Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Emerson, anticipating Darwin, said that to become perfect is to have changed often. But there are, in human affairs, two kinds of change, one leading to perfection and the other to social perdition. To take one example at random, the revolutionary changes introduced in the late 19 th century by Karl Marx and other socialist/communists did not lead to social perfection. They led to enforced conformity and the totalitarian menace both in Germany and Russia, and the principal beneficiaries of the revolutionary changes was the totalist state. The vanguard of the proletariat in Russia made out like bandits because they were bandits. The communist party vanguard had their dachas, the proletariat their cramped living spaces, food stores with empty shelves, low paying jobs, and the vast gulag described in painful detail by Alexander Solzhenitsyn which, with open ragged jaws, awaited anyone who presumed to question the undemocratic, plenary powers of a Stalinist,   socialist-communist sta

Lamont, Biden and Hayes In mid-August 2020, Connecticut Commentary, relying largely on then presidential nominee Joe Biden’s Democrat Party Platform, noted that the Biden Administration, in both foreign and domestic policy, would be a repeat of the preceding Barack Obama administration in which Biden served as Vice President. This prediction was a bit off-point. The policy prescriptions adopted by the Biden administration indicate he has bypassed Obama and now postulates Obama prescriptions raised to the third power. Socialist Bernie Sanders , it may be recalled, was more than satisfied with the Democrat Party platform he helped construct. Biden was sworn in as President on Jan 20.  During an unusually long honeymoon period, Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Biden have utilized a narrowed split in the House and a fifty-fifty split in the Senate to consolidate their triumph over former President Donald Trump and Republicans both m

Winkler Mike Winkler, a progressive – very progressive -- state representative from Vernon, Connecticut, tumbled into a postmodern mare’s nest when he attempted, poorly, to discriminate between different kinds of discrimination. During a public hearing on bills before the Planning and Development Committee, Winkler said that Greenwich Housing Authority member Sam Romeo had counted Asian Americans among minorities presently suffering from invidious discrimination. Winkler had just suggested that Greenwich officials had deployed zoning regulations to deny access to African Americans, and here was a Housing authority member claiming that 37% of the population of Greenwich were minorities. Well yes, Winkler grudgingly conceded. However, “You count Asians and other minorities that have never been discriminated against,” Winkler said during the hearing, at which point the frigid waters of Critical Race Theory closed over Winkler’s head. Critical Race Theory holds that the law and legal

Looney, Lamont and Duff The government of the United States and, derivatively, the government of Connecticut is, we were told by our fifth grade teachers, a three stroke engine containing executive, legislative and judicial departments. Each of the three branches of government is separate but equal. The separation is a result of functional differences: the legislature is constitutionally authorized to make laws governing the state, the executive department to enact the laws made by the legislature, and the judicial department to exact just punishment upon law breakers. In addition, state and national appellate courts, including high courts such as the U.S. Supreme Court and state Supreme Courts,   review laws, striking down those that are deemed unconstitutional. The three branches of government are equal in power and moral authority -- provided each operates according to Constitutional prescriptions. My fifth grade teacher, Sister Immaculata, knew all this and passed on to her stu

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet – TS Eliot Connecticut is running out of time to prepare a face to meet the faces it will meet. The whole world is watching, as kids in the sixties used to say when, caught in the grip of an unwanted war, TV cameras showed them sticking flowers in the barrels of national guard rifles warding them off . Clever politicians may hide behind their own designer masks, but the face Connecticut presents to the world and other states cannot be hidden. The question politicians in Connecticut should be asking, and acting upon, is this one: What is the face Connecticut has been presenting during the last few decades to revenue producers? Is it attracting or repelling the entrepreneurial capital the state desperately needs to finance both its operations and its best prompting from the angels of its better nature? Consider a recent story in a Hartford paper titled “ Lamont tells Connecticut businesses he

Montesquieu There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice… To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them… Power ought to serve as a check to power – Baron de Montesquieu Some court decisions ring like liberty bells because they touch the very marrow of American democracy. There were two questions, one infinitely more important than the other, presented in a suit brought by The Connecticut Freedom Alliance before Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher, which was summarily decided on March 8. The first issue concerned the wearing of masks. The second more important issue was: Did Governor Ned Lamont’s edicts imposed during the Coronavirus epidemic in Connecticut violate the constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers, the cornerstone of our American Republic? In a “ Memorandum of Decision on Summary Judgment ”, Moukawsher ruled that they did. On the question of mask wearing, the court

I’ve asked a politically astute friend the question that now, a year after the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic has passed, is tormenting most “scientists”: Has the Coronavirus dragon been slain? And I’ve been careful in our correspondence to put the word “scientists” in quotes to indicate a doubtful use of a word, because my friend, no longer professionally connected with politics, has said elsewhere that there is no “science” of coronavirus – merely scientists, some more politically and economically self-interested in outcomes than others. There are, she says, tons of money to be made by keeping the population in a fearful frenzy. Among most salespersons, fear is the nail in the coffin of buyer resistance. My friend believes this is especially true with regard to politicians, whose product generally is ethereally non-material -- in part a serious business surrounded by a lake of campaign propaganda. “Would you believe it,” she winks at me in her hand written letter, “polit

Biden and Progressives -- photo from Dailey Beast There is a little noticed, rarely remarked upon, qualitative difference between traditional Democrat liberals and post-modern Democrat progressives . During the 2020 elections, Republicans in Connecticut suffered heavy losses to progressive Democrats. The losses wiped out some promising earlier Republican gains in the General Assembly. Over a period of thirty years, dating from 1991, the year former Republican U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker, later Governor elected as an independent,   pushed an income tax through an income tax resistant General Assembly, Republican “moderates” --- more precisely, Republicans who styled themselves fiscal conservatives but social liberals – consistently have lost ground to Democrats, spending in the state has increased precipitously, entrepreneurial capital has fled the state, and taxes of course have reached the highest plateau in state history. The present U.S. Congressional Delegation is made up in

Biden Inauguration American politicians suffer from two problems. They are, most of them, the victims of their past successes. And they are, in Nietzsche’s memorable phrase “all too human,” which means they are, in Shakespeare’s more memorable phrase, “subject to all the shocks that flesh is heir to.” President Joe Biden , elderly and suffering from the old age shocks all flesh is heir to, is also the long suffering father of Hunter Biden, one of Communist China’s more notorious employees. A US Senator from the state of Delaware for 16 years, from 1973-2009, Biden was, most recently, former President Barack Obama’s Vice President, from 2009-2017. The Vice President in American politics is, more or less, a butler to the President, not a person who is, in American jargon, “his own man.” Asked how he liked his job, Vice President during the Franklin Roosevelt administration John Nance Garner III, known to his Texas contemporaries as “Cactus Jack,” said it wasn’t worth “a warm buck

Optimists who believe in free markets – the opposite of which are unfree, illiberal, highly regulated markets – knew, shortly after Coronavirus slammed into the United States from Wuhan, China, that the virus and the free market were inseparably connected. The more often autocratic governors restricted the public market, the more often jobs would be lost, and the loss of jobs and entrepreneurial capital everywhere would necessarily punch holes in state budgets. In many cases, the holes were pre-punched by governors and legislators who, prior to the Coronavirus panic, had failed to understand the direct connection between high taxes, which depletes creative capital, and sluggish economies. For the last thirty years, it has taken Connecticut ten years to recover from national recessions. The dialectic of getting and spending is a matter of simple observation and logic: the more governments get in taxes, the more they spend; the more they spend, the greater the need for taxation. Excess