Former senator and author Gary Hart. Photo courtesy Blue Rider Press.
One of the Democratic party’s brightest lights of the 70s and 80s claims that modern U.S. governance has suffered a drastic shift for the worse in the last few decades.
Former senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart says that a culture of lobbying and campaign dollars has made our political system “massively corrupt.”
After leaving elected office Hart wrote a doctoral dissertation on Jeffersonian ideal of the republic. He tells Steve Fast that Jefferson and other Founders decried the sort of Beltway-based government common to the present day.
“What they said was our republic would last only so long as we resisted putting special or narrow or personal interests ahead of the common good or what we would call today the national interests,” Hart says. “America is bigger than just a collection of special private interests and that is what a lot of government has become.”
Hart holds the media to account for the rising disenfranchisement of the public with politics. The former senator’s second presidential bid was derailed in 1987 by tabloid fodder. The feeding frenzy surrounding Hart’s personal life presaged the partisan obsessions of the Clinton years. A media obsession with scandal has proved popular, if not productive.
“Let’s redefine what is a scandal. A scandal [is] black churches being burned down in the south. A scandal [is] elderly people without medicine,” Hart says. “And people in the media ought to be careful of how they use words like that.”
Gary Hart has authored the book “The Republic of Conscience.”
Listen to the interview: Gary Hart on The Steve Fast Show
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