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| Twain |
I’m going to try and say some non-twitter-like, intelligent
things about progressivism, Connecticut’s media and what Karl Marx, were he
alive today, might call the “correlation of forces” in our own state. By the
way, I’m not sure how many people reading this know that for about four years
in the 1850s, Marx, then living in London, was the European correspondent for
the New-York Daily Tribune. He even exchanged letters with President Abraham
Lincoln. Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote for a European, not an American
audience. Their articles on the Civil War were later collected into a 325 page
book, “The Civil War in the United States.”
It might be well to start this discussion with some
undisputed claims.
Many editorial pages in Connecticut’s media are dominated by left of center writers. I was asked not so long ago “Why does the political orientation of reporters and commentary writers matter -- if they are truly objective?” I responded, by way of answer, that what the state really needed for some necessary balance was a few editorial board writers who were objectively conservative.
This was not well received by the questioner who, moments
before, seemed willing to elevate objectivity to an indispensable moral
prerequisite. Then too, I once asked John Zakarian, for 27 years the editorial
page editor of the Hartford Courant, why he didn’t consider hiring just one
conservative editorial writer as a check upon the exuberance of his
left-of-center staff? His answer was clear and unambiguous. “Over my dead body,”
he exclaimed. "I came to The Courant when it was known as a very
conservative, Republican paper," Zakarian is quoted as having said in a 2004 story. "It has
changed." Indeed. When the Hartford Times, a very liberal paper, closed
its doors, its staff migrated to the Courant, resulting in a paper top heavy
with liberals. Conservative views were pinched out in the transaction. We
contrarians are used to exclusion. The same isolation process occurs when center-leftists,
weary of the handiwork of progressive legislators – high taxes, excessive
regulation, unwanted intrusions into the private lives of citizens -- escape to
some center-right nirvana and change the whole nature of Eden.
With minor lapses, the Courant has continued its
exclusionary tradition to the present, though Kevin Rennie shows signs, every
now and then, of a rebellious, contrarian disposition.
And that is what conservatism really is: a disposition
in favor of conserving and passing on to our progeny a successful social and
political structure that we know will enhance the public good because it has in
the past enhanced the public good, whereas progressivism is an absurd plot to
make the world over, relying on long exploded quasi-Marxist platitudes. New
York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a perfect specimen of the
breed. Only in New York, you think. But political lies of this kind have many
children; truth is an orphan. And for the thoughtless politician, platitudes
carry a lot of weight.
The least progressive thing in the world is progressivism.
It is, in fact, a step backwards into a welter of poorly thought out,
half-baked ideas and disruptive social causes. Historically, progressivism is a
via media, a middle way between socialism and communism, its political kins.
These three systems of government carry within themselves the seeds of an
anti-democratic totalitarianism. And
totalist governments lead directly to the grave of liberty and justice.
Venezuelan socialism began by promising social justice to the people and ended
unable to supply toilet paper to its impoverished and whipped citizens.
In 1911, a few years before the Communist revolution in
Russia, William Graham Sumner wrote an essay titled “The Absurd Effort to Make
the World Over.” It was included as a chapter in his book “War and Other
Essays,” published by Yale University Press. That essay should be made
available to every sociology student in the United States, even at the risk
of disappointing progressive faculties that might consider the essay too
triggering.
I can only give you a brief taste of the essay here. Sumner
is talking about the politicization of industry and the baneful consequences of
“the denunciation of capital which we hear from all the reformers,” mostly
progressives. “Can anyone imagine,” he writes, “that the masterfulness, the
overbearing disposition, the greed of gain, and the ruthlessness in methods,
which are the faults of the master of industry at his worst, would cease when
he was a functionary of the State, which had relieved him of risk and endowed
him with authority? Can anyone imagine that politicians would no longer be
corruptly fond of money, intriguing, and crafty when they were charged, not
only with patronage and government contracts, but also with factories, stores,
ships and railroads. Could we expect anything except that, when the politicians
and the master of industry are joined in one, we should have the vices of both
unchecked by the restraints of either?”
