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| The Cynic |
Interview With The Cynic
There is no question that post-modern progressives within
the Democrat Party in Connecticut far outnumber silent Democrat moderates, he
said.
What we might call the Democrat moderates, John F. Kennedy
remnants, becoming ever smaller, may secretly want to bite the state employees’
union bullet, but they are certain, if they do so, the bullet will go off in
their mouths. And so they remain mute. And the status quo marches on – more spending,
more debt, to be passed along, as always, to the children and grandchildren of
the debtors.
The ever dwindling number of moderate Republican politicians
are also silent on important social issues of the day and, as we know, silence
signifies assent, both in law and politics. But Republicans cannot remain
silent forever and hope to mount in reliably blue New England states an
effective political resistance to Democrat progressive hegemony.
Over a period dating from the gubernatorial reign of former
Republican Lowell Weicker to date, Republicans in the General Assembly have won nearly
every economic argument and lost nearly every budget decision to progressive Democrats. And they've also lost elections.
Why?
There are several reasons, the most important of which is
this: that culture precedes politics, and Republicans simply do not engage
progressive Democrats on decisive social issues.
This means that in any political struggle Republicans have
ceded to Democrats half the political battlefield. You can do that once, maybe
twice, and still retain political standing among 1) republican conservatives
and libertarians 2) unaffiliated voters waiting in the wings for an authentic
combatant, 3) moderate and liberal Democrats, and 4) members of the state’s
media, many of whom willingly place themselves in the progressives’ corner.
However, if you continue to wave white flags on social
issues, your ranks will thin. And this is what has happened in Connecticut.
Republicans who have been moderate – fiscally conservative but liberal on
social issues -- have all been replaced by Democrats who fall into the progressive
bucket on both social and economic issues. And Democrats who have been moderate
– i.e. liberal – on social issues have been replaced by immoderate
progressives.
The U.S. Congressional Delegation in Connecticut has been trending
progressive for decades, the last Republican moderate standing, Representative
Chris Shays, having been throttled by Rep. Jim Himes, a socially progressive
Democrat who has held office for a dozen years.
While Shays was moving left on social issues – but not
nearly far enough to satisfy Democrat progressives – the Democrat Party was
moving left on both social and economic issues. The Connecticut Democrat Party
now stands in the socialist shoes of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Try to get a leading Democrat in
Connecticut to say a critical word about either of them is like pulling teeth
in a state in which it had been routinely expected of Republicans to denounce
the titular head of their party, former President Donald Trump.
Former Vice President Joe Biden may have campaigned for
president as a Kennedy Democrat, but his nose ring while in office has been
fashioned in a far left smithy. And whenever Biden feels the tug, he moves
inexorably to the left. His support comes from progressives on the nation’s
coasts.
Right. The late Barry
Goldwater once joked that if you lop off California and New England, you’ve got
a pretty good country.
Goldwater meant, I think, that the ideological and
historical center of the country should be central to Democrat and Republican
politics. Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Senate ruffian Chuck
Schumer naturally think differently. The locus of political power within the
Democrat Party is precisely that portion of the country Goldwater would have
lopped off, the New England states plus New York and California. Pelosi is from
California, Schumer from New York.
Since the Obama administration, the national Democrat Party
has been able to cobble together a majority by including within its “Big Tent,”
more narrowly constricted ideologically than most people realize, an eccentric
coalition of the supposed disenfranchised: African Americans, some of whom are
now straying dangerously into conservative territory; working women, enfranchised
by the 19th amendment passed in 1920 and liberated from their
kitchens by World War II; paroled criminals; libertarian drug users; chronic
gamblers; citizens of Honduras who have crashed our border with Mexico and who,
some mildly assert, may not be prevented from voting in U.S. elections if they
are not compelled to produce at poll stations proof of citizenship; Critical Race Theorists who
really do believe, solipsistically, that U.S. History has always revolved
around a racial discrimination pole; teachers who would rather stay home than
teach; a Coronavirus-sidelined General Assembly that continues to rent out to Connecticut’s governor powers and
responsibilities the constitution assigns to legislators; cities, most of them
run by Democrats during the past half century, smoldering in violence and crime
induced, leftists believe, by ill-mannered cops; and so on and so on…
We are witnessing the breakdown of this temporary and
unstable coalition. And the battering rams that have smashed it are unblinking
views of reality. The Hartford mother of a three year old child murdered by a
19 year-old kid who couldn’t shoot straight knows, in her heart of hearts, that
the politicians who showed up in Hartford to mug for the TV cameras were not
there to help, because nothing they had done in the past half century in
Hartford had helped to reduce crime or make any Connecticut large city as
pleasant and prosperous a place to live as, say, Glastonbury, a suburb of
Hartford lately experiencing its own uptick in crime.
Few if any papers in the state seem interested in publishing
on their op-ed pages contrarian views that do not support editorial opinion. Why?
I’ll bite, I said.
Why?
Along with the dominant Democrat Party in Connecticut, leaning
left for a good many years, those who report on politics in the state also have
been drifting left. Partly, this is natural. Reporters report on power-players,
and the Connecticut GOP, especially in cities, has been unplugged for a long
while. Editorial page editors listing left are temperamentally hostile to
contrarians, many of them given over to Connecticut opinion that in some sense
supports their own editorial views. It is human nature to give preference to
flatterers.
“Everyone likes flattery,” Benjamin Disraeli says, “and when
you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.” Leading Democrats in
Connecticut are the state’s royalty.
My own view is that contrarian opinion on op-ed pages is a
marker indicating editorial vigor. To put it mildly, one does not find contrarian
opinion laid on with a trowel in most Connecticut news publications. I’m
speaking here of contrarian opinion written by Connecticut commentators. Then
too, it is easier, indeed effortless, to swim with rather than against the
current. G. K. Chesterton, a contrarian, tells us that even a dead thing can
flow with the current, but only a
live body can struggle effectively against
the current. Swimming upstream against the current is a heroic act. Swimming
with the current is an abject surrender to force and the status quo. In
Connecticut, the status quo is a leftward tug that rarely, if ever, is met with
a countervailing force.
I understand from
your remarks that you like contrarians and dislike progressives, I said. Why
this distaste for progressivism?
For postmodern progressivism do you mean? Postmodern
progressives do not believe in progress. It cannot be progress to tear down a
political house that divided against itself cannot stand and replace it with
daydreams. Real progress is an additive process – or it is simply a work of
destruction. Emerson used to say that to be perfect is to have changed often.
But postmodern ideologues – people like Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and,
increasingly, former liberals such as Schumer and Pelosi – are not interested
in progressing to perfection. Their ambition is to tear the house down, sow its
historic and spiritual site with salt, and erect on the spot a fetching but
impossible dream. It’s time to grow up.
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