Gary Hart Urges "Grand Strategy" (Kerry advisor and possible cabinet pick)

BERKELEY -- If former Colorado Senator Gary Hart had his way, this year's presidential campaign would look a lot different.

The noted author of 13 books was on the UC Berkeley campus this week to promote his latest book, The Fourth Power: A Grand Strategy for the United States, and to issue a foreign policy challenge to all candidates vying for president in the upcoming November elections: "sit down for half a day and come up with a grand strategy for the U.S," he declared.

In a presentation at International House, Hart, an advisor to the campaign of Senator John Kerry, addressed an audience of about 70 people in the booming bass voice of a man long accustomed to public speaking. The one-time Presidential hopeful charged that the US at present lacks what he calls a "grand strategy", and put this deficiency into historical context.

He proceeded to outline some global trends that are rapidly changing the face of both national security and foreign policy, which will need to be considered in the formulation of a new grand strategy for the US.

Hart defines strategy as "the application of a nations powers to the achievement of its larger purposes." The US is by far the most powerful nation in the world, and Hart suggests that our "larger purposes" are threefold: to achieve security for ourselves and cooperate in the security of our allies; to expand economic opportunities for our citizens; and to promote liberal democracy around the world.

According to Hart, the central organizing principle behind US foreign policy between 1947 and 1991- after WW II and until the collapse of the Soviet Empire- "could fit on a bumper sticker" and can be summed up in three words: "Containment of Communism." This simple formula prompted the US to befriend any nation or movement opposed to communism, no matter their record in human rights, and overthrow the occasional government that was friendly to communists, even if that government had the popular support of its citizens.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991, Hart says US foreign policy "drifted for almost exactly ten years." The Clinton administration pursued a reactive foreign policy, dealing with events as they arose rather than formulating a unified strategy to guide foreign actions, he said. This led to a botched intervention in Somalia, and a non-intervention is Rwanda where nearly a million people died in ethnic bloodshed.

In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, President Bush called for a global "War on Terrorism", and that effort has defined the national "grand strategy" ever since.

Hart cautioned that the "War on Terrorism" actually represents the pursuit of Empire and global domination, and is not a viable or sustainable grand strategy. "Terrorism is a tactic, and you cannot declare war on a tactic," Hart said. According to Hart the threat of terrorism is metastasizing; growing "like a cancer", and is a symptom of mushrooming anti-American sentiment fueled by our current foreign policy of pre-emptive wars and "going it alone."

Globalization and advances in information technology are leading to the erosion of the nation-state and the transformation of war, according to Hart. The US requires new methods of coping in order to effectively handle these revolutionary changes.

Hart's own grand strategy for America, detailed in his most recent book, involves becoming a nation of production rather than consumption, focusing on environmental protection, energy security, destroying terrorism and using technology to share information and cement ties with our allies.

If all goes as Hart predicts, his grand strategy may be influential over the next four years. At the end of his hour long presentation, when Hart announced, with complete confidence "John Kerry is going to win," the audience erupted into spontaneous applause, but quieted to hear him utter a few final words: "I think the nation will sober up by November 2, and we will change Presidents. I certainly pray so."

"Postindustrial social democrat" *** After listening to a couple of his major addresses, and conducting a lengthy, wide-ranging interview with him, I would say Gary Hart poses a unique challenge to American political conventional wisdom. And there seems little doubt that if he were to make a serious run, and if he got sufficient attention, he could - at a minimum - shake up the entire process. "I have a rather archaic view of history," he says during our talk. "You ought to qualify to run for the presidency before you run, not try to figure it out after you get elected - like in the movie The Candidate, where Robert Redford asks at the end, 'What do we do now?'"

That's easy, of course, to say if you have published a dozen books, established yourself as a Jeffersonian scholar and just got your Ph.D. in politics - as Hart did two years ago, from Oxford no less. But what is striking about Hart is precisely his seriousness in pondering the role and future of America way beyond the narrow, Rove-like calculations of a political operative. He proudly boasts of "writing every word" of the thick, major policy papers he presented over the last few months. And anyone who knows him wouldn't doubt the boast for a moment.

