“If ever a time should
come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government,
our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin”
-- Samuel Adams
A surprisingly honest Otto von Bismarck is reported to have
said of the politics of his own day, “Never believe anything in politics until
it has been officially denied.” Ironically, the attribution itself has been
called into question. In any case, the
apothem applies with special force to egotistic politicians who garland
themselves in glowing personal fantasies. We should believe their own accounts
of their own heroic actions, they vainly suppose, because they fervently
believe their own accounts of their own heroic actions, which many times are so
mixed with fantasies as to be laughably improbable.
To take a recent example, former U.S. Senator and Governor
Lowell Weicker believed in himself whole-heartedly and, despite his insistence
that he cared little for public adulation, he wanted the right people to laud
him, the more extravagantly the better. Weicker was awarded a “Profile in
Courage” award by the Kennedy
Center after he had imposed an income tax on his state. Declining to stand
for re-election in Connecticut, Weicker moved to Washington DC for a time where
he taught a college course on St.
Thomas More and himself. Public acclaim is the ambrosia of godlike
politicians. When politicians tell us they care little what the public thinks
of them, provided they are doing what they can to save an endangered republic,
we should resist the fraud by buckling on our Bismark or, better still, our Mark
Twain. Here is Twain on the Congress of his day: “An honest man in
politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.”
If Weicker did not want to go down in history as a heroic
politician, why ever would he have written Maverick,
a mock heroic account of his life in politics? Thomas More, whom Weicker admired
but misunderstood, wrote no autobiography. He was content to let God, rather
than the New York Review of Books, have the final say on his life and times.
Beheaded in 1535, More was not
canonized by the Catholic Church
as a saint until 1935 -- 400 years after his martyrdom. Weicker, with
some help from ghostwriter Barry Sussman, canonized himself, and an
appreciative media in Connecticut has ever since busied itself burnishing his
halo.
There are notable exceptions. No hagiographer, Chris Powell of the Journal Inquirer reviewed Maverick under the title “Mr.
Bluster Saves The World, a depreciation that somehow did not make the pages
of the “all the news that’s fit to print” New York Times.
Weicker’s state income tax, forced through the General
Assembly by both hook and crook, will be with us, of course, long after the
“Maverick” has assumed room temperature. Weicker spent much of his time as
Connecticut’s U.S. Senator -- a post he held for 18 years, until Republicans at
long last tired of his barely concealed anti-Republican animus and joined with
Democrats in a senatorial putsch – inveighing again President Ronald Reagan,
who appeared to have noticed Weicker but once, calling him a “fathead” in a
diary entree.
The evil that politicians do lives after them -- such is the
income tax, the gasoline tax, the cigarette tax, the tax on nail salons, the
restaurant tax on ready to eat grocery items such as rotisserie chicken, six or
less bagels, salads in plastic bags, only a partial list of Connecticut’s
encumbrances, as numerous as swarms of locusts munching on the harvest. The good politicians
do is oft interred within their autobiographies.
When journalists meet a politician whose ego fills the room,
they sometimes say about him or her that they are “larger than life.” This
plaudit is thrown at their feet, however, only when the politicians’ worldview
conforms to the journalist’s own political predispositions. Politicians hawking
alien and unwelcome wares are considered supreme egoists and a danger to the
republic. The political lives of “larger than life” men and women who pursue
policies recklessly without regard to hidden consequences is of short duration,
a firefly’s light dying out in the night, with this difference: the firefly
does not think itself a brushfire lighting the hearts of men.
“Why don’t you tell
them to widen I-95 down there,” he [Malloy] quipped during a walk through the
University of Maine campus in Orono, where his new office is.”
When Governor Dannel Malloy left office in January, 2019,
having served two terms, he was not trailing clouds of glory. Malloy’s approval
rating in office hovered around 25 percent, possibly because tax-whipped middle
class workers in Connecticut did not appreciate his lashings. It does not take
long for politicians of this kind to find a cozy berth once they have left off
ruining states. Following his decision not to run again for governor, Malloy
accepted a position as Chancellor of Maine’s university system.
