However, the former First Selectman of Trumbull does have a
habit of fondling third rails that other Republicans running for governor fear
touching. Some of those rails – a hearty defense of the Second Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution, every bit as inviolable as the First Amendment; peace and
security in Connecticut; the socially disruptive effects of certain
Malloy-Lawlor justice reforms; the abolition of Connecticut's death penalty on
social rather than legal grounds by Connecticut’s constitutionally confused,
left leaning Supreme Court; serious crime
ripening in Connecticut cities; a
plenitude of illegal guns in a state that boasts some of the most restrictive
gun laws in the country; the baneful effects of fatherlessness among young urban
African American boys; and the constant chipping away of traditional morality
by pretentious moral “reformists” – have gotten Herbst in Dutch with
progressive social warriors.
To be sure, Herbst not only stands squarely in a traditional
Christian moral universe, his plans to
lift Connecticut from its economic doldrums represent the larger part of his
campaign message.
Still, there are those rails pulsing with electricity, and
also a sense on the part of many Democrats that Herbst is treading on sacred ground
reserved to Democrats, a part of their progressive moral preserve. The flight
from social issues by Republicans has surrendered half the political
battlefield to Democrats. That is how Democrats win elections.
And now the left has to deal with this interloper. It’s best
to make quick work of him, after which Democrats can set about winning
elections by couching all issues in glossy moral terms. Not so long ago, U.S.
Senator Dick Blumenthal, a progressive attached by a permanent umbilical cord
to Planned Parenthood advised everyone that any regulation of the
abortion provider would reek of immorality. Herbst, not unreasonably or
immorally, thinks that parents of children should be advised when their
daughters procure abortions.
A ridged division between social and financial issues is not
only false; it is silly. There is no Berlin Wall separating such issues.
Welfare dependency among what English aristocrats used to call “the lower
orders” is both a social and an economic issue.
When welfare payments are unaccompanied by work
requirements, you create a permanent dependent underclass that is certain to be
preyed upon by rootless and fatherless males. The notion that independence or
self-reliance is morally superior to a cringing dependence on the mercy of
strangers was the center pillar of the social philosophies of both Malcolm X, whom
some of his critics during his own day regarded as aggressive, and Martin
Luther King. Not far removed from crusading journalist Ida B. Wells,
who recommended arming black men who wanted to put the fear of the Lord in the KKK, King kept a
pistol close by; so did Malcolm X, bushwhacked by the hoods that surrounded Elijah
Mohammed after Malcolm X publically accused the religious leader of having illicit
sex with young girls.
And it was President Bill Clinton, no hard-hearted
conservative, who approvingly signed into law the “Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” of 1996 (PRWORA), having promised during his 1992
campaign to "end welfare as we have come to know it.”
That is the kind of third rail Herbst likes to fondle, even
as his own Republican Party has been for decades in full retreat from welfare
reform, silent on the matter of the Second Amendment, stonily silent as generation
after generation in the state’s inner cities drift towards social and moral anarchism.
Republican incumbents insincerely believe that ceding the moral high ground to
moral reformists like Planned Parenthood will in the end assure them enough
votes to remain a second rate minority party; better a live mouse in office
than an out of office lion prowling on the political perimeter.
In the meantime, cowardly Republicans continue to win
economic arguments and lose elections to gifted Democrat demagogues proficient
in the art of fooling most of the people most of the time. A thoughtful media
would blow many of them out of the water with raucous, cleansing laughter. For
fifty years and more, hegemonic Democrat political organizations have been
holding the lower orders in cities, many of them bankrupt, hostage to feel good
programs, gilded cages that shrink the soul and open the heart to endless despair
and misery. Herbst and a few fearless
Republicans know this, and they are roaring – ENOUGH!
Comments