Lamont Addressing Unions, CTMirror |
Governor Ned Lamont has probably learned more than he has been willing to say from recent state and municipal elections.
If one could stretch Lamont out on a comfortable couch and
peek into his political psyche, one might find him sharing space with Virginia’s
new Governor, Glenn Youngkin, and the bête noir of the progressive wing of the
national Democrat Party, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Manchin is something of a Democrat budget hawk, whose
hectoring, residual moderates believe, is very much needed in a party that has adopted
improvident spending as an operative political principle.
Singing from the balcony of the party’s once vibrant
moderate center are Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi, party leader in the
Senate Chuck Schumer, and the lead choir boy, President Joe Biden, all of whom have
borrowed hymns from socialist Bernie
Sanders' progressive song book.
Budget watchers generally agree that the redistributionist
Democrat Party budget, as well as the ideological arc in the once moderate
party, has been heavily influenced by Sanders’ eccentric socialistic notions.
There are in political parties king makers and budget makers. Sanders and members
of the so called "Squad" that the media constantly dotes upon have become the
leftist budget and policy makers of the Democrat Party.
Ideology, the fierce commitment to a political doctrine, is
the iron bar in the politics of force. What, we may ask, is the opposite of the
politics of force? Surely, few will disagree that its opposite is the still
revolutionary notion that government derives its authority to govern from the
consent rather than the conquest
by power and force of the governed.
Asked shortly after the polls had closed in Virginia whether
he thought “the sagging poll ratings of President Joe Biden could impact next
year’s elections for Congress and governors’ offices around the country,”
Lamont first quipped that “he had spent time Tuesday night,” when election
returns were rolling in, “watching the final game of the World Series,”
according to a report in a Hartford paper.
Two days later, Lamont was less flippant. The shadow of the
New Jersey race had fallen over many Democrats. In New Jersey, Democratic Governor
Phil Murphy won reelection by a breathtakingly small margin, according to Politico: Murphy 1,285,351, Jack
Ciattarelli 1,219,906.
Lamont told a reporter, “I certainly feel like there’s a
sense that the middle class is getting slammed, but I’ve felt that since I’ve
been governor … I think that dysfunction in Washington D.C. put a cloud on
Democratic races…They did have a big tax increase in New Jersey, which I think
got people’s attention. We’re in a very different place here in Connecticut.
I’ve got to talk to Phil and see what else I can learn from that.”
During his first year in office, Biden, Pelosi and Schumer together
have been the principal force leaders in their party. Both have threatened to
eliminate the Electoral College in favor of the election of presidents by
popular vote, a measure that would allow large population centers, mostly on
the East and West coasts of the United States, to deprive small states and low
density areas of the country of an equitable voice in presidential selection.
This measure, like the packing of the Supreme Court, would in the short run
benefit a Democrat Party that values force above government action tempered by
constitutional restraints.
None of the force leaders in the Democrat Party have
hesitated to use the power of government agencies to enhance their own political
standing with the American public. The recently concluded elections are the
first indication that the American public is, in both the pre and post-Coronavirus
epoch, generally opposed to a mode of governance that has succeeded elsewhere
in the world only through the sustained application of the kind of persistent
force that raises its horned head in every page of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Pelosi’s own daughter,
intending to bestow a compliment, said of her mother, “She’ll cut your throat,
and you won’t even know you’re bleeding,” a frighteningly accurate description
of the politics of force.
“Character,” said Thomas Paine, when the American experiment
in republican government was yet in its infancy, “is better kept than
recovered.”
If Lamont were a close student of history, rather than a millionaire
whom fortune has blessed, he would understand why Biden’s approval ratings are abysmally
low, 38 percent, why Democrats almost lost to Republicans in New Jersey, why
Democrats are losing their grip on unaffiliated voters, as well as soccer Moms, and
why it is much easier to keep liberty, justice, constitutional government, the
republic and a decentralizing power principle – the separation of the three
branches of government – than it would be to restore the characteristics of the
American experiment in freedom and representative government after the
essential nature of the country had been deformed -- not reformed -- by leftists with knives in
their brains.
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