The most progressive governor in Connecticut’s history,
although the state has not often flirted with progressivism, Malloy and Maine
appear to be a comfortable political fit.
Malloy once described himself, memorably and aptly, as a
porcupine. How he got that way is a matter between himself, his God –
Malloy is a Roman Catholic, sort of – and his confessor, if he has one other than
Ben Barnes, the former governor’s Office of Policy Management Svengali. Now
that Malloy has left the state, his victims – pretty much anyone in the state
who pays taxes – might relish the peace and calm following his departure, were
it not that he had been succeeded by Democrat millionaire Ned Lamont, whose policies
are not substantially different than those of Malloy. Lamont’s dip in the
polls, greater than a comparable point in Malloy’s administration, suggests
that Malloy and Lamont’s disfavor with the general populace is not due to
character traits – but rather to the abrasive policies that mark both the
Malloy and Lamont administrations.
Following in the well-worn track of former Governor and U.S.
Senator Lowell Weicker, Malloy resorted to tax increases, rather than
permanent, long term cuts in spending, to discharge ever-mounting deficits. Revenue
producers both in and outside the state took notice and, acting in their own
selfish interests, adopted lifesaving measures. Connecticut, under the Malloy
regime, began to bleed out, losing both entrepreneurial capital and
entrepreneurs. And since the state’s expenditures, both before and after the
Malloy administration, exceeded its assets, Connecticut lost revenue,
prolonging a destructive recession, a gaping hole in the economic fabric of the
state that many Connecticut governors and Democrat dominated General Assemblies
strived to patch by passing off state debt to future tax stakeholders. It takes Connecticut about ten years to
recover from national recessions – principally because cowardly politicians in
the General Assembly are loathed to bite the state employee union hands that
feed them and institute permanent, long-term cuts in labor costs.
“No people will tamely
surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is
diffused and virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally
ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight
without the Aid of foreign Invaders”― Samuel Adams
In the modern
period, knowledge is disbursed by such educational goliaths as Yale University
and Harvard. Ivy League students would benefit from a close reading of Bill
Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, first
issued in 1977. Students in Yale and Harvard are not universally ignorant. Here
and there, one finds among them disturbing pockets of rationality and common
sense: Yale, for instance, boasts a William F. Buckley Jr. Program, its stated mission “… to promote intellectual
diversity on Yale's campus.”
Fortunately for the
nation, not everyone has had an opportunity to attend such universities. Still,
debauchery is a tender shoot, at least in the lower grades in Connecticut. Libraries
are now inviting drag queens to read children stories to pre-school and kindergarten
innocents. In politics, social affairs and even prison, there still are lines
that may be approached but not crossed. In the past, one did not allow
educators to impose certain manners and ideas on pre-pubescent children. That
appears no longer to be the case. Then too, manners -- socially approved
behaviors -- have run aground on the rocks of Twitter. Leftists have crossed
the bar from progressivism to socialism, manners are no longer enforced by an
ambivalent, morally confused ruling class, and atheism appears to be slouching
towards paganism. People who cease to believe on God, do not therefore believe
in nothing, G. K. Chesterton warns us – they believe in everything. And, in any
case, the default position for those who have sworn off Christianity is not
atheism – it is the modern variants of an ancient paganism.
Dwight Macdonald
used sometimes to wonder: If the United States had entered a new Dark Age, how
would anyone know it?
Governor Ned Lamont is,
policy-wise, Dan Malloy without the quills.
Everyone agrees that
the ebullient Lamont is a nice man.
Recently, the governor conceived the idea of replicating the late 1960’s Woodstock
fest in – this should come as no surprise – Woodstock, Connecticut, and Lamont,
a millionaire several times over, generously paid the tab himself. Many of us,
rising from nightmares early in the morning, ask ourselves tremulously, “Are
the 60’s over yet?” Lamont, living in his own little walnut shell, has no bad
dreams.
Lamont’s political
career, prior to his runs for governor – there were two, the first unsuccessful
in a 2010 Democrat primary against Malloy – was jump-started by Weicker’s distaste for
all things conservative, a passion shared by successive Editorial Page Editors of the
Hartford Courant, a left of center Weicker-liker.