These are questions that the media monitors of the Democrat
primary debates had never put to presidential aspirants Bernie Sanders, an
anti-capitalist socialist, or Elizabeth Warren, a socialist in a minor key who
has entirely lost the skill of computing the real price of things. You may
recall Oscar Wilde saying “The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Warren and
Sanders, both exuberant futurists who want to make the world over, are the opposite
of cynics; they think they know the value of everything, but they know the
price of nothing. It’s necessary to know both.
The Connecticut Democrat Party has been, we all know,
trending in a progressive direction for decades. Oddly enough, it was former Republican Lowell Weicker who opened the curtain on the Connecticut progressive play in
1991, when the “Maverick” politician graced the state with his income tax. Nearly
half the members of the present Democrat Caucus in the General Assembly
consider themselves progressives.
Modern progressives are playing with fire, because
the modern variant, profoundly revolutionary, aims to readjust the foundations
of Republican government and – perhaps more important – to attempt, absurdly,
to make the world over. Such ambitions are commonly featured in totalitarian
structures, whether socialist, fascist or communist. We all know that both
Mussolini and Hitler, the father and step-father of fascism, were socialists
before they were fascists. Karl Marx and Lenin were also socialists before
communism emerged, more or less full grown, from the fevered brow of Marx.
Stalin considered his brand of communism to be the perfection of socialism. Here in the United States, following the
post-World War 1 period, socialism was generally considered a bridge too far.
Woodrow Wilson, a progressive like Teddy Roosevelt, who brewed the American
version of the elixir, winked at Eugene Debs’ arrest, apparently for having thrown
his hat in the presidential ring as a socialist candidate for president. One
cannot imagine a President Barack Obama nudging Sanders towards a jail cell.
The late Sir Roger Scruton, one of the important conservative
philosophers of our time, understood modern conservatism as flowing from the
great continental, liberal tree that had its roots firmly planted in the
ancient earth of Greece and Rome. G.K. Chesterton, a liberal in his politics,
used to speak affectionately of the “little platoons of democracy,” by which he
meant the social hierarchies with which everyone living during his day was
familiar – the church, the family, the workplace, republican parliamentary
democracy, an independent judicial system, a free press, and the affections and
ideas that made Great Britain great – minus the empire’s colonial afflatus,
which Chesterton, a lover of liberty, openly despised.
The modern progressive despises both our familiar
hierarchies and Chesterton’s little platoons of democracy. A re-imagined Marxism
has for some time been marching through Chesterton’s little platoons -- most importantly
higher education -- leaving behind in its wake a wasteland of destructive pop-Marxist ideology. The Christian religion
must be replaced by an omnipotent practical atheism; the traditional family –
Mom, Dad and 2 ½ kids – must be broadened out of existence; republican
parliamentary democracy must be replaced by the “scientific socialism” of
autocratic regimes; politics, which is, according to progressives nothing but a
calculus of power relationships, must be enforced by a jury of experts, many of
them lawyers; the judicial system must operate as a lever to increase the power
of what some dour conservatives have called the administrative state – a crush
of seasoned, progressive politicians who know better than you what pictures you
should display on your living room walls. And a free press? Well, after the
world has been made over, how dare anyone call “free” a media that
that stands athwart the coming of a socialist nirvana yelling stop!
I want to spend the time I have left discussing the
correlation of political power in Connecticut, like most of New England a
black-and-blue state of whipped citizens, and I will spoil the ending by
telling you now that unless we are able in the future to re-imagine a sound
republic of vigorous, moral citizens, we will go the way of other one party
states, wrapped in beggars clothes, deprived of our fructifying liberties. It
is the liberty of free individuals that is the indispensable element in real
progress, brutally crushed by progressivism. And by liberty I do not mean only
economic liberty, which of course is vital to the well-being of a republic. The
wellspring of economic liberty is not, as progressives insist, the accumulation
of capital by millionaires and Wall Street stock bettors, but rather the
unleashing of dynamic creativity. The creativity of a free market is utterly
destroyed by autocratic government, which must operate in a world of free men
and women as secular deities -- omnipotent and, as George Orwell imagined in
his dystopian novel 1984, omnipresent. In authoritarian regimes, real progress
always ends at the point of a sword. That sword, in our day, is progressivism.