Nor is Hart's political posture so easily pigeonholed into the limited spaces that now make up modern American politics. Perhaps the best definition comes by way of one of his former advisers, who says, "Gary is basically a postindustrial social democrat." In Europe that might be easy to grasp. But what does it mean in American terms?

"I can boil all this down into two themes," Hart answers. "First is to restore the ideal of the republic. The second is to shift American culture from consumption and spending to investment and saving. The bumper-sticker version might be: 'We must earn our rights by performance of our duties.'"

That's one helluva wonkish slogan to run on. But Hart is deadly serious about it. He's written a trilogy of weighty books on the "restoration of the republic," and his novel I, Che Guevara, written a handful of years ago under the pen name John Blackthorn, envisions a Jeffersonian revolution in post-Castro Cuba. He now argues for a renegotiation of the social contract in which the American people would take on more civic duties in exchange for improved physical, social, economic and environmental security. It's a vision, he says, that America has been able to glean only fleetingly three times in the last half-century. "There was that moment when we were asked not what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country," Hart says. "And that changed my whole generation. Then there was Clinton's brief, too brief, mention of an AmeriCorps." The third incident, which Hart describes as a "massive missed opportunity," was a week after September 11, when George W. Bush said, "We are all in this together."

The economic and social rights won through blood and sacrifice over the last two centuries have made America a "hugely" better place, says Hart. "But we have lost the other side of the coin," he adds. "Participation, responsibility and ownership."

On that basis, he sketches out a political program that is no less than a hybrid of socially progressive ideas and small-c conservatism: national health care, children's and citizens' savings accounts, tighter regulation of markets and corporations, a national energy strategy, environmentalism, and radical campaign-finance reform. In turn, Americans might be asked to pay a consumption tax, he says, participate in community service and learn to scale down their lifestyles to something more compatible with finite resources.*** LA Weekly April 17, 2003

Does this sound like small-c conservatism, or is it rather small s-socialism?

More the small-c communism.

***.....On the other hand, conservative misunderstanding of the left is only in part a product of the left's own deceits. It also reflects conservatives' inability to understand the religious nature of the progressive faith and the power of its redemptive idea. For instance, I'm often asked by conservatives about the continuing role and influence of the Communist Party, since they observe quite correctly the pervasive presence of so many familiar totalitarian ideas in our academic and political culture. Though still around and sometimes influential in the left, the Communist Party has been a minor player for nearly fifty years. How can there be a communist left (small "c" of course) without a Communist Party?

The short answer is that it was not the Communist Party that made the left, but the (small 'c') communist Idea. It is the idea, as old as the Tower of Babel, that humanity can build a highway to Heaven. It is the idea of returning to an Earthly Paradise, a garden of social harmony and justice. It is the idea that inspires Jewish radicals and liberals of a tikkun olam, a healing of the cosmic order. It is the Enlightenment illusion of the perfectibility of man. And it is the siren song of the serpent in Eden: "Eat of this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you shall be as God."

The intoxicating vision of a social redemption achieved by Them-this is what creates the left, and makes the believers so self-righteous.

And it did so long before Karl Marx. It is the vision of this redemption that continues to inspire and animate them despite the still-fresh ruins of their Communist dreams.

It is this same idea that is found in the Social Gospel which impressed the youthful Hillary Clinton at the United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. She later encountered the same idea in the New Left at Yale and in the Venceremos Brigade in Communist Cuba, and in the writings of the New Leftist who introduced her to the "politics of meaning" even after she had become America's First Lady. It is the idea that drives her comrades in the Children's Defense Fund, the National Organization for Women, the Al Sharpton House of Justice and the other progressive causes which for that reason still look to her as a political leader.

For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal-"social justice"-is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself. ....***

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