Posted on 10/25/2004 4:21:23 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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
Another political has-been from a party of has-been's chimes in.
Hart describes small-c conservatism as: national health care ... tighter regulation of markets and corporations ... environmentalism ...learn to scale down their lifestyles to something more compatible with finite resources.
Does this sound like small-c conservatism, or is it rather small s-socialism?
And Hart should remember that, whilst for a long time America's foreign policy was indeed "Containment of Communism" it was Reagan who changed America's foreign policy to "Beat Communism". And hey presto...
Gary Hotpants should fit right in with Johnny Gigolo's crowd.
This "flashback to the worst of the sixties, seventies, and eighties" is just strange. Americans are forward-looking... we don't dwell on the past, but look to the future.
A "has been" who could well be shaping foreign policy in if Kerry sits in the Oval Office.
William Cohen (Bill Clinton's U.S. Secretary of Defense) and Gary Hart are great friends and co-authors.
Gary Hart??? What is all this Monkey Business he is spewing forth anyway???
And why should anyone care??
Exactly.
NO DISCO!!!!
PLEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASE!!!!
The Seventies were the absolute PITS under Carter! Politically, Culturally, Monetarily and Militarily!!!
Make the bad Mr. Potato Head GO AWAY!!!
Jack.
Kerry says social justice would guide presidency
Senators Gary Hart and William Cohen, who might have been killed as a result of CIA-backed Contra terrorism if their plane had landed on schedule at the Managua airport. Source
Kerry Meeting With Nicaraguan Communist Dictator Daniel Ortega
I'd say he's just trying to shore up the damage he caused himself. Sort of like Bill Clinton. Every time I see the name Gary Hart, I can't help but remember the Monkey Business photo.
No, but it does make a politically-correct stand in for for what really needs to be done. That Hart doesn't get it makes me worry about his mentcal faculties.
So? Hitler wrote Mein Kampf all by his lonesome also. What were we thinking when we invaded Berlin to rid the word of him? Why, he wrote his own book, every word of it...
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. ....***
I was around. Gary Hart was stupid enough to taunt the MSM when they still had the appearance of neutrality and they buried him. I wish they were still hanging on to that appearance.
Good ol' Gary Hart, whose short-lived Prez campaign was based on, "Hey, Clinton was a dirt-bag...so how about me?"
Aw, now you have me hankering to find that old box of 8-tracks with "Hot Stuff" in it...
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