Political Polarization in Connecticut

Polarization, most often caused by rapid political change, sets group A, most often a majority, against group B, an aggressive minority determined, as Father of the American Revolution Sam Adams used to say, to set fire in the minds of men:  “It does not take a majority to prevail ... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

For Adams, the lust for freedom and liberty always played a leading role in the shape and substance of government. “Government,” Father of the Country George Washington once said, “is force,” which is why it should be deployed sparingly.

In postmodern times, liberty is less important than political organization. The postmodern politician is not especially interested is freeing mankind from political oppression and unwanted force. It is interested chiefly in occupying a place of power and using hard won political advantage to rule. Force, not freedom, is the political desideratum among most parties struggling to achieve dominance.

The successful postmodern politician is he or she who can satisfy irreconcilably opposed groups, adept at convincing everyone they may have their cake and eat it too.

Consider the following lede in a recent Associated Press (AP) story. “Biden increases oil royalty rate, scales back lease sales”: “The [US] Interior Department has announced that it’s moving forward with the first onshore sales of public oil and natural gas drilling leases under President Joe Biden, but will sharply increase royalty rates for companies as federal officials weigh efforts to fight climate change against pressure to bring down high gasoline prices.”

Early in his administration, President Joe Biden cast his lot with extreme environmentalists temperamentally indisposed to slower, organic changes in energy production. The extremist environmentalists wished to bring oil and gas production in the United States to a screeching halt.

To this end, Biden, almost immediately upon achieving office, canceled the construction of a Canadian XL oil pipe line, threw up obstructions to reduce fracking, and banned oil exploration on federal lands. These efforts were loudly applauded by far left groups and fringe politicians such as U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and her outsized cheering section among the legacy media’s reporters and commentators.

According to the Institute for Energy Research, the sponsor of the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline terminated the project "after Canadian officials failed to persuade President Joe Biden to reverse his cancelation of the presidential border crossing permit by executive order. The partially built line… was to transport oil from fields in western Canada and the Bakken basin in North Dakota to Steele City, Nebraska, connecting to other pipelines that feed oil refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Construction on the 1,200-mile pipeline began last year and would have moved up to 830,000 barrels of oil daily. Biden’s executive order cost 1,000 immediate job losses and an estimated 11,000 future job losses. Alberta, Canada had invested over $1 billion in the project last year, kick-starting construction.

“Biden’s cancelation of the border permit for Keystone XL has also helped to increase gasoline prices by 30 percent since his taking office, along with his other anti-oil actions, including pausing federal oil leases and suspending oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. All of these supply-limiting actions send signals to markets that begin to factor in their impacts.”

Under pressure to “expand U.S. crude production as the pandemic and war in Ukraine roil the global economy and full prices have spiked” the Biden administration has now done an about-face, according to the AP.  In addition, a recent finding from a Superior Court in Louisiana ordered sales cancelled by the Biden administration to resume. This confluence of unintended consequences forced Biden’s reversal of his preferred energy policy, which was and is to drive up energy costs so as to force a gas committed public to give up, under pressure of force, their gas guzzling cars in favor of more acceptable, though much more costly, electric cars.

The Biden administration's Interior department has now reset its policy. “For too long,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, “the federal oil and gas leasing programs have prioritized the wants of extractive industries. Today, we begin to reset how and what we consider to be the highest and best use of Americans’ resources.”

The Biden administration – attempting to have its cake and eat it too -- will resume some sales on public land and, at the same time, increase royalty fees, satisfying no one. “But the move,” the AP reports, “brought condemnation from both ends of the political spectrum: Environmentalists derided the decision to hold the long-delayed sales, while oil industry representatives said the higher royalty rates would deter drilling.”

Teetering on the edge of a recession months before mid-term elections, some Connecticut Democrat politicians are beginning to wonder how much of an albatross Biden might be next November when disgruntled Connecticut voters, whose own household budgets have been adversely impacted by excessive taxation, expensive union contracts and inflation, march to the polls. In the recent past, it has taken Connecticut about ten years to recover from national recessions, and inflation is now so pandemic that it is outpacing salary gains everywhere in the nation, including Connecticut.