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Should Elon Musk have taken over Twitter?
Yes. Since its advent, politicians the world over have
learned to twitter-speak, and the media has also spent a good amount of time
pouring over witless tweet idiocies in search of eye-catching stories.
“There are only so many hours in the day,” Oscar Wilde once
responded when asked why he did not take socialism, much in vogue during his
day, more seriously. Media hours, we all know, stretch from here to eternity.
Generally, Twitterdom has had a baneful influence on
political discourse. Twitter is the breeding ground of bad manners and sloppy
thought. Abraham Lincoln, many debate coaches might agree, is a better
rhetorician than say, former President Donald Trump or (former?) Speaker of the
U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. If you are a politician and your
discourse begins to sound like it was ripped from a bumper sticker or a random
tweet, you should be impeached instantly. The fear lately is that Twitterdom
has introduced algorithms that put the kibosh on conservative discourse.
Someone had to put his foot down on this sort of thing. Why not Musk? He has a
big stomp, and he is rich enough to swat off stupid objections.
Do the rich exert an undue influence on American politics?
In a manner of speaking, that has always been the case. In
days past, the rich owned newspapers. Now they own politicians and, through
them, access to favored treatment in the media. Here in the United States,
there are two kinds of rich influencers: the Democrat rich and the Republican
rich. These are nicely balanced in terms of political contributions, though
Democrats in recent years may be a little ahead of Republicans. If money is the
mother’s milk of politics, the Democrat rich and the Republican rich are its
milch cows.
Individual politicians, rather than political parties,
generate their own campaign funds, and this throws the advantage to incumbent
office holders. The way to provide monetary equity in political campaigns is
through term limits, not tax payer supported campaigns. There is no reason why
eight term U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro should not be forced, at the end of a reasonable
term limit, to surrender her political baton to younger back-bench Connecticut
Democrats. At that point, campaign contributors would have to think before they
reflexively wrote a check to support the campaigner. Thinking is always a
refreshing exercise. The rich rarely think. Instead, they align their
unexamined prejudices with what they believe is their self-interest and allow
their money to fall into the sinkhole of bad political habits.
Some people in Connecticut, disenchanted with the two major parties,
think the creation of a third party might be advisable.
In Connecticut, we already have third and fourth parties.
But neither the Independent Party nor the Working People’s Party have taken
wing. The two major parties have evolved since the good or bad -- depending on
your point of view -- old days of party bosses. John Bailey, the last real
Democrat Party boss in Connecticut, was himself a primary system. He and a
small coterie of other Democrat Party influencers pointed to former Governor
Ella Grasso or former governor Abe Ribicoff and said, “You will run for Governor.”
And because he had his hands on the money till, there was little argument. That
is no longer the case. Primaries these days determine the slate of challengers
for various offices in Connecticut. As a general rule, it is nearly impossible
for an untested candidate for office to unseat an incumbent in the parties with
which they are affiliated. So then, we are left with a system in which campaign
wealthy incumbents rule in both parties, and challengers, some of them
promising, are left, so to speak, out in the cold gnawing on frozen knuckles.
After a while, party slates become brittle and boring. Political parties tend
to expire not from their failures but from their outmoded past successes. Candidates in third and fourth parties wage
campaigns to make a point rather than to win office.
How would you summarize the condition of the media in Connecticut?
Partisan from head to toe. Connecticut has been for many
years a one party Democrat state. Reading political reports in the state is
like overhearing only one person during a phone conversation. There is little
contrarian journalism afoot in the whole of New England. It is as it every
journalist in the region woke up one morning and decided to pitch for a job as
press secretary to the local politician-for-life.
How does Trump figure in Connecticut politics?
He’s the Democrat Party’s El Cid, the Spanish warrior who
rode into battle – dead in the saddle of course – to frighten the opposition. Historian Victor Davis Hanson is the person
who has written most intelligently about Trump in his book The Case For Trump. There’s audacity for you – a book that presents
an objective historical view of Trump!
As long as the vultures are pulling at his liver, we will not have a
clear view of the man. People in Connecticut, I think, are onto the game. If
you have nothing to say – the Biden administration is indefensible – shout
loudly from the rooftops and frighten the populace, the very definition of
demagoguery. The problem with this is – voters occasionally are smarter than
the political manipulators. When politicians begin telling us that grass is
blue and the sky red, we justly begin to slide into a skeptical crouch, because
there is something in human nature, thank God, that deeply resents political
manipulation.
Should Trump or Biden have a second go at it?
No, and no. Vindication is always a suspect motive in human
action. But ask me that one later. There are only so many hours in the day, and
the political attention span of the average American feasting on Twitter is
very short.
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