To the Connecticut Republican Sitting in Darkness

Why Connecticut Republicans lose elections

There is always a great deal of disagreement within political parties. But that is the dark side of a revelation, and the revelation is this:  members within political parties agree on most important matters. So let’s begin by describing broad areas of agreement.

There is general agreement that here in Connecticut Republicans have for a long time – too long -- been outnumbered by Democrats. Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republican in the state by a two to one majority. Both parties have been losing members to the unaffiliated column, somewhat larger than the Democrat basket. It is important to note here that unaffiliateds are not a political party. And because they are not a party, the notion, sometime peddled by both Democrats and Republicans, that a political program can be designed to sweep them into one of the two major parties is, at best, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Very little study has been done on unaffiliateds. There are two theories: the first is that unaffiliateds are party averse and therefore not open to any inducements to join either of the major political parties; and the second is that unaffiliateds are expats from the two major parties. If this latter theory is true, Republicans may rejoice somewhat, because this would mean that among unaffiliateds  there are larger defections from the Democrat Party, roughly in proportion to party members in the state.

Thus far, moderate -- i.e. fiscally conservative but socially liberal -- Republicans in the state have answered the Democrat supremacy by spurning some potent conservative ideas as too inflammatory. On social issues, they have steadfastly refused to engage Democrats, little understanding that Democrats win elections almost wholly on social issues. This reticence is one of the reasons that Republicans have had no presence within Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation for ten years. The last Republican member of the Connecticut DC delegation was U.S. Representative Chris Shays, a fiscal conservative who styled himself a “moderate” – read, liberal -- on social issues. Shays was displaced in 2009 by Jim Himes, who affects moderation when he is not agitating for the impeachment of President Donald Trump. Likewise, other Republican, fiscal conservative, social liberal members of the Connecticut U.S. Delegation were replaced by liberal fiscal and social Democrats, some of them trending recently in a progressive direction.

It would seem that Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, for instance, has sold his liberal patrimony for a mess of progressive pottage. He has fully embraced a universal health care program peddled by Democrat New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and socialist Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont. A man dropped from Mars would hardly guess that Blumenthal hails from a state that used to be called, not so long ago, the insurance capital of the world. Blumenthal has supported AOC reckless Green New Deal fantasy. He also claimed to have served in Vietnam several times on different political stumps in Connecticut, was called out on his pretenses by the New York Times, but appeared to have suffered not at all in the voting booth, so cordial are his relations with the state’s left of center media.

Political Tectonic Shifts in the Democrat Party

The national Democrat Party, in recent years, has shifted left in response to a socialist political tropism, a so-called populist, progressive movement that spurns the free market system. Socialism, properly and historically viewed, is a system of governance in which major decisions about the free market are made by authoritarian politicians rather than entrepreneurs, buyers and sellers, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” Whether life-server politicians are more capable than entrepreneurs of making economic decisions best left, conservative Republicans believe, to the free market is a hotly debated issue. Socialist schemes have given way historically to repressive governments, the long-term installation of corrupt, self-serving politicians, the supersession of dissent, the nationalization of primary industries and, consequently, a scarcity of goods. Not all political power corrupts, but unreasonable aggregations of political power may be corrupting, which is why we say absolute power corrupts absolutely.  

Two of the major candidates for president within the Democrat Party this year, Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, are clearly socialist evangelists. Warren wants to appropriate the assets of billionaires on the false but populist premise that her appropriations will then be used to finance her utopian schemes, one of which involves putting a “total moratorium on all new fossil fuel leases for drilling offshore and on public lands” and banning fracking, largely responsible for a reduction in energy prices, everywhere. It’s becoming difficult to gauge which congresswoman, Warren or AOC, is more destructive to the US energy sector, not to mention the country’s economy, which cannot run on the airy effusions of quasi-socialist politicians.

Warren is not proposing a gulag for millionaires, though her rhetoric aimed at the malefactors of great wealth is very hot. Sanders, who styles himself a socialist, may for all we know have a gulag sloshing around somewhere in his revolutionary brain but, to vary a phrase of Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi, we may have to elect him president before we know whether he really is a wolf in wolf’s clothing. The latest polls show both Warren and Sanders descending, a hopeful sign for the nation.

Two questions arise at this point: 1) to what extent does national politics influence state politics? and 2) is there a socialist utopia in Connecticut’s future?

The second question is easily answered: We in Connecticut are living in a progressive dystopia.

Most people will agree that national politics is the larger planet that exerts a gravitational pull on smaller, state planets.

During the 2018 elections in Connecticut, the Democrat Party used President Donald Trump, who was not on the ballot in Connecticut, as a political straw man to launch progressive politicians into office, an effort that was largely successful. Republican had whittled down majorities in the state House and Senate but, during this turnstile election, Democrat majorities were fully restored in both houses. About 50% of the membership of the controlling Democrat caucus in the General Assembly is composed of progressives, some with knives in their brains. For some odd reason, Connecticut has yet to give birth to an AOC. Their successful 2018 election venture provides impetus for Democrats to further blacken the character of Trump before the 2020 elections, and the impeachment process in the U.S. House may be regarded as a giant step forward towards this goal. Democrats have perfected this process through previous hearings on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Blumenthal, among others, leading the pack.

In politics, as in law, silence signifies assent, and there is no doubt that state Republicans during elections preceding the upcoming 2020 presidential race made no serious attempts to answer the successful assaults made by Democrats on the national head of their party.

