Political Interests in Connecticut

Chris Powell

After losing the governor’s office to Democrats twice, after watching in quiet desperation gains hard won in the state’s General Assembly disappear like the morning’s fog, after knitting their hands in despair at having lost important political races in former Republican strongholds such as Greenwich and West Hartford, Republicans still do not know how to campaign for public office.

Chris Powell noticed this obliquely in one of his most recent columns. “If” – big “if”, he wrote – “a Republican is elected governor in 2022, new taxes probably will be avoided [in the short term]. If Lamont is re-elected, the far left in his party will press him hard again to raise taxes, and as the federal money runs out, resisting the far left won't be as easy for him.

“But Connecticut's Republicans share the blame for the state's high taxes and weak economy. For the Republicans have not been very good at articulating the big policy choices. While proposing alternatives risks controversy, the state can't be restored without it.”

Then too, political and cultural templates have shifted. Businesses – especially the larger national and international behemoths in Connecticut – are no longer stalwart defenders of their own interests, if one judges by their political contributions to a Democrat Party that warmly embraces high taxes, ungovernable spending, undemocratic partisan rule, and a left leaning progressivism systemically hostile to entrepreneurial interests.

The crunch in Connecticut, Powell correctly predicts, will arrive after the upcoming elections, when massive federal tax transfers to the states give way to a post Coronavirus political period in which Democrats are likely, in the captive Northeast, to receive an election mandate that will spur them to carry forward unsustainable tax and spend policies, while Republicans in the Northeast once again knit their fingers in despair and become even more irrelevant politically than they presently are – because they do not know how to campaign.

Lamont, who has won some battles against progressive vandals at the gates in his own party, may come to resemble, in the post-election period, the little boy stemming the inevitable flood of progressive policies by holding his finger in a dam about to burst. Businesses generally have not been adept at spotting cracks in the dam or reading the unambiguous political writing on the wall because they are convinced they can play the political game better than tax hungry, progressive politicians.

In this they are wrong.

“Trump won't be on the ballot during the state election next year,” Powell notes, “but Connecticut Democrats will run against him all the same. For Trumpism is never going to carry the state. But a Republican platform might gain some votes -- if Connecticut Republicans can even remember what a platform is.”

Terrorized by Democrats in Connecticut, who wish for political purposes to breathe life into an expired Trump presidency, Connecticut Republicans, frightened of spooks, even now are unwilling to defend rational Trump policies. In its haste to deface all things Trump, the Biden administration dismantled border protections, opened wide the door of liberty to border jumpers from multiple countries, whispered “Don’t come yet,” and reaped a rich harvest of compassion plaudits from a wall-eyed left of center media blind to the real world consequences of a failed border policy. The border jumpers came, they saw, they conquered. The border dam burst, compassionate Democrat politicians ran away, leaving the rest of us to deal with a legal entry immigration system in disarray.

In a like manner, Democrats here and elsewhere have opened wide the door to unwanted pedagogical practices with predictable results. Parents -- not the products of post-modern pedagogy, who yet can add two and two and get four – do not want their schools to be used by pedagogues to propagandize their children. Increasingly, they are turning out at Boards of Education hearings to reclaim their status as parents from an aggressive educational hegemon that has elevated the in loco parentis doctrine into a sociological article of faith.

Large cities in Connecticut, all Democrat Party hegemons, are in the same sad shape as our border states. Crime is rampant; public education is a failure; gun toting gangs of teens are mowing down innocent victims; policy-wise Democrat politicians have fled with their pants on fire; fathers have fled, replaced by an unsustainable loco parentis welfare state that suppresses liberty and independence among those it claims to serve. The welfare state, permanent and ubiquitous in cities, finances a crippling dependence that simply repeals the notion that in the United States, while poverty exists, the poor are not always the same poor. Urban policies lock the poor into perpetual dependence, fatherless households, street crime, inadequate schools, and the silent despair of victims who have learned to accept gratefully the crumbs that fall to them from rich men’s tables.

The only political commentator in the state who has raised his voice against the perpetual dependence of the poor upon a state that has, in many ways, caused the problems it has pretended for a half century to solve is – all honor to him – Chris Powell. And he is Cassandra, whom no one in power heeded, although she was a prophetess whose word, always hard to bear from power centers, was true. But prophets, who are nothing short of truth sayers, are never loved in their own states, especially when the tribunes of the state are caught in the undertow of a ruling power.