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.
When the late Barry Goldwater said “If you lop off
California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country,” he meant 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, unrestrained cops; and so on and so on…
We are witnessing the breakdown of this temporary and
unstable coalition. And the battering rams smashing it are unblinking
views of reality.
The 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.
In a previous posting, “Politicians And The Memory Hole”, this writer predicted at the time that “it would take politicians who turned up to commiserate with stricken family members – [Senator Dick] Blumenthal, known to show up, as he said, ‘at garage door openings,’ appeared to be absent without a by-your-leave -- only a few hours to forget the child’s name. A 29 year-old woman, walking her dog a few blocks from the murder scene, was asked by a reporter to comment. ‘I was raised in this neighborhood,’ she said, ‘It’s always been kind of a thing, especially when the weather starts to warm up. It’s kind of expected.’”
Along with the dominant Democrat Party in Connecticut, leaning left for a good many years, those who report on politics in the state also are left-leaning. 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 preferring supportive opinion that reaffirm editorial views.
It is human nature to purr at flattery.
“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.
Contrarian opinion on op-ed pages is a marker indicating
editorial vigor. To put it mildly, one does not find contrarian opinion on
matters affecting the state laid on with a trowel in most Connecticut news publications.
Then too, it is easier, indeed effortless, to swim with rather than against
the current. G. K. Chesterton, a favorite 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 becoming in Connecticut a
rare heroic act.
If Republicans were to capture more seats in the General
Assembly, maybe even the governor’s office, Connecticut’s media might, for
business reasons, be more open to contrary opinion. And, of course, contrarian
opinion just might enliven papers and boost sagging
sales.
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