Blumenthal, Biden, And Postmodern Utopians

Blumenthal

People are noticing the drop in U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s approval rating. According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, Blumenthal’s approval has dipped into a danger-red area.

“The job approval of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who is seeking a third term this fall, CTMirror reports, “was his worst in Quinnipiac polling since the Democrat took office in 2011. He was barely above water: 45% approve while 43% disapprove.”

Coincidentally, the approval rating of President Joe Biden, which ranges from 36% to 43%, is underwater.

The New York Post, every postmodern progressive’s bete noir, suggests that Biden’s reactionary economic policies may lie at the root of his disfavor, but these roots may go deeper than anyone supposes.

“President Biden,” a Post commentator writes, has dismissed inflation worries, “saying that Milton Friedman — the famed inflation-fighting economist — no longer runs the show. Well, the late economist certainly didn’t run Biden’s show, but his observation that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon was borne out in spades as prices took off.

“And it was a double whammy. Inflation comes when you have too much money chasing too few goods. The spending part provided the excess money, but the Biden team was right there helping to ensure fewer goods, too.”

From the very moment Biden, a reanimated postmodern progressive, set foot in the White House, he has been detaching prudent economic policy from his Cloud-Cuckoo vision of the way things ought to be. To put it bluntly, Biden wants to turn back the clock to 1955, when noted conservative polemicist Bill Buckley vowed in the first issue of National Review to position conservatives athwart history, largely progressive at the time, yelling “Stop!”

Biden began his political career at the age of 27.  He was, then and now, a derivative rather than a creative politician, noted for plundering and sometimes plagiarizing other people’s thoughts.

Americans quickly tire of unimaginative, reactionary politicians who do not know when to leave the political stage, always the better part of valor.

These days, every time Americans visit gas pumps, they know from their shrinking salaries and the diminishing purchase value of the dollar that something is amiss. And this knowledge is reaffirmed whenever mothers, deeply opposed to theories that aim to remake history and the family, set off in search of baby formula, now scarce because transcendent regulators imprudently shut down a plant that provided about 40 percent of baby formula consumed in the United States -- when they most certainly knew the shutdown would empty shelves.

Not to worry, Bidenites have assured panicky mothers – we’re on it! Reactionary politicians are always adept at providing politically insufficient solutions to economic problems they have caused, safe behind the barricades of an increasingly postmodern progressive media that would not know Friedman economics from the proverbial “hole in the ground.”

Is there a gas shortage caused in large part by a Biden policy that has reduced the supply of fossil fuel? Not to worry, the postmodern progressive reactionaries say, we will tap into reserve supplies set aside for emergencies, and we may temporarily reduce the federal tax on a product we wish to eliminate in the near future to save the planet from environmental degradation. In the meantime, we will flood the states with reserve cash, the result of excessive taxation, borrowing, and the printing of money that, Milton Freedman tells us, produce debt, inflation and pretty political speeches that seem to repeal economic laws.

Blumenthal is Biden’s political godchild. Both are buoys on the rising postmodern progressive tide that, most unwoke journalists will be surprised to learn, is fed by dark tributaries such as Gramscian Marxism.

 “Socialism,” Antonio Gramsci wrote in one of three prison notebooks, “… is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”

Cultural tribalism, the attempt to make of one many, economic egalitarianism, historical revisionism, the centralization of political power, a remorseless attack on American political experiment, the disparagement of institutions central to the culture such as the family, the neighborhood, municipal government, all have fallen out of the cultural Marxism of Gramsci’s prison notebooks.

Hegemonic bourgeois politics, always downstream from culture, can only be changed by the construction of a rival cultural hegemony, Gramsci theorized. Foundational institutions must first be held up to contempt, then eliminated. Gramsci’s prison diaries have been, in the postmodern world, much more fruitful than Marx’s now outworn economic class theory.

The Republican Party in Connecticut has been unwilling over the years to focus on cultural issues. Both Biden and Blumenthal have benefited greatly from such indifference. Here and there in Connecticut politics, one sees signs among voters of a blowback, a reaffirmation of Isaac Newton’s third law of motion: “Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite on the first.”

Recent poll ratings are an indication that cultural revolutionists among us have yet to repeal scientific laws, and Blumenthal seems unaware that political history, even in deep blue Connecticut, may steamroll the absurd efforts of postmodern utopians to make the world over anew.