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It’s pretty well known in Connecticut’s conservative Republican circles that the state’s media, aping the national media, is squarely in President Joe Biden’s corner and would be delighted to see former President Donald Trump, their bête noir, squiggling on a hook in political Hell. That is pretty much the refrain of former State Senator Joe Markley, who left the General Assembly to run for Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut in 2018 but lost the general election to Democrat Susan Bysiewicz, and current State Senator Rob Samson, who continues to torment neo-progressive Democrats in the state’s General Assembly by supporting sound conservative principles.
Conservatives in Connecticut and the nation continue to be
rattled by Trump’s political persona, bristly and somewhat solipsistic, but
they support his policy prescriptions over those of Biden, who presided over a
botched American withdrawal from Afghanistan, a southern border policy that has
left border security in shambles, a spendthrift posture, apparently
irreversible, that has contributed mightily to monetary inflation and the high
costs of goods and services, and – the list here is incomplete for reasons of
space – a stubborn refusal to step away from the presidency at a time when even
important national Democrats are urging him to do so, in order to save his
party from a humiliating defeat at the hands of Trump-the-Terrible, almost
universally denounced within the Democrat Party as an affront to small “d”
democracy. The Democrat Party has long considered itself to be the custodian of
the nation’s democracy.
In the future, historians – assuming the Stakhanovite efforts of
neo-progressives bent upon revisionist history are not successful – will be
able to map the drift of the post-President John F. Kennedy Democrat Party from
left of center, or liberal, to extreme left, where it is now deeply planted in
a neo-progressive ditch, its wheels wildly spinning. Biden, historian Victor Davis Hanson tells us, is
the most radical president since the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. For
reasons undisclosed, Hanson’s luminous columns have not been picked up by
Connecticut’s media, even though they have been made available to the sprawling
Hearst Empire in Connecticut through its op-ed service.
This is usual practice among left of center editorial page
editors in Connecticut. All right of center efforts to redirect the path of national
dissolution are left to wither on editorial page vines, while left of center
opinion is solicitously manured.
It is still very much a longshot, despite encouraging polls,
but if Trump prevails over Biden in the 2024 election by a sizable margin, the
neo-progressive advance in the northeast and elsewhere in the nation may be
effectively checked, even in true-blue Connecticut. The prospect of a sizable
electoral loss has national neo-progressives tightly clutching their pearls.
Following the disastrous nationally televised Biden-Trump debate, The New Republic, not a Trump cheerleader, reported, “’I don’t know who’s making decisions,’ said one House Democrat ‘Why the hell isn’t Biden on the phone with congressional leadership? ... Everybody now thinks he could cost us the majority.’”
In Connecticut, the all-Democrat members of the state’s U.S.
Congressional Delegation – even its verbose U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and
Chris Murphy, imposed upon themselves a discreet and impenetrable silence.
Murphy, up for reelection in 2024, cautiously professed
indifference to the debate, according to Politico, “Sen. Chris Murphy
(D-Conn.) also waved off Biden’s poor debate performance and pivoted to Trump’s
support for overhauling the federal government and its implications on abortion
and LGBTQ rights.
“’I’m about substance, not style. After last night’s debate,
I’m more panicked than ever at Trump’s agenda. So I made a short video
explaining Trump’s detailed plan — Project 2025 — to destroy democracy,
criminalize abortion, and target and harass gay and transgender people,’ he
posted on X.”
The overhaul, one may be certain, will not include
substantial reductions in federal or state spending.
New York’s U.S. Senator Chuck
Schumer – like Blumenthal and Murphy, never straying far from the 2024 made-in-Washington
D.C. script – also posted on X, “Tonight’s debate made the choice clear: Four
more years of progress, or four more years of attacks on our fundamental rights
and our democracy. We’ve got to get out the vote for @JoeBiden, @KamalaHarris,
and a Democratic Senate and House!”
The pearl clutching on the part of neo-progressive Democrat
office holders is perfectly understandable. If Trump wins in 2024, the Democrat
Party will have much to answer for. If Trump loses, everyone may expect the
critical Republican response to the most radical administration in our lifetime
to be pushed beneath the waves like Melville’s Pequod. And no one will be left
to tell the tale.
One would never guess it from reading Connecticut’s left of
center media, but modern American conservatism, which owes much to Connecticut
native Bill
Buckley, stretches back further in time than neo-progressivism, a media res iteration of a stunted, revolutionary
minded Marxian view of history and politics. The curse trembling on the lips of
Connecticut’s anti-conservative pundits is a blessing in disguise. Buckley
himself, a prodigious writer and polemicist, was not printed widely in
Connecticut’s media, and the Obama-Biden interregnum may be the last gasp of a
failed Marxist tainted neo-progressive fad.
There is no reason for despair. Chancellor of Germany Otto
von Bismarck reminds us: “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards,
and the United States of America.”
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