U.S. Senator Gary Hart

No matter what you believe is happening or has happened to the political system. The end result is that we're currently in the center of some serious change. But where is it endlessly coming from? From the iHeart Radio Studio I'm Unplugged and Totally Uncut with U.S. Senator Gary Hart. “Gary Hart’s THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIENCE is a thought-provoking analysis of modern American democracy and how powerful special interests have impacted our national security and civil society. It’s a must-read from one of the brightest minds of his generation.” —Senator John McCain “Gary Hart may be out of office but he’ s not out of ideas. This provocative analysis is a welcome addition to the national dialogue that should take place in both parties, the news media and the electorate as we head into another presidential election with a political system so broken it is shameful.”—Tom Brokaw “This is a passionate and powerful plea for us Americans to recover the democratic-republican principles of the founders, a plea that is made all the more effective by the book’s clear and forceful prose. The idealism that runs through the book is not utopian; it is firmly grounded in the extensive civic experience of the author and in his clear-eyed appreciation of the realities of our twenty-first century world. It’s a very persuasive book.”—Gordon S. Wood, Alva O. Way Professor of History Emeritus, Brown University “Hart’s impassioned plea for reform seeks to empower political compatriots to rethink the direction of U.S. governance, thus closing ‘the gap between promise and performance.’ A proactive appeal to restore confidence in the American republic.” —Kirkus Reviews Why do Americans feel so bad about their country right now? Gary Hart—the former Colorado senator and presidential contender—argues that the answer has to do with the gap between who we believe ourselves to be and who we have become, in THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIENCE (Blue Rider Press; Publication Date: June 30, 2015; ISBN: 978-0-399-17523-7; Price: $27.00/$32.00). America’s founders, he tells us, created a republic knowing that it—like all republics from ancient Athens and Rome onward—would be vulnerable to corruption. By corruption, they meant something very specific: when narrow individual and special interests take precedence over the national interest and the common good. “By these classic standards,” Hart writes, “the American Republic in the twenty-first century is massively corrupt. A vast and cancerous network of lobbying, campaign fund-raising, and access to policy makers in administrations and lawmakers in Congress is based purely and simply on special and narrow interests.” He notes that more than four hundred former members of Congress, not to mention their spouses and family members, along with myriad former administration officials from both parties, have joined the lobbying ranks, becoming fabulously rich in the process. This permanent political class is very effective at serving the needs of the political and economic elite, but it does so at the expense of the middle class and the poor. It is a major factor in the stunning rise in income inequality and the persistence of shocking levels of poverty. From one end of the political spectrum to the other, from the Tea Party to the Occupy movement, many people have come to feel that politics is rigged, and consequently have lost faith in the very idea of government. Hart writes, “Much of our current unease in the land involves citizen alienation from ‘Washington,’ but it is also a latent but powerful sense that we are adrift, adrift not simply on a sea of globalization and international competition nor lost in a jungle of primitive terrorism, but adrift from our founding principles.” Moreover, Hart contends, a massive national surveillance operation that collects vast quantities of data about ordinary Americans—far more than is needed to fight terrorism effectively, he says—has sacrificed principle for expediency, endangered our constitutional liberties, and provoked outrage among liberals and conservatives alike. In the realm of foreign policy, he charges, we have relied too heavily on military force and far too frequently ignored John Quincy Adams’s famed advice not to “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Lacking understanding of the history and culture of the nations in which we have intervened, we have too often produced disastrous unintended consequences, from Vietnam to Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq.