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| Brownson |
Orestes Brownson, (1803-1876), went through the political and religious enthusiasms of his day like a hot knife through butter. His forward motion progress came to an abrupt halt when, friendless afterwards, he formerly joined the Catholic Church. Some scholars theorize that Brownson was in his day America’s Cardinal John Henry Newman, author of The Development of Christian Doctrine and principally responsible, after his own conversion to Catholicism, for founding the influential Oxford Movement in Western Europe.
During one of his intellectual meanderings from atheism,
through Transcendentalism, to what Hilaire Belloc later would call The Path to
Rome, Brownson, the author of The American Republic, would insist
that throughout history there were only two political parties: the party of
stasis, and the party of forward movement, falsely identified by our current
neo-progressives as progressivism.
Brownson’s observation remains true today. But how does one
calculate the standing of each party within Connecticut’s post-modern politics,
circa 2026?
Is progressivism in Connecticut a regression or a
progression forward from the status quo? What is the current political status
quo? The answers to such questions are not what one would expect, because
political terms are fungible. Time, as the philosophers say, moves on, burying
in its wake standard definitions. The liberalism of President John F. Kennedy
is not the progressivism of, say, US Senator Chris Murphy. Neither is the
progressivism of President Teddy Roosevelt the progressivism of U.S. Senator
Chris Murphy.
Two years ago, US Senator from New York Chuck Schumer was
what might be called a moderate liberal Democrat, not unlike President Kennedy.
Most recently, for campaign rather than policy reasons, he has more in common
with Vermont socialist US Senator Bernie Sanders or Marxist flavored Mayor of
New York City Zohran Mamdani. That is because Schumer constantly has a wet
finger raised to measure the prevailing political wind, and the Democrat wind
for the past few decades has been blowing right to left. Within the Republican
Party the political wind, ever since Bill Buckley more or less invented
American conservativism, much different then British conservatism, has been
blowing left to right.
What of the moderates in both parties? Such are the
political enthusiasms within both parties that these ever–shifting movements have
crowded out the middle. My waitress at a diner in Manchester tells me that
there no longer is a political middle, and she blames the displacement on 24/7
campaigning. “It’s enough to drive you nuts,” she says, moving at warp speed to
deposit a plate of eggs, hash browns and sausage at a neighboring table.
There can be no room in an either/or for polite differences.
Every word becomes an act of war, but food, my mother often mentioned, makes
people less volatile. Rose Pesci would not permit political discussions during
festive occasions – Thanksgiving, Easter, and Christmas – when the extended
family showed up in force, tongues wagging. We all waited until she was in the
kitchen before violating imposed truces.
The war on the part of Democrats is a campaign war, one
involving political positioning and power politics. Connecticut Republicans are
concerned with policy and political issues: Does state spending exceed the
state’s gross domestic product (GDP)? What is the relationship between power
politics and the wellbeing of a majority of Connecticut residents? What are the
representational drawbacks to a one-party state? Does Connecticut have a
spending rather than a budget problem? During the past 30 years under
autocratic Democrat Party control, have Republicans in the state Assembly been
marginalized by progressive-minded committee Democrats in charge of admitting
bills to the legislature? And most recently, should important decisions
concerning public and private schools in Connecticut be decided by parents,
municipalities or state government officials?
In Connecticut, the Democrat Party has been for more than
three decades the party of stasis. Especially in urban areas, nothing changes.
We may say, along with the French -- the more things change, the more they
remain the same. The last Republican to have been elected mayor of Hartford was
Ann Uccello, in 1971. Figures are similar in other large metropolitan areas.
Outmigration in Connecticut, driven by high taxes, excessive regulations and
frustrating one-party politics, is mounting, along with stale profitless party
rhetoric. All the signs of the times point to a hunger for change and
anti-establishmentarianism.
If the political establishment is neo-progressive, real
change can come only from the right, not the left. The political substructure,
if not the culture and history of New England and New York, presently are
neo-progressive. A politician such as current mayor of New York City Zohran
Mamdani, popular with uncritical reporters and commentary writers, is wallowing
in a castoff quasi-communist socialism older than the failed anti-democrat
communism of impoverished Latin American states such as Venezuela and Cuba.
They are stepping backwards, not forward.
They are, in a word, unprogressing.
One can only imagine how the Author of The American Republic would attack such foolishness. Like George
Orwell, he likely would remind us that every political corruption is preceded
by a corruption in the language.
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