The Trump Factor

However, the correlation of forces in the 2020 election will be different. The much anticipated Mueller report, vindicating the view that the Trump administration had not engaged in collusion with President of Russian Vladimir Putin to deny Democrat nominee for president Hillary Clinton her highly anticipated eight years in the White House, had not yet appeared publicly before the 2018 elections. Mark Twain is credited, some say falsely, with having said that “a lie travels half way around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on.” But the aphorism certainly applies here. Trump served as a Democrat straw man during the 2018 election, Republican were loathed to defend him, and state Democrats consequently reaped a rich harvest.

Now, Trump has hardly been given a clean bill of health by Democrats intent on impeaching him – or, more importantly, by a media Trump regularly accuses of putting out “fake news” and yielding supinely to Democrat Party propaganda.  Democrats have been trying for three years to call foul on the 2016 election. This has made Trump more bilious than he was when, during the Republican primary, he was calling fire down on the heads of Republican primary presidential contestants. Victory has not made him less any the less twittery.

However, other presidents, it should be here noted, were also bilious, President Andrew Jackson notably among them. When the father of the modern Democrat Party lost a battle with the Supreme Court, he declared that the Chief Justice of the high court had rendered his decision – “now let him enforce it.” And, of course, Jackson went along on his merry way, undeterred by high court opinions. When South Carolina Senator John Calhoun defied Jackson, the President messaged him, saying in so many words that if Calhoun did not relent in his opposition, he would send the U.S. Army to South Carolina under orders that they were to hang Calhoun from the nearest oak tree.

Calhoun was a gifted orator and a sometimes unorthodox but brilliant political talent. In one of his most famous writings, the “Exposition and Protest,” drafted for the South Carolina legislature, Calhoun claimed original sovereignty for the people acting through the states, whenever the federal government exceeded its constitutional powers, and advocated a state veto or nullification of any national law held to impinge on minority interests.

When, under progressive Governor Dannel Malloy, state Democrats erected sanctuary cities throughout Connecticut, thus nullifying federal law, they were, perhaps unknowingly, drawing inspiration and ideas from Calhoun’s “Exposition and Protest.” The whole state of Connecticut is now a nullification state. One might suppose state Republicans would make use of the nullification of federal law in any effective state-wide campaign but, alas, this issue does not turn on the economy, and Republicans in the state have long since ceded ground on all significant social issues to Democrats.

The Forgotten Cities

Republicans know, and have known for some time, that it is not possible to change the correlation of political forces in Connecticut without sending political missionaries into the state’s three largest cities – New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford – all of them bastions of a long-standing Democrat Party hegemony. Hartford last elected a Republican mayor in 1971, Bridgeport in 1990 and New Haven in 1945.

Sardonically praising equality, playwright Anatole France wrote of the “sublime majesty of the law” that forbids both rich and poor alike to beg in the street, steal bread or sleep under the bridges across the Seine. Desperately hunting for the African America vote, President Lyndon Johnson was reported to have said of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which garnered more Republican than Democrat affirmative votes,  “I’ll have those nig***rs voting Democratic for 200 years.” Snopes, a left-leaning verification site, regards the quote as “unproven,” but the cite notes that the quote, verified by named sources, was perfectly in character.

Johnson “reportedly referred to the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as the “nig***r bill” in more than one private phone conversation with Senate colleagues. And he reportedly said upon appointing African-American judge Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, ‘Son, when I appoint a nig***r to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nig***r.’… In Senate cloakrooms and staff meetings, Johnson was practically a connoisseur of the word. According to Johnson biographer Robert Caro, Johnson would calibrate his pronunciations by region, using “nigra” with some southern legislators and “negra” with others. Discussing civil rights legislation with men like Mississippi Democrat James Eastland, who committed most of his life to defending white supremacy, he’d simply call it “the nig***r bill.”

In his 2004 book Moyers on America, Bill Moyers noted that Johnson was euphoric after having signed the Civil Rights Act. But later the same night Moyers found him in a doubtful mood: “I found him in a melancholy mood as he lay in bed reading the bulldog edition of the Washington Post with headlines celebrating the day. I asked him what was troubling him. ‘I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.’”

In the long run, Johnsons War on Poverty, highly successful in capturing the African American vote for Democrats -- especially in urban areas -- was about as unsuccessful as his prosecution of the Vietnam War. The immediate victors of the Vietnam War, after it had been shut down by President Richard Nixon, were such as Jane Fonda and John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Vietnam vet who rode his opposition to the war into the U.S. Senate.

Useful to Democrat politicians, Johnson’s “war on poverty” locked the poor into a welfare system that, many now agree, is no friend of the poor. While it is true that the poor shall always be with us, it is no sign of progress that the same poor shall always be with us.

Christianity, which modern politicians on the stump tend to leave in the closet when they go politicking among the poor, imposes upon Christians who art not what Jacques Maritain calls “practical atheists” an inescapable obligation to the poor. We Christians, Jews and Muslims are in their debt, and we must behave towards them in a way that lifts them out of the poverty and places them on the broad way to prosperity.

Not only did the War on Poverty fail to reduce marginal poverty, it erected barriers that effectively prevent access to a general prosperity that depends chiefly on the stability of marriage, access to the market place and most damagingly, assures that the same poor will remain poor, passing on to their children crippling pathologies that serve as the retaining walls to a sub-culture that is more enduring than the comforting solutions progressives hold out to the permanent underclass. There is nothing Christian in this at all.