RESTORATION OF THE REPUBLIC

Scholarly dissertation meets populist manifesto in politico Hart’s case for increased citizen involvement in government.

Disgraced when caught dallying with Donna Rice on the good ship Monkey Business, former US senator and presidential candidate Hart has spent the last decade or so restoring his image as a student and practitioner of statecraft. This phase of that attempt began its life as a doctoral thesis in politics at Oxford University. Hart’s thoughtful critique of the centralized state under which Americans live today is, in the main, free of the me-first libertarianism of so many antifederal treatises. “America in the twenty-first century,” he writes, “is a procedural republic deficient in the qualities of civic virtue, duty, citizen participation, popular sovereignty, and resistance to corruption.” What is more, he adds, the state actively hinders citizens from exercising the “republican virtues” that informed the Founding Fathers’ ideas of citizenship, with the result that the citizenry and the state have become remote from each other. Hart revisits arguments first offered in The Patriot (1996) and The Minuteman (1998) for increasing the involvement of the National Guard (the militia of the Constitution) in matters of national security, an argument given new timeliness in the aftermath of September 11. He also offers a consideration of Thomas Jefferson’s idea that the growing union should develop “ward republics” by which power could be devolved and local decision-making encouraged. Arguing that the nation-state is increasingly ineffectual in the age of transnational economies and roving bands of terrorists, a time “characterized by the erosion of national authority and the weakening of national sovereignty,” Hart makes a strong case for the republican virtue of allowing local people to make some if not all of the day-by-day decisions that affect their lives—and for the ability of the populace to undertake that hard work.

Despite some pie-in-the-sky elements, the argument merits discussion, and the prescriptions are delivered coherently and effectively.