First Person Singular 2: On the Conservative Option

Part 2 in a Series of Self-Interviews: On the Conservative Option

Q: Donald Trump has been President for nearly a full term. When people are not trying to impeach him, or send him up on tax charges, they are chattering about him. CNN seems to be weirdly obsessed, but you have been as strangely silent. Why?

A: I doubt I could add anything useful to the general brutish clamor, and I’m writing mostly about Connecticut politics.

Q: But national and state politics intersect.

A: They do.

Q: In one of your pieces, you wrote that state Republicans stumbled badly in 2018 because they did not defend Trump when possible. You said Trump was not on the ballot, that he had come under withering fire from Democrats and anti-Trumpists in Connecticut’s media, that the silence of the loyal opposition always signifies assent, and that Democrats had stolen a march on Republicans that year, during a non-presidential election, resulting in a good number of Republican seats lost in the General Assembly.

A: Yes. Trump is, for better or worse, the nominal head of the Republican Party. To that extent, an attack on him is an attack on all Republicans, even those never-Trumpers who held their noses while commending Trump for having moved two important originalist justices onto the Supreme Court at some cost to himself. I certainly don’t think Trump can be defended in every instance. He is much too spontaneous and free with his tongue, jumping in where even the angels of his own better nature should fear to tread, and his vulgarianism has in the past been grating. Fourteen karat gold toilets -- really? He seems to be unable to decide on occasion whether he wants to be Teddy Roosevelt or P.T. Barnum. But even a bad penny has two sides. Trump’s boost in military spending, which had languished during the Obama administration --  a country that “leads from behind,” President Barack Obama likely reasoned, has no need of a well-financed military -- certainly is a boon to Connecticut, still in many ways “the provision state”, so called because Connecticut supplied George Washington’s forces with military provisions during the American Revolution. Pratt&Whitney, Sikorsky and even United Technologies were all Connecticut based, as were many gun manufacturers, some of which have been chased out of Connecticut by two gun-averse, US Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both of whom, I noted in one of the columns, were suffering from an artificial but politically useful bout of hoplophobia, an irrational fear of guns. Republicans were silent during the 2018 election when “the man who wasn’t there,” Trump, was not on the Connecticut ballot. This Democrat gambit worked, and Republicans lost hard-won seats in the General Assembly, ushering in a crop of young progressive warriors. This new contingent of progressive hoplites now comprises nearly half of the Democrat caucus in the General Assembly. They are the vote plow that long term impregnable rusting liberals like President Pro-Tem of the Senate Martin Looney will rely upon to move the state further left and neutralize the Republican Party as a political force.

Q: That has been going on for a long while.

A: True. Every so often, Republican leaders quail in the face of their own powerlessness. Democrats do not consult us, they sniff. But really, why should a majority party consult with the leaders of a minority party if the majority is able by force majeure to push through their progressive policies without effective opposition? If you’ve got all the marbles, you win all the games.

Q: How have Democrats won all the marbles?

A: It’s a good question. They could not have done it in the absence of a sometimes left of center media no longer operating on the principle that good journalism should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It is very difficult to think of any Connecticut institution more comfortable than the state Democrat Party. Democrats have controlled the governor’s office during the administrations of Governor’s Dannel Malloy, the first Democrat governor since William O’Neil, and current Governor Ned Lamont, a left of center politician like Malloy but invested, because of Coronavirus, with near plenipotentiary powers. Lamont has just extended by five months his extraordinary powers, which include a grant of immunity from suits filed against nursing homes and hospitals. The majority of deaths from Coronavirus in Connecticut occurred in nursing homes unprotected by the governor’s inattentive ministrations. Democrats control both houses of the General Assembly by comfortable margins. All the members of the state’s US Congressional Delegation are Democrats; so are all the members of the state’s Constitutional offices. So, if we ask ourselves the question “How did things get this way?” we should give some credit to Connecticut’s left of center media. Whatever happened, media critics in the state should be asking, to contrarian journalism? When was the last time any political commentator quoted approvingly Otto von Bismarck’s luminous line: “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied”? Has anyone in Connecticut’s media ever read Henry Mencken?

Q: There are two answers to that objection. First, Connecticut’s legacy media is writing with invisible ink. Legacy reporters and opinion makers are, for various reasons, no longer dogs waging tails, but tails attempting desperately to wag political dogs. And second, political bias should not matter among objective journalists who can lay aside their biases and tell it like it is.

A: The second objection is easily answered by asking managing and editorial page editors why they have not hired right of center staff who easily may lay aside their biases and report or comment on the news objectively. The first objection is probably an accurate assessment of the current lamentable condition of the news business. Papers are smaller and more costly; the staff that produces the product may have no firm local roots; and the product itself is stale bread. But the objection begs the question -- if people aren’t buying your overpriced, stale bread, it may be because your product is deficient or no longer satisfies a felt need. If the road you’ve been taking leads, time and again, to the same cul-de-sac, why have you not wandered down the road less taken. It may make all the difference.

Q: Progressives in Connecticut would argue that conservatism is a cul-de-sac.

