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One Party Rule in Connecticut
Reading about Connecticut politics in the news is a bit like
listening to one side of a phone conversation. You realize you must interpret
the substance of the conversation between vocal Democrats and muted
Republicans. And then you discover, to your dismay, that the parties talking on
the phone are Governor Ned Lamont, a Democrat, and the Democrat leaders of the
dominant party in the General Assembly, Speaker of the House Matt Ritter and President
Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney. These privileged Democrat caucus
discussions are not for public consumption, and Republicans, as usual, are not
invited to participate in the shaping of important legislative measures.
The Democrat hegemony in Connecticut is, as journalists
sometimes say, comprehensive. Democrats in the General Assembly have nearly a
veto proof margin over Republicans. Republican minority leaders in the
legislature are sometimes called upon by journalists to provide a counterpoint
to Democrat hegemonic rule. But the counterpoint is simply that – an opinion on
a motion in the General Assembly that cannot materially be adjusted by minority
Republicans. And opinions on bills are very different than effective opposition
to destructive legislation or, more likely these days, to a grand vision of the
way we want to be.
To put it in the briefest terms, The Democrat Party’s view
of Connecticut’s future is a reassertion of the status quo. If hegemony
is good, more hegemony will be better. Thus far, Democrats have been
inordinately successful in keeping things the way they have been in the state
for the last three decades and more. The Democrat Party is – especially in the
state’s culturally crumbling cities – the party of stasis.
The visionaries in Connecticut’s Democrat Party hegemon are
postmodern progressives. Visionaries in the Republican Party tend to be
conservatives or libertarians. For the last half century, the media in
Connecticut has vigorously opposed the rise to power and influence of
conservatives. Most political writers in the state are moderate Democrats,
postmodern progressive Democrats or registered Independents – i.e. postmodern
Democrats who find it convenient to hide behind an “unaffiliated” flower pot.
Republicans have long been forced to ride in the back seat of Connecticut’s tax
supported political bus. But it is the Republican Party in the state that is
now what Orestes Bronson, a transcendentalist expat, used to call “the party of
forward movement.”
The status quo will not change unless
numbers in the General Assembly change. And numbers in the General Assembly
will not change unless the media in Connecticut becomes far more
confrontational with respect to the party in power.
Thoreau’s Assault on Slavery in Massachusetts
Antagonism to the party in power has been the usual posture
of a useful media.
When, in response to the recently enacted pre-Civil War Fugitive
Slave Law, Henry David Thoreau delivered in one of the many salons of the day
his fiery response to the law, “Slavery
in Massachusetts,” he was acting in place of somber journalists and
ministers who had abandoned the missions of both journalism and Christianity.
“They who have been
bred in the school of politics,” Thoreau thundered, “fail now and always to
face the facts. Their measures are half measures and makeshifts merely. They
put off the day of settlement indefinitely, and meanwhile the debt accumulates.
Though the Fugitive Slave Law had not been the subject of discussion on that
occasion, it was at length faintly resolved by my townsmen, at an adjourned
meeting, as I learn, that the compromise compact of 1820 having been repudiated
by one of the parties, ‘Therefore,... the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 must be
repealed.’ But this is not the reason why an iniquitous law should be repealed.
The fact which the politician faces is merely that there is less honor among
thieves than was supposed, and not the fact that they are thieves. As I had no
opportunity to express my thoughts at that meeting, will you allow me to do so
here?
“Again it happens that
the Boston Court-House is full of armed men, holding prisoner and trying a MAN,
to find out if he is not really a SLAVE. Does anyone think that justice or God
awaits Mr. Loring's decision? For him to sit there deciding still, when this
question is already decided from eternity to eternity, and the unlettered slave
himself and the multitude around have long since heard and assented to the
decision, is simply to make himself ridiculous. We may be tempted to ask from
whom he received his commission, and who he is that received it; what novel
statutes he obeys, and what precedents are to him of authority. Such an
arbiter's very existence is an impertinence. We do not ask him to make up his
mind, but to make up his pack.”
