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| Looney |
Martin Looney is more than a state senator, a post he has occupied for 29 years. He also has been for 9 years President Pro Tem of the Senate, one of the two gate keepers in Connecticut’s General Assembly who steer the business of the state legislature when, as has not happened for a year, it is in session operating as a functional General Assembly.
During the last two state elections, Republicans in the
General Assembly were decimated. Dominant Democrats have nearly a sufficient
number of seats in both chambers to override gubernatorial vetoes, the
progressive contingent in the General Assembly comprises nearly half the
Democrat caucus, and registered Democrats outnumber their counterparts in the
Republican Party by a two to one margin. Unaffiliateds in the state outnumber
Democrats by a whisker.
Dominant Democrats have festooned Democrat Governor Ned
Lamont for nearly a year with executive powers that might easily have brought warm
applause from monarchs, autocrats and totalitarians past and present.
The general assumption among progressives in the state appears
to be that representative democracy is, so long as the Coronavirus plague
continues to ravage the state, an unnecessary encumbrance to efficient
governance. Both the General Assembly and the state’s judicial branch have been
in a holding pattern for nearly a year, which, as a practical matter, means
that a constitutional government that traditionally runs on three co-equal cylinders
– executive, legislative and judicial – has for a year been autocratically chugging
along on one cylinder.
Constitutional government will return, it is assumed, when
the Coronavirus dragon has been slain by numerous vaccines now available, thanks
in great part to former President Donald Trump, who spurred the development of the
vaccines by eliminating regulatory encumbrances, a best practice that easily might
be applied to spur Connecticut’s sluggish economy if the party in power should
ever decide to embrace economic reforms that really do “lift all the boats,” a
phrase deployed by liberal President John Kennedy when he reduced marginal
taxation in 1962.
The difference between the liberty loving liberalism of old
once embraced by Connecticut Democrats and the progressivism that is now all
the rage among Connecticut’s forward looking politicians is the difference
between Kennedy and Looney.
But there is another crucial a difference between
post-modern progressivism and the progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow
Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Old-time progressivism was a middle way between socialism
and liberalism, a moderate socialism without the dictatorship of the
proletariat and the violent overthrown of the existing culture.
In classic Marxism, a transformed capitalist state seizes
the means of production and overthrows bourgeois culture, sweeping away in its
onslaught what G. K. Chesterton used to call “the little platoons of democracy”
-- the family, the church, a science independent of the state, schools that are not propaganda instruments and, most
importantly, the liberty of the individual. All this is replaced by an
Orwellian governing superstructure, a Big Brother far more successful than the Spanish
Inquisition in rooting out political heresies.
Modern progressivism is fatally mixed with a theory of
revolution that rescues economic Marxism by reversing the process. The leading
proponent of this mode of capitalist overthrow was Antonio Gramsci, a sickly, anti-fascist, Italian
Marxist who reasoned that the Marxism installed by Lenin and Stalin in Russia
had failed because it sought to change the culture by means of a revolutionary
adjustment of the economy. Thrown in prison by Mussolini, Gramsci produced a
series of notebooks outlining a theory in which capitalism, which he regarded
as a cultural hegemon, could more successfully be destroyed though the
development of a replacement Marxian culture hegemon. Destroy Chesterton’s
“little platoons of democracy” and you are well on your way to installing
cultural Marxism. A capitalist cultural hegemon can only be replaced by an
alternative Marxist cultural hegemon that in time will grow strong enough to
overthrow the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores that
support a capitalist status quo.
Post-modern concepts such as cancel culture, historical
revisionism, the promotion of an ideological subservient “science,” a radical skepticism
that denies the very possibility of objective truth, the broadening of the
concept of oppression to include traditional social structures such as the
family and the school – institutions soon to be replaced by a panel of Marxian
political experts, financed no doubt by un-woke capitalists who will give to
the cultural Marxists the rope with which they will hang the capitalists – all
fall out of the Gramsci Marxian cornucopia.
Post-modern progressives such as Looney, who want to bring
about “economic justice” – try defining it -- by instituting a wealth tax on
property in the midst of a year-long Connecticut going-out-of business misadventure,
may not be Gramsci Marxists but, if not, they are prime specimens of useful
idiots, along with timid Connecticut Republicans who for decades have refused
to confront the Gramsci cultural blight evident wherever in Connecticut
traditional supportive hierarchies
are not so subtly subverted by cultural
Marxists.
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