The front page, top of the fold headline in the Hartford
Courant reads, “Dam breaks in
primary field.”
U.S. Representative John Larson, who has held Connecticut’s
First District since 1999, is being besieged by Democrat primary challengers,
among them former mayor of Harford Luke Bronin, regarded by most serious
political commentators as Larson’s most serious challenger.
The First District has been in Democratic hands without
interruption since 1957, and for all but six years since 1931. For the
mathematically challenged, that is a span of 94 years. The 1st
District castle, it would appear, is impregnable to Republican Party assault.
Chris Powell, longtime managing editor and editorial page
editor of the once independent Journal Inquirer, now retired from the paper,
pops the relevant question: Why now?
“In the 2nd District, eastern Connecticut, Kyle Gauck of
East Hampton, another unknown, wants to wrest the Democratic nomination from
U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney,” Powell writes. “In the 3rd District, the New Haven
area, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro is being challenged for another Democratic
nomination by a lawyer from the city, Damjan DeNoble.”
“Why?”
Larson, after all, is festooned with hard won political
power. He is anti-President Donald Trump, a backslapper, fairly articulate, a
longtime harvester in the Democrat political vineyard, and not opposed to his
party’s recent lurch to the left. If he has a problem with New York City
Democrat primary victor Zohran Mamdani, supposed by some to be a fashionable
updated Marxist, Larson is keeping his objections close to his vest. Most
recently Larson said that Mamdani’s mayoral Democrat primary victory in New
York City – with its focus on affordability – has enlivened his own reelection
campaign.
Both claim they are making life more affordable for the
struggling masses in different ways: Larson by preventing the piratical
billionaire Trump from reducing Medicare costs, and Mamdani through price
controls and seizing “the means of production” from greedy capitalists.
Trump and the Republicans claim they are restoring the
original mission of Medicare, a program designed initially to assist those who
cannot help themselves. Medicare, suffering from program sprawl, has become
cost prohibitive as redesigned and broadened following the Barack Obama
administration. Grandma, they insist, will not be thrown off the cliff. Neither
Larson nor Mandani seem overly concerned with deficit spending or frequent tax
grabs by greedy politicians. And neither appears willing to share with their
constituents the true cause of inflation, a political move to avoid troublesome
tax increases through excessive borrowing and devaluating the purchasing power
of hard currency by flooding the country with printed funny money.
Party structures grown old in a one party state such as Connecticut tend toward ossification and stasis. A disturbance in any part of the political organism affects all members of the party. Even a mild change within a brittle party structure threatens the whole settled political organism. Successful parties mark time in place and eventually become victims of their own successes. In true authoritarian structures – Hitler’s Nazi socialist party,
Mussolini’s fascist socialist party,
Stalin’s communist socialist party – change and dissent cannot be permitted.
Once you have captured the castle, you must defend it against all assaults,
however mild.
Against the socialist winds now blowing through the Democrat
Party in California, New York and many of the nation’s largest cities, all
Democrat sinecures, both Lamont and Larson are very thin reeds. The latest
Democrat Sir Lancelot in New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is a smiling, bearded,
charismatic socialist whose central campaign plank has been torn from the
pastes of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin. The banner under which Russian communism,
the perfection of socialism, has marched since Marx wrote Das Kapital is that
communism will have succeeded the world over when the party of forward motion
has “seized the means of production,” something, beginning with baby steps,
Mamdani has said he hopes to effectuate
as mayor of the city that gave birth to Wall Street.
Historically, communism and Nazism
are both logical and evolutionary products of socialist parties whose leaders
have historically been articulate, charismatic and vicious, all of whom have violently
seized both political power and “the means production.”
When should leaders of the Democrat
Party on both U.S. coasts – coastal neo-progressives -- begin to defend their
castle from an unremitting assault by socialists, a doctrine pretty on paper
that in practice has led ineluctably to a shabby, liberty denying Gulag Archipelago.
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