's Diet and other institutions.

The Gingrich "reforms" of the House -- changing the names and structures of committees, altering the way the body works -- thus are consistent with the Toffler vision. But that vision also includes new ways of governing because, as they put it, "majority rule, the key legitimating principle of the Second Wave era, is increasingly obsolete."

It is minorities, not majorities, that count, and the Tofflers call for a democracy of minorities: ways to let small, often self-identifying, groups assert their principles and prerogatives.

"We need new approaches designed for a democracy of minorities -- methods whose purpose is to reveal differences rather than to paper them over with forced or fake majorities based on exclusionary voting, sophistic framing of the issues or rigged electoral procedures," they write. "We need, in short, to modernize the entire system so as to strengthen the role of diverse minorities, yet permit them to form majorities."

The Tofflers call for "imaginative new arrangements for accommodating and legitimating diversity."

The Founding Fathers came up with imaginative new arrangements for governing more than two centuries ago. Since then, their notions have been celebrated in this country and copied abroad, and though thinkers like the Tofflers may disparage the American system as "Second Wave," many contemporary Americans are loath to tinker with it. That impulse is so strong that President Clinton was forced in June 1993 to abandon his selection of Lani Guinier to head the Justice Department's civil rights division, because the University of Pennsylvania law professor had toyed with alternative voting schemes to assure minority representation,

"If Toffler is {Gingrich's} guru, I wonder why he discards some essential principles," Borosage says. "The essence of the Third Wave is the emergence of minorities and finding ways of empowering them, but the essence of Gingrich conservatism is to represent a white majority being infringed upon by pushy minorities."

Whatever the limits of the contemporary political system, according to the view of both the Tofflers and the speaker, the Democrats, with their ties to organized labor and the established ways of the old Congress, are "Second Wave," caught in the web of an industrial-based world that is fast-disappearing and accomplished in the art of winning roads and public-works projects that form the infrastructure of a way of life that is quickly being overtaken.

But the Tofflers make an important distinction among Republicans, dividing them among the traditional Republicans who "are still beholden to some of the Second Wave past, and to their trade associations, lobbies, and policy-formulating round tables," and the new, high-tech Republicans who are attuned to the changes in the workplace and in the economy.

For that reason the Tofflers, who nonetheless have kind words for Democrats such as Vice President Al Gore, worked assiduously to cement their relationship with Gingrich.

"The failure of the Democrats to make themselves the party of the future (as, indeed, they once were) throws the door wide open for their adversaries," the Tofflers write. "The Republicans, less rooted in the old industrial Northeast, thus have an opportunity to position themselves as the party of the Third Wave."