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Article: Hart, son of McGovern. (Gary Hart)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- April 20, 1984
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1984 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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DEMOCRATS IN Washingston who are climbing on the Hart bandwagon are now saying that his ideas are not so much "new" as they are syncretistic, reconciling the older liberalism of the New Deal with the newer, popular conservative Reaganism. FDR was the thesis, Reagan is the antithesis, and Hart is the synthesis. Reading Hart this way clears two hurdles: 1) his ideas are not, palpably, new. 2) Viewed as a synthesizer, Hart becomes moderate, agreeably reasonable, centrist; and so Mr. Reagan is pushed off to the fringe.
The problems with this view are manifold, not the least of them being that Ronald Reagan's foreign policy is certainly not the antithesis of FDR's. ...