Let me separate the attention to Newt Gingrich as an individual from the institutional problems of the society. There is little question that bureaucracy has become burdensome and that uniformity in government programs is often not responsive to the variety and needs of local institutions. The US comprises 50 states, most of whose size and shape bear little relation to the functional or regional requirements of the different locales. We have states as small as Delaware and Rhode Island and states as large as Texas, where the distance from Brownsville at one end to Texarkana at the other is, quite literally, the distance in Europe between Brussels and Moscow. If one looks at gridlock in Congress, multiply that 50 times in the future.
Personal responsibility is a necessary condition of a truly civil society.
But the basis of such personal responsibility is to have a job, and if that is so, then full employment, not the deprivation of welfare, might be the prior consideration for the good society. Gingrich's vision of America is one of small communities tied together by communication networks. Yet such a vision has to embrace as well the reality of a world economy where the volatile flows of capital, currency and commodity markets, or the demographic tidal flows of displaced workers, swamp all nations. For a realistic reference one can look back to the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt. This is the hard work of thinking that needs to be done, not the chimeras of Gingrich's gurus.