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.
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