A: Not in Connecticut. Conservatism has not been tried here and found wanting; it has never been tried. Name one conservative governor.

Q: John Rowland.

A:Rowland was a middle of the road Republican pragmatist. You remember what the Thomas More character in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons says about Cromwell the pragmatist. More dismisses him as “a mere plumber.” Weicker, who knew nothing about conservatism and quite a lot about political plumbing, used to wave the conservative spook-stick around in his campaigns, but no, about this and much else he was wrong. Weicker floated into office as governor having asserted in his campaign that he would not, once in office, press for an income tax. Instituting an income tax in the midst of a recession, he said, would be like “poring gas on a fire.” Weicker repented of this as soon as he was sworn in, one presumes on a Bible, and thereafter appointed as his budget chief Bill Cibes, a man who, having run for governor on a pro-income tax plank, had been soundly defeated. Likewise, Rowland was swept into office after he had promised during his campaign to repeal the Weicker income tax. Once installed as governor, Rowland, like Weicker, repented of his pledge – with what results we see before us. The last pre-income tax budget of Governor William O’Neil was about $7.5 billion. The present budget crested at $31.1 billion in 2016. The state’s non-income tax status was, in fact, a spending firewall; since the Wicker income tax, we have all been roasting in a spending fireball. The administrative apparatus in Connecticut has been liberal verging on progressive verging on socialist for decades. Following the administrations of Malloy and Lamont – a political protégé of Weicker, by the way – the state Democrat Party may have arrived at its Finland Station.

Q: Do you consider yourself a conservative?

A: A contrarian first. American conservatism of the kind embraced by Bill Buckley is the antidote to progressivism, which is, political philosophers such as Friedrich Hayek tells us, the road to socialism, which is the road to the Marxist miasma, which is The Road to Serfdom. No one need read Hayek’s book to be convinced of its unanswerable gravamen. They need only read recent history – preferably with their eyes open. The postscript to Hayek’s book The Constitution of Liberty is titled “Why I Am Not A Conservative.” Bill Buckley’s 1993 book Happy Days Were Here Again is subtitled “Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist.” Journalists should be contrarians embracing fiercely the doctrine of liberty. I would be gratified if I knew that, say, 90 percent of journalists writing in Connecticut regarded a one party state with disfavor and the same percentage thought that Coronavirus was an inadequate excuse for suspending republican government in  favor of one man, one party rule.

Q: You like Buckley.

A: I do.

Q: Of his many books, which ones do you find yourself returning to most often, as you’ve said elsewhere, for courage?

A: Gratitude I would say is the most lyrical, In Search of Anti-Semitism the most polemical. But all the column collections are entertaining and re-readable. More than his books, I liked the man. His critical sense was overmastered by his appreciative sense, always on full display in private conversation. He was a grateful man, a rarity among ink-stained wretches. Someone asked him whether he would ever seriously consider writing from a permanent platform at the New York Times. No, he said, “Not unless I could write the whole paper.” But the real joke was lost on his questioner. He was the only man I know who could have written the whole paper.

Q: Wither Connecticut?

A: Per capita, Connecticut has one of the largest public employee labor debts in the nation, about $68 billion and, of course, progressive Democrats have a positive genius for disregarding debt and petting public employee union chieftains. Our major cities, Democrat plantations for the last half century, have been crumbling for as many years. For Democrats, the answer to social disintegration involves the construction of ever more elaborate and larger gilded cages in urban fatherless households. Who needs dads if you can draw on the seeming bottomless resources of a rich Uncle Sam? The attack on Columbus statues in Connecticut’s inner cities was hugely successful, the attack on systemic poverty or the urban black market in guns much less so. Democrats, the liege lords of public employee unions, would like nothing better than to snuff out successful Catholic and charter schools on behalf of their permanent political clientele, while winking at under-performing public schools. The Democrat position on late term abortion is both implausible and deadly. If abortion were to be limited, except in cases in which the prospective mother’s life were to be in physical danger, to the first two trimesters, Roe v Wade would suffer no diminution. Planned Parenthood, which facilitates the selling of baby parts to “doctors”, is no less immoral than the Roman patrimony that used to expose unwanted infants, usually females, on snowy mountain tops. Dick Blumenthal, who never as Attorney General met a regulation he didn’t like, will survive media scrutiny as a liberty loving libertarian only on abortion matters, and no one in Connecticut’s stupefied media will wince when he pronounces “immoral” reasonable restrictions on abortion. Life in Connecticut, much diminished since the liberal turn towards progressivism, will go on in its usual faltering way, largely because incumbent politicians are cowards too much concerned with their own political survival rather than the survival of the polis. “Après moi,” they chant to themselves, along with King Louis XV of France, “le deluge." It is perhaps too much to hope for a restoration of what used to be called among liberal Democrats such as former Governor Ella Grasso and President John Kennedy “the vital center” in Connecticut and national politics. But, on the bright side, at least Democrat leaders in cities such as Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven, urban landscapes in which illegal gunfire and the funerals of children are not uncommon, may rest contented that their cities have been purged of the Columbus taint.