Readers will note the absence of ambiguity here. Ambiguity
is the last refuge of rhetorical scoundrels, and Thoreau, who astonished his
contemporary Unitarian transcendentalists by writing “A Plea for Captain John Brown”
– Yes, THAT John Brown – was an enemy of
ambiguity, the plush nest in which politicians seek refuge to maintain their status
and power.
Brown, Thoreau wrote, “did not go to the college called
Harvard, good old Alma Mater as she
is. He was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. As he phrased it, ‘I
know no more of grammar than one of your calves.’ But he went to the great
university of the West, where he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty, for
which he had early betrayed a fondness, and having taken many degrees, he
finally commenced the public practice of Humanity in Kansas, as you all know.
Such were his humanities, and not any study of grammar. He would have left a
Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.”
It is a pity postmodern high schools do not take the two
above cited writings as seriously as they do Walden Pond, all written by the same hand and mind. But protesting
modern students, some of whom appear to want to start the Civil War all over
again, are taught, many of them, by Harvard-like faculties Thoreau slathered
with contempt. With some financial help from Emerson, Thoreau, a privileged
white male whose father owned a pencil factory, built himself a
shack on Walden Pond and lived there, where he wrote such things about nature
and the nation as this:
“The nation itself,
with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all
external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment,
cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and
heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million
households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid
economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.
It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have
commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles
an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live
like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.”
The debt-burdened postmodern graduate, leading a life of
unquiet desperation, is content to place himself at a safe remove from the
problems he inveighs against. Thoreau “went to the woods because I wished to
live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I
could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover
that I had not lived.”
One doesn’t expect recent high school graduates on their way
to college -- some of whom, poorly taught, have not mastered the three “r’s --
to live
in the quasi-socialist utopias they present to others frequently in their showy
demonstrations.
Thoreau was of course a pre-Civil War abolitionist agitator.
The moral cordite that set him off was the all too apparent inability of his
contemporaries to see slaves escaping slavery in the relatively free North as
MEN whose principal desire was to be allowed, as other men were, to support
themselves and their families independent of the slave master and his near
cousin, a solicitous state and nation.
One admires from afar Thoreau’s merited moral indignation.
Etymologist will notice the word dignity – from dingus, "worth, proper,
fitting" -- tucked into the word “indignity,” i.e. “without worth.” Only a
baboon, though he be a Harvard graduate, could possibly regard an escaped slave
as other than a MAN. But if the slave is a MAN, by what authority in Heaven or
earth do we strip him of his manly due?
From a safe distance, we tend to regard such splenetic
opposition to slavery as praiseworthy and fully justified in our more
enlightened post-Civil War period. Indeed, were we living cheek by jowl with
Thoreau in Walden Pond, we have little doubt that we would have been his
brother in spirit. President Abe Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – not to
mention the oceans of blood spilled over the slavery question by non-Harvard
graduates at Shiloh and Gettysburg – has certainly vindicated Thoreau’s view on
the Fugitive Slave Law, and to some extent even John Brown’s martial opposition
to slavery.
Good, very good. Slavery is gone, and it is always well to
place oneself on the side of the moral angels. None of us any longer believes
that Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, was but half a man. That was always errant
nonsense designed expressly to support both slavery and the agrarian south,
heavily dependent, as Lincoln pointed out at the time, on low cost slave labor.
Urban Blacks and Postmodern Indignity
New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a prophet unloved
in his own country, noted, nearly six decades ago, that the Black African
American family -- Mom, Pop, and 2.5
kids -- was disappearing. Black families that had painfully recovered from the
many indignities of slavery in the post-Civil War period were in danger of
extinction. Fathers were leaving the institution in droves following the
passage of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs. Others noted
that if you finance single motherhood, fatherless families would soon become a
cottage industry
Moynihan might have been Thoreau shouting from Concord
rooftops, “They who have been bred in the school of politics, fail now and
always to face the facts. Their measures are half measures and makeshifts
merely.”