Weicker was defeated
in his run for the U.S. Senate by former Attorney General Joe Lieberman, who
managed to capture a seat firmly possessed by Weicker for nearly three decades
by pummeling his opponent from both the left and the right. In 2006, Lamont, Weicker’s
Hector, challenged the former senator’s old nemesis, Lieberman, in a Democrat
primary and, astonishingly, won. Both Weicker and Lieberman defended their
seats at a time when national political parties were undergoing ideological
renovation, the Democrat left drifting further left and the Republican right
drifting further right. Primaries also had long made a wreck of party
puissance.
Lamont lost the
senatorial general election to Lieberman who, spurning the party that had
spurned him, ran as an independent. Weicker, also spurning the party that had
spurned him in a general election, ran for governor of Connecticut and won in a
three candidate race that featured future Republican Governor John Rowland and
Democrat Bruce Morrison. Weicker garnered 40% of the vote, Rowland 37% and Morison
20%, a clear demonstration of Weicker’s prior political support among
Democrats.
To put it in the
least painful terms, Weicker’s political predispositions had long placed him in
the Democrat Party camp. Towards the end of his last term in the Senate,
Weicker’s liberal ADA rating was ten points higher than that of Democrat U.S.
Senator Chris Dodd, and when, later as Connecticut’s Governor, he imposed an
income tax on his state, Weicker received the coveted Profiles in Courage Award
by the Kennedy Center. Although Weicker
lost the Senate race to Lieberman in Fairfield and New Haven County, he ran
strong in the Hartford metro area, largely because of his strong support by the
Courant and state employee unions.
It is no wild
exaggeration to say that Lamont is a Weicker-Malloy protégé. What the income
tax was to Weicker, tolling is to Lamont and, underlying both, is a dangerous common
misperception – that “the state” is its governmental apparatus rather than the
larger universe of political and societal institutions and interactions that
touch us all.
A recent Hartford
Courant/Sacred Heart University poll sums up the general discontent with Lamont, whose approval rating
remains at a bargain basement 24%. But, the Courant advises, 47% of respondents
said they disapprove of how he is handling his job, a seven-point increase from
a poll conducted in May. Lamont’s honeymoon with tax tortured Connecticut
residents appears to be over; divorce seems imminent. However, if Republican
hopefuls feel they can coast into office in 2020 owing to the general
discontent with high taxes, over-regulation and ever mounting state budgets,
they should recall 2016.
In the 2016
off-presidential-year elections, Connecticut Republicans in the General Assembly
lost all of their hard-won gains, chiefly because Democrats, with an invaluable
assist from Connecticut's left of center media, were able to make the elections a
referendum on Trump -- even though the President was not on the election
ballot. Malloy had left the state, Lamont was, as yet, an unknown quiddity, and
no prominent Republicans in the state rose to a defense of Trump. Silence – in
politics and law – signifies assent. All this occurred, it should be mentioned,
before the published Mueller report had vindicated Trump from a charge of
collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Am an attendant lord, one that
will do
To swell a progress, start a
scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an
easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and
meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a
bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost
ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
When Dick Blumenthal
moved – after 21 years as Connecticut’s Attorney General – into the U.S.
Senate, he took his moral high horse along with him. It would only be a slight
exaggeration to say the senator was born on a high horse.
He early on showed a
proficiency in burn-and-conquer journalistic jargon. Blumenthal was the editor
of the Harvard Crimson, where he learned the importance of demeaning
adjectives. His background in journalism made his media releases, both as attorney
general and senator, highly printable “as is.” Lazy journalists in Connecticut
currying favor with a powerful attorney general more or less rented a permanent
spot in their papers to Blumenthal; he gave them the adjectives, and they gave
him a permanent berth. So frequent a presence in the media was he that
journalists began to mutter that the most dangerous spot in Connecticut was
that between Blumenthal and a television camera. Stampedes occurred weekly,
sometimes daily. Later, when Blumenthal began to feel comfortable in his own artificial
political skin, he would joke that he was known to have attended “garage door
openings.” Nodding approvingly, if wearily, Connecticut journalists unfailingly
showed up at every one of Blumenthal’s garage door openings.
