Gary Hotpants should fit right in with Johnny Gigolo's crowd.
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.
Gary Hart??? What is all this Monkey Business he is spewing forth anyway???
And why should anyone care??
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...
Good ol' Gary Hart, whose short-lived Prez campaign was based on, "Hey, Clinton was a dirt-bag...so how about me?"
Sounds more like little c Communism to me.
And the list of losers lining up just keeps coming...
Too much Monkey Business
...for me to be involved in :o)
bump
"A car in every garage...and on every lap, two chicks smoking pot."