The Moynihan Report stirred the political pot somewhat in
1965 when it first appeared, but it did not take long to defuse the bomb. “Black Families and the Moynihan Report, a
Research Evaluation” appeared a scant nine years later in 1974.
According to the author’s abstract, “The Moynihan Report
contends that black families will produce more antisocial behavior, ineffective
education, and lower levels of occupational attainment than white families.
This study employed data collected from a random sample of the 14-18 year old
population of Illinois and examines the joint effects of race, gender, social
class, and family organization on a number of indicators of family interaction,
antisocial behavior patterns, educational aspirations, and gender role
conceptions. Few differences were found in the ways that families treat their
children, and these differences were not concentrated in the lower class. Even
in the lower-class broken family, there was no indication that black families
are dramatically different from white families. Thus, it is concluded that in
terms of delinquency, educational expectations, perceptions of the education
desired by the parents, self-conceptions, and notions of appropriate gender role
behavior of adults, the empirical evidence does not provide adequate support
for the conclusions of the Moynihan report.”
Americans never solve their more pressing problems, a cynical
observer of the American scene once said. Instead, they “amicably bid them
goodbye.”
But this one will not go away. Time has shown that Moynihan
was right in almost every particular. And the Research Evaluation, a crude
attempt to make a painful problem disappear, is tragically wrong. Today, the
abstract reads like a cruel parody. Chicago, an anti-social graveyard, is in
Illinois. Fatherhood, as an institution, has all but disappeared in poor cities
that depend, in Tennessee William’s haunting phrase, “on the kindness of
strangers.” And decades of pumping money into the crevasses of a ruined
familial urban architecture is proof beyond doubt that “in the lower-class
broken family” life is nasty, brutish and short, quite unlike life among of
middle class white families living outside the circle of want and despair in
the center of Chicago’s heart of darkness.
A year ago, at the end of December, the Hartford Courant
noted in its top story of the year, Hartford
has deadliest year since 2003, “capital city had more killings than in any year since 2003, when 16
people died in a nursing home arson. Four of this year’s homicide victims were
children — one only 3 years old… Hartford’s homicide rate exceeds that of the
biggest city in the state, Bridgeport, which had 21 homicides as of Dec. 17,
and New Haven, which had 25 homicide victims as of Dec. 19.”
Randell Tarez “Jun
Jun” Jones, 3 years old, was killed, the paper noted, “in a drive-by shooting
April 10 while sitting with his two sisters, ages 4 and 5, in a parked car at
Nelson and Garden streets in the city’s North End. Police said the shooter was
aiming for the man in the front passenger seat.”
Hartford Mayor Luke
Bronin, who recently decided not to seek another term, commented, “This was our
most difficult and heartbreaking year in recent memory when it comes to
homicides, and the fact that our experience was shared by cities across the
country is little comfort… The effects of violence like this are devastating to
families, to neighborhoods, and to our whole community, and my heart is with
everyone who has lost a loved one or a friend, or simply been exposed to this
trauma.”
Bronin will move on.
His wife, Sara Bronin, nominated by President Biden to chair the
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, seems to be firmly planted
in Washington DC., and it would not be irregular should her husband join her,
perhaps having secured a suitable position in LaLaLand.
The devastated
families in Hartford will not, any time soon, be mounting middle class ladders
to success, self-reliance and independence. They are rooted to their cross with
nails of public compassion and financial rewards that will keep them, and
perhaps their children, on a cross of dependency deplored by both the Reverend
Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
And none of it will
end until the urban Black African American family is restored to a condition
that makes invisible men visible as fathers who will love and treasure their
children, protect them from antisocial behavior, and raise them to the level of
occupational attainment enjoyed by middle class white families – and, be
it noted, intact, functional,
prosperous, Black families throughout Connecticut.
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