The Democrats have floated to the top in a state that is
sinking to the bottom. Even prominent Connecticut Democrats agree that the stewardship of
out-going Governor Dannel Malloy and – very important – a hegemonic Democrat
power base in the General Assembly has left the state in a precarious position.
There really is no need to sound the death knell here. All the lurid figures have been paraded often enough before voters: We are among the
highest taxed state in the nation; we are leeching entrepreneurs and
entrepreneurial capital to neighboring states, not to mention southern economic
powerhouse states; we can no longer balance our budgets because state labor
costs will always exceed on-hand revenue -- unless long-term labor
costs are permanently reduced, and this cannot be done because the party in
power in the General Assembly for more than thirty years is tied politically to
the apron strings of powerful state employee unions.
Democrats -- and some Republicans who style themselves
economic conservatives but social liberals – have put forward a false
dichotomy. In what sense, bright people in Fairfield County, drifting for years
from the Republican to the Democrat Party, might ask themselves are economic
issues NOT also social issues? Is inferior education in urban schools a social
or an economic issue? Are services for the poor a social issue if the state
feels compelled to rob poor Peter in social services to pay rich Paul’s state
employee costs which, once one includes benefits, are higher than comparable
salary and benefit packages in the private sector?
On so called “social issues,” are there any demarcation
lines at all? Can a distinction be made between a first term fetus and a third
trimester baby? Please don’t frown; that is what virtually all pregnant women
in their third trimester call their late term fetuses – babies. Is the
distinction between citizens of the state and leapfrogging illegal aliens a
socially useful one? Is a national border a demarcation line on a map only, or may it
also be a series of laws, administrative architecture and historical
distinctions on the basis of which an intelligent fourth grader may distinguish
the United States from, say, Guatemala? Does culture cause poverty, or is
poverty maintained by well-intentioned government programs that lock the poor
into self-destructive behaviors, which prevent them from leaving the never
quite adequate gilded cages in which those concerned with “social issues” have
imprisoned them? And what precisely does economics have anything to do with all this?
These are question rarely if ever batted around on the
campaign hustings, but they lie, shark-like, just below the surface of our
politics. And they are not insignificant and remote questions. Depending upon
how they are answered, civilizations will rise and fall. All political questions
touch the culture, because it is culture that produces politics. All economic
questions are at the same time social questions, because economics shapes
culture.
Connecticut Democrats wage political campaigns on what they
call social issues, apparently a third rail for Connecticut’s Republican politicians.
Two days after Republicans fell to Democrats in the off-year presidential election,
glum analysts, mostly Democrats and left-leaning political commentators,
reasoned that the social issues of center Republicans – even the slightest
defense of the intolerable President Donald Trump, for instance -- had sunk the
Republican effort. But there are no Trumpists and only an insignificant number
of conservatives in power positions in the General Assembly and, putting aside
three or four Connecticut political commentators who might loosely be described
as social conservatives, there are precious few right of center reporters
writing for newspapers in the state. Yet Connecticut’s Republican Titanic, we
are told, has been sunk by an ice cube – by Donald Trump, floating far away in
a Washington DC swamp.
Trump is not a conservative; he’s a Trumpian. Those spurning
Republican RINOs in Connecticut are, many of them, hapless anti-party enthusiasts.
Moderate Republicans in Connecticut have been thoroughly routed by progressive
Democrats, and a return to RINOism, Republicans wrapped in social-democrat
skins, is worse than a council of despair; it is a call to political
immolation. Republicans in Connecticut who forswear an honest debate on social
issues are essentially dishonest, liars in the marrow of their bones, whitened sepulchers. That is why so few of the
wards of the Democrat Party in Connecticut’s major cities flock to the
Republican banner.
Have fiscal conservative Republicans nothing to say to the
person sitting in darkness in our fatherless cities? Do they not hear the wail
of the unborn as babies succumb to doctors stabbing their brains? To the poor
and wretched, it would appear, they offer a deafening silence, while Democrats,
stuffing their own campaign chests with the tears of the wretched, easily
converted into campaign cash, offer them only eternal dependence and gilded
cages.
This is the stuff of which revolutions are made. But to make
a revolution, you must have revolutionists, a Sam Adams – who cared more about
liberty than economics; having given everything to the revolution, including
his own personal fortune, his band of brothers in Boston had to pass the hat to
buy him a set of respectable clothes, so that he could appear in Philadelphia
other than in rags -- rather than a social issue spurning Republican or a Democrat
who wants to keep their charges in an infantile state, the better to mother them
with suffocating embraces.
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