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| Como and Lamont |
If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty damn good country – Barry Goldwater.
Governor Ned Lamont, a small businessman before he became
chief executive of a state now suffering an acute identity crisis, has made it
plain to both Democrats and Republicans on the left that Connecticut is not New
York or California.
Lamont may have been former Governor of New York Andrew
Cuomo’s fishing buddy (see pic above), but, even so, the
historic differences between New York and Connecticut have been obvious to
dispassionate observers for decades. In the northeast, New York was and is an
advance guard of the nation’s neo-progressive movement, a slow march to a
glorious future in which we all shall be
equal at last in intelligence, talent and, most importantly, in income.
Historically, Connecticut was – note the past tense -- a
state that sanely maintained its head when all others were losing theirs.
There were, of course, scores of neo-progressive legislators
in Connecticut, some of them with revolutionary knives in their brains, but
these did not command popular assent. Political changes usually inch forward on
padded cat’s feet. Here in Connecticut, there were enough historically minded
politicians, reporters and news editors to prevent a headlong rush into a post-Marxian,
Antonio Gramsci nirvana that would
end, as most leftist revolutions do, in a crack-up in which political liberties
are sacrificed on the altar of efficient autocratic governance.
In the end, of course, autocratic governments,
unrepresentative of the public good and not creative, demand of the governed
that they surrender essential liberties to a false security. All such
governments impoverish their people and extinguish any hope of a general
movement towards true self-reliance, independence and liberty. The hallmark of
all quasi-socialist governments is the dependence of the governed upon a
parasitic and absurdly incompetent central state that could not create a
hairpin or an IPhone if its life depended on it.
There are some indications, however slight, that Lamont does
not favor a revolutionary repositioning of Connecticut that would tie the state
to the ideological dispositions of neo-progressive New England. In fact, if
sane legislators were to follow the lead of center right Republicans and
Democrats, Connecticut may well escape the undertow of New York and California,
becoming once again a modest, self-abasing exception to the self-destructive
tendencies of ungovernable neo-progressivism.
It is questionable whether Lamont, a neophyte politician, can
long hold out against a powerful phalanx of neo-progressive politicians and an intellectually
exhausted administrative state. Powerful state unions, a propagandistic
pedagogy, a media blithely unconcerned with the history of the state or foundational
documents undergirding our republic, yielding often to the temptation to
support a left of center body of politicians, together create a force that
tends to undercut the most rational and beneficial centrist positions in
matters of culture and politics.
It will be generally agreed that Democrats in Connecticut
are better able than Republicans to round up votes during election periods.
That has been evident in urban and state elections for the past 30 years.
Democrats now claim a super majority in the General
Assembly. In addition, they have controlled the state’s constitutional offices
and membership in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation during the same
period, the last fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republican member of
the delegation being U.S. Representative Chris Shays, swept out of office in
2009 by present Democrat U.S. Representative Jim Himes.
It should be recalled that all the fiscally conservative,
socially liberal Republican members of the U.S. Congressional Delegation fell
to socially liberal, neo-progressive Democrats. And indeed it may plausibly be
argued that Connecticut has been in the grip of left leaning Democrats,
especially in its murderous large city welfare trap-gates, for the last three
decades.
H.L. Menken reminds us that democracy is that form of
government in which the people get what they want – “good and hard.”
We do not know at this point whether Lamont’s nascent
efforts to carve out an exception to the general New England rule will be
successful. Within his own party, Lamont is surrounded by neo-progressives, and
while his limited business experience makes him, at least temperately, averse
to destructive political meddling from the left, temperament is a paper wall.
The best that may be said of Lamont is that he is former
U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker without the P.T. Barnum pyrotechnic bluster. Lamont was groomed by
Weicker to run against U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman in a Democrat primary. Lamont
won the primary but lost in the general election after Lieberman chose to run
as an independent candidate.
Connecticut is desperately in need of a push-back Republican
Party rooted in sound small “r” republican principles, both economic and
cultural, that have shown themselves to be far more long lasting than savior
politicians.
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