This sword has been pointing at our brains and hearts ever since Lenin in April
of 1917 boarded a train that took him from Switzerland to Petrograd in Russia.
Connecticut, one of the most progressive states in the North
East, has been in the throes of debt crisis for nearly 30 years, and it is
important to properly describe the crisis as a spending, not a revenue crisis.
Every time Connecticut has produced a debt during the last three decades, much
too frequently, its response has been unvarying – discharge the debt by raising
taxes. And we are well aware of the inevitable consequences of this fatal
choice. There are two ways to discharge a debt: you may increase revenue
through taxation, the road often taken by Connecticut’s progressives, or you
may reduce costs.
Now, the ugly truth about taxation is this: whatever you tax
tends to disappear. If you tax businesses, businesses will disappear. If you
tax income, income will disappear. If you tax people, people will disappear. If
you tax entrepreneurial capital, the lifeblood of any economy, entrepreneurial
capital will disappear. Environmentalists doff their hats to the principle by
encouraging taxation on gas and fossil fuels. Connecticut has among the highest
gas taxes in the nation – there are two of them, a pump tax and a port tax –
because, in the progressive imagination, the limitation of car use and the
encouragement of public transportation are much desired, though, as usual,
entirely impractical as an immediate solution to any of our problems.
The increase in taxation leads ineluctably to an increase in
spending, which leads to an increase in taxation, which leads to guess what?
Round and round we go. This vicious cycle, which results in a never ending net
increase in spending, might be arrested by means of permanent, long term cuts
in spending. But that solution is never seriously entertained by our governors
and legislators.
Why not?
Here is the answer: ruling politicians in Connecticut have
decreed that only revenue increases as a means of discharging state and
municipal debt may be allowed. And if the state’s total debt cannot be answered
by revenue streams that are inadequate, the state then must produce a new
revenue stream. For Governor Ned Lamont, a redundantly wealthy Greenwich
businessman who should be familiar with basic economics, tolling, a new revenue
stream, serves the same purpose as the Weicker income tax. It provides big
spenders in the legislature with a cost cutting escape hatch. If taxes can be
increased to satisfy debt, there is no need for prudent spending cuts. The same
cowardly calculation that gave us Lowell Weicker’s income tax in 1991 will give
us tolling, so long as big-spending progressives rather than cost-conscious
conservatives man the state’s General Assembly. After massive increases in
taxation – the Weicker, Malloy, Lamont tax increases – it ought to be
self-evident that excessive taxation is not the solution to ever increasing
state debt.
Your eyes will glass over, I’m sure, if I assault you with
too many statistics, but here are a few to conjure with. According to the
indispensible Yankee Institute, “Controlling for
inflation, Connecticut’s state spending grew 87 percent since 1990, whereas the
GDP [the Gross domestic product] which supports the state grew a mere 48
percent… spending on debt service, pensions and employee healthcare
benefits grew 174 percent over inflation” during the same period.
There are in Connecticut only a handful of willful idiots
who do not know that spending has outpaced revenue by a massive getting and
spending gap, and fewer still who do not know that costs would have to be cut –
if expenses could not be met through tax increases.
But our politicians have perversely refused to cut costs.
And why? Because, Chris Powell, former Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer,
might say, our representative republic, both in the nation and in Connecticut,
has been replaced by a government too cowardly to confront unions and other
special interests that demand constant increases in spending. We have through our votes elevated above us a
government that has tied its own hands behind its back through what has been
called “fixed costs,” that is – expenditures that a representative legislature
constitutionally authorized to raise revenue and distribute taxes refuses to
adjust. These include pension and salary contracts arranged between unions and
the executive and legislative departments of government. Real democratic reform
would change this governing template, destructive to all but cosseted special
interests. It would unfix costs, perhaps through zero-based budgeting. And a
cost conscious legislature, by reclaiming its power of the purse, would
unilaterally set public employee pensions and salaries.
The permanent government of Connecticut is seen by many as
an anti-republican power push the success of which has, to turn a phrase of
Mark Twain’s, gratified some politicians and astonished the rest. Do the right
thing, Twain advises, you will gratify your friends and astonish your enemies.
But always, always -- at a cost. The world turns on a little courage. Without it, we are a dead planet.
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