Cicero
Freedom suppressed
again and again regains bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered
-- Cicero
The primary system in Connecticut was initiated to purge
politics of party bosses such as the formidable John Bailey. Governor Ella
Grasso, the first woman in the nation to serve as governor in her own right,
was a product of the Bailey system, now defunct. Under the boss system, the
party boss selected candidates for major state positions and presented them for
affirmation at party conventions; a delegate convention being conventional and
traditional, incumbents manage to retain their seats – why disturb the
political universe? – and the façade of democracy is preserved.
However, there is a downside to all primaries preceding
party conventions.
In semi-anarchic modern times, the candidates chosen in
primaries often are not acceptable to voters in general elections. A primary
choice may be a Hobson’s choice – that is a “choice” that is no choice at all –
because primaries lack what might be called “bossism.” No one is directing the
political orchestra, and what may be acceptable to primary voters often is not
acceptable to general election voters.
The difficulty arises because the audiences to which
politicians address themselves in primaries and general elections are
categorically different. Among postmodern Democrats, primary audiences tilt to
the left, while Republican Party primary audiences tilt to the right. General
election audiences are a mishmash of leftists, rightists and moderates. A
primary serves only as a political prelude to a general election.
No one in Connecticut can argue persuasively that U.S.
Representative John Larson is unacceptable to 1st District voters.
Larson has been elected and re-elected to his seat 11 times since 1999. His
age, we are told by his Democrat primary competitors, may be a problem. But the
proof is in the campaign pudding and, so long as the 77 year old Larson does
not, like former President Joe Biden, fall into the pudding, he may survive his
competitors in a Democrat primary.
The last time Connecticut’s First District fell into
Republican hands was in 1956. It is a safe bet that the current gerrymandered district is a safe
bet for Democrats.
The Democrats challenging Larson in a primary – former
Hartford mayor Luke Bronin and state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest of West Hartford --
have yet to fully unfurl their campaigns, but they will be facing the same
problem that confronted Vice President Kamala Harris once presidential aspirant
Joe Biden had been dumped by leading Democrats. Harris, who had escaped a primary,
was unwilling or unable to distinguish her campaign from that of then President
Biden. Asked by a reporter how her campaign would differ from her enthusiastic support
of Biden as his Vice President, she offered up meaningless platitudes and a
deer caught in the headlights stare.
At some point in the 1st District Democrat
primary, Democrats challenging Larson must confront the same question, possibly
during a Democrat primary debate.
The Hartford Courant tells us that
Democrat Party “experts” agree that a three way primary race will benefit
Larson, because Bronin and Gilchrest will split the Democrat progressive vote. True
moderate Democrat candidates are a rarity these days in Bailey’s old party.
Former Governor Ella Grasso, former President John Kennedy and Boss
Bailey were all liberal centrist Democrats. Now that Larson has effectively
presented himself as a left of center Democrat but not a zany progressive with his
hair on fire – think New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani -- Larson may gain a sufficient
number delegate votes to emerge as a primary victor in a contest for a seat he
has held uninterruptedly for the past 26 years… or not. He will doubtless seek
to prevent himself from falling into the pudding by limiting public debate, the
gambit of every American political incumbent for the last 250 years. In state
and national politics, rule always trumps debate.
During his campaign for the presidency in 1964, the
irrepressible Barry Goldwater noted in an aside that if you cut out California
and New England, “You got a pretty good country.” Since Goldwater’s day, both
California and New England have made Goldwater “a prophet unloved in his own
country.”
President John Kennedy, the author Profiles in Courage, was a Democrat liberal, a man who could and
did appreciate what later came to be called American exceptionalism. It is
doubtful that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the new face of the new progressive
Democrat Party, had read the book. Had she done so, she would not have called
the history and culture of the United States “thin,” and therefore
inconsequential, on a visit to Munich, Germany.
The current crop of Democrat Party technocrats in California
and New England are not liberal but progressive, and progressivism is a horse
of a different color that has more in common with failed socialist and communist
ideologies than the visionary architecture of governance the founders of our
nation discovered in the writings of John Locke’s and Cicero, the arch Roman republican
killed on the orders of Mark Anthony following the assassination of Julius
Caesar.
Western culture, AOC argued in Munich, Germany, is “very
thin” and forever changing. "Culture is changing, “she said. “Culture
always changed. Culture for the entire history of human civilization, has been
a fluid, evolving thing that, that is a response to the conditions that we live
in. And so they want to take this mantle of culture at the end of the day, though,
is, you know, is very thin."
But some cultural skin is thicker than others, and worth
preserving. It is nearly impossible to read any of the founder’s thoughts on
liberty and government without crashing headlong into Cicero or Locke.
Cicero’s writings, Paul Meany writes, “was not solely
a role model; his political writings were greatly admired as well. Thomas
Jefferson wrote that the Declaration of Independence’s authority rested upon
the elementary books of public right, among which he included the writings of Aristotle,
Locke, Sidney, and of course Cicero. Jefferson would also compliment Cicero as
“the father of eloquence and philosophy.” John Adams—who might have been
history’s greatest admirer of Cicero—wrote, “As all the ages of the world have
not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character,
his authority should have great weight.” Thinkers listed in common by Bernard
Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock, such as Algernon Sidney, John
Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Montesquieu, all share an intimate familiarity
with both the life and writings of Cicero. Even if Cicero had no direct
influence on a particular Founder, many of the authorities who did had
themselves derived much from him.”
AOC, both in Germany and the United States, has done her
best to avoid such frightful historical collisions. Apparently, she has
succeeded in flaying “Aristotle, Locke, Sidney, and of course Cicero” as “too
thin” and entirely dispensable.
In Treason of the
Intellectuals, Julian Benda wrote some time ago,
“And history will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates
and Jesus Christ died.”
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