 |
| 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?
Comments