Why Progressives Are Not Liberals

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 large part of progressive Democrats who showed the door to fiscal conservative and social liberal Republicans. The Republican “firewall” within Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation has now completely collapsed. All members of the delegation are Democrats, and all are unalterable progressives on nettlesome social, foreign policy and domestic political issues. The state’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, proudly self-identify as progressives, and nearly half the Democrat caucus in the General Assembly boastfully claims to be progressive – not, be it noted, liberal.

The difference between a progressive and a liberal is a difference in kind, not merely a difference in intensity of purpose. Progressives, in other words, are not simply more liberal liberals, no more than donkeys are more horsey thoroughbreds. American post-progressive progressives are qualitatively different from, say, Camelot liberals during the presidency of John Kennedy. The distance between John Kennedy and Ella Grasso may be measured in inches. The political and philosophical separation of former Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the anti-Vietnam “Winter Solider,” and John Kennedy, despite a common party affiliation, can only be measured in miles. Kennedy, the World War II PT 109 hero who became a Massachusetts Senator, then President, was not a “Winter Soldier.” The distance between traditional liberals and progressives who are kissing cousins to socialists like Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders or U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York can only be measured in light-years.

Abe Ribicoff – Connecticut’s congressman in both the U.S. House and Senate, the 80th Governor of Connecticut and the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in President John F. Kennedy's cabinet – Jewish like Dick Blumenthal, very likely would not have approved of partial birth abortion. Blumenthal, wholly a creature of Planned Parenthood, an international abortion provider, would rather march bravely through a field of thistles than disappoint the abortion lobby from which he receives ample gratitude in the form of campaign donations.

Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut Susan Bysiewicz, wrote a biography of Grasso, her political hero, in 1984. Recently she claimed that Grasso was right about nearly everything but the income tax, which Grasso and her successor, former Governor Bill O’Neill, had vigorously opposed when it passed the General Assembly and then was quickly repealed during the administration of Republican Governor Tom Meskill.

Bysiewicz is wrong about Grasso, who rightly opposed the income tax on economic and prudential grounds. Grasso knew then – and the bulk of fiscal conservative, Kennedy Democrats in Connecticut, assuming any remain in the state, should know now -- that a tax on income a) relieves Democrat legislators tied to the apron strings of state employee unions  of the necessity to cut spending when deficits began piling up, and b) insidiously increases and removes entrepreneurial capital from a creative private marketplace to government coffers in a vain attempt to quench the unappeasable appetite of progressive Democrats for more spending. The last O’Neill budget was $7.5 billion; the 2016 biennial budget of Governor Dannel Malloy was $40 billion.

Grasso and Ribicoff were Kennedy Democrat liberals. Malloy and Present Governor Ned Lamont, derivative rather than creative in his politics, are progressives. The progressive faction within Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly is nearing 50 percent. The fiscal conservative firewalls in the state since 1991 have been disassembled. The last Republican gubernatorial firewall, Jodi Rell, has now been a resident of Florida for many years. There no longer is any effective resistance to progressive policies in this “the land of steady habits.” Progressive Democrats now occupy the governor’s office, the U.S. Congressional Delegation, all the Constitutional offices in the state, and a good portion of the General Assembly. In addition, wealthy communities in the state, previously bastions of fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republicanism, are now trending Democrat.

Given the steady drift of Connecticut away from the liberal policies of Kennedy, Ribicoff and Grasso towards the progressive policies of former Speaker of the State House of Representatives Joe Arsimowicz, a union employee, and present President Pro Tem of the State Senate Martin Looney, a New Haven based progressive, it should be obvious to any Republican  operative in the state who has lived his life with his eyes open that the fiscal conservative, social liberal posture of Republicans in the post-Grasso period has not been successful in wresting political power from progressive Democrats. The last fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republican to be purged from the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation was U.S. Representative Chris Shays, who lost to Jim Himes more than a dozen years ago? The Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics correctly describes Shays as “A moderate Republican, who is socially progressive and fiscally conservative, Shays had a strong record of reaching across the aisle to address our nation’s problems.”

Former Republican U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker, who claimed to be fiscally conservative but socially liberal, like his political hero Jacob Javits, was bested by Democrat Joe Lieberman. Upon leaving the U.S. Senate, Weicker’s liberal American for Democratic Action rating was higher than that of his Democrat Senatorial colleague Chris Dodd.  The fiscally conservative Weicker went on to shove an income tax down the throats of Connecticut’s remaining Kennedy Democrats and Republicans, and he received a Kennedy Profile in Courage award for having done so.

Would it not be the better part of valor to simply recognize obvious truths: that, in a state like Connecticut in which Democrat voters outnumber Republicans by a two to one margin, Republicans who claim to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal will in the future, as in the past, invariably be bested by progressives who are socially liberal and not at all fiscally conservative?