Salon's Gabriel Winant has looked at Newt Gingrich's various adventures in right-wing buffoonery in the years since he resigned the Speakership, including his new book To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine, and neatly encapsulated them as one sad man's desperate and unending quest for relevancy. He makes the case that there is no real reason we should be paying any attention to the “incoherent bile” coming from this “dishonest, pseudo-intellectual creep,” and that Gingrich should have faded into the political ether as just another former House Speaker, a name on a Wikipedia list.

No argument here. And yet, here we are talking about him. Why?

The answer lies in the failing-up culture of institutional conservatism, which boasts innumerable think tanks, non-profits, and media outlets that will happily provide salaries, speaking gigs, and publishing opportunities to even a disgraced, failed politician like Gingrich. All he needs to do is spout ideological blather and he'll have a ready-made audience that he can point to as evidence of his continued relevance.

Winant picked out two recent examples of “misleading nonsense” from Gingrich -- his demands that President Obama withdrawal Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, and his videotaped discussion of To Save America. For both these examples, consider the contexts in which Gingrich was operating. His demands for Kagan's withdrawal were made during a speech to the National Rifle Association's national convention and an appearance on Fox News Sunday. His videotaped discussion of To Save America was hosted by National Review Online. The book itself is published by Regnery, which is owned by Eagle Publishing, which also publishes Human Events, for which Gingrich writes a weekly column. Gingrich also boasts fellowships at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. His resume reads like a dossier for the vast right-wing conspiracy.

And Gingrich scored all these gigs after resigning from the Speakership and the House, ending a political career in which he presided over many failed and much-maligned investigations into President Clinton, a failed and much-maligned shutdown of the federal government, and a failed and much-maligned 1998 midterm campaign that saw Republicans lose House seats. All these things, not to mention his various ethics scandals, should have been enough to shunt Newt off into obscurity, making him at best a political punchline. But the wingnut safety net caught him, and he made the most of it.

So the reason we still have Newt Gingrich to talk about is because he enjoys the largess of a right-wing infrastructure that quite literally manufactures his relevance for him.