The Blumenthal way
was paved by his predecessor, Attorney General Joe Lieberman, who changed the
office from a sleepy gaggle of lawyers whose statutory mandate was to serve as
the legal representative of the executive department and its agencies in cases
at law to a consumer protection brass band designed to afflict comfortable businesses
– and, by the way, crown the attorney general with moral unction that would
serve him well should he decide to move from the most comforting spot in
Connecticut politics to a more adventuresome slot, say, the U.S. Senate, where
his past practice would stand him in good stead. Both Lieberman and Blumenthal
moved from the attorney general’s office into the U.S. Senate, Blumenthal
taking with him all of his vices and few of his virtues.
Upon leaving his Attorney
General sinecure, Blumenthal deeded to incoming Attorney General George Jepsen more
than 200 cases whose principals had been stretched on judicial racks in
Blumenthal’s litigation chamber for years. Jepsen quickly dropped the cases and
pledged, if only to himself, that he would not use the office as a
self-aggrandizing instrument in which victims
were impoverished through years of costly, needlessly prolonged litigation.
In the U.S. Senate,
Blumenthal has reverted to strategies that had proven successful in his past. We are
all the victims of our past successes. He still performs weekly, sometimes
daily, before Connecticut cameras. More than any congressman, Blumenthal
continues to fancy himself a consumer protection senator. He has thrown up obstacles
to appointees to the Supreme Court who follow in the originalist footsteps of
the late Justice Scalia, and he lustily cheered on some of the more unsavory opponents
of both Justice Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Perhaps following
the precept that the exception proves the rule, Blumenthal has resisted any and
all attempts, however reasonable, to regulate abortion, at one point intimating
that anyone who presumed to regulate abortion was immoral. Given that Blumenthal favored
endless regulations on businesses in his state, his public posture on abortion,
as a coitus-unfriendly Englishman one said, is ridiculous.
When Cardinal Richelieu died the news was brought to the Pope of the day, who was asked, in modern parlance, to comment on the death of the prelate-politician..
When Cardinal Richelieu died the news was brought to the Pope of the day, who was asked, in modern parlance, to comment on the death of the prelate-politician..
“If there is no God,” the Pope said, “Richelieu will have
lived a successful life. And if there is a God, he will have much the answer
for.”
The same is true of Blumenthal.
The road to communism, we know by consulting history, has
been paved with socialism. Before Karl Marx was a communist, he was drinking
deeply from the socialist well. In fact, fascism also sprang from socialist underpinnings. Mussolini, who most accurately
defined fascism as “everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing
above the state,” was a socialist – and a journalist! -- before he became a
fascist, and the fascist regime in Germany-Austria called itself the National
Socialism Party (NAZI).
The worm that turns in all these apples is the same: the
notion that people, left to their own devises, could not properly and
organically become a successful nation. The purpose of the totalitarian state is
to save people from even the appearance of libertarianism. Liberty is to be secured by an omnipresent
and omnicient state for people.
Sanders has been bold enough to define himself as a
socialist and, since twice running on the Democrat ticket for president, a
progressive, we are to understand, in the fashion of presidents Woodrow Wilson
and Franklin Roosevelt.
It happens that there was a prominent socialist running
for president during the progressive era in American politics. Eugene Debs ran
for president on the socialist ticket in 1912. Debs had challenged Wilson’s
World War I draft, as well as the war itself. He was jailed for subversive activities, with
the approval of Wilson, in 1918. Among prominent politicians of the day, only
William Jennings Bryant made much ado over his imprisonment. When Roosevelt’s
Vice President, John Nance Garner, teetered too far left, Roosevelt exchanged
him for Harry Truman.
Socialist Sanders has not similarly been treated as a pariah
by modern Democrats, nor has he run for president on a socialist party ticket.
Democrats have been anxious to retain Sanders within the Democrat Party paddock
because, should he run as a third party candidate, Sanders would undoubtedly
throw the election to the Republican presidential candidate – President
Donald Trump.
To be continued…
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