It should come as no surprise to political watchers in Connecticut, including reporters and political columnists, that Connecticut has been for some time a one-party state.
U.S. Senator from Connecticut Chris Murphy has been
swimming in a warm one party state pool for his entire tenure in office.
Democrats in Connecticut control 1) both houses of
the state’s General Assembly by nearly a two to one majority, 2) all
Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Offices, 3) the gubernatorial office, 4) Connecticut’s
semi-independent court system, and 5) the State Supreme Court. Justices on the
court owe their appointments to Democrats, who have not hesitated to use courts
as a prop and launching pad for the promulgation of leftwing ideas.
The one-party state, history buffs will have noticed,
is boringly similar wherever it has raised its horned head above the political
horizon. In the blood soaked 20th century, significant
socialist/communist dictatorships in Germany and Russia were voted into office
by democratic plebiscites. Germany moved from the quasi-socialist regime of
Otto von Bismarck, though a difficult transition period after World War I, marked
by the collapse of cultural unity and dangerously high inflation, to the Nazism
of Adolph Hitler. Benito Mussolini was a socialist journalist before he
launched the fascist movement in Italy. Asked to define fascism, Mussolini
said, “Everything in the state, nothing above the state, nothing outside the
state,” hardly the definition Bill Buckley might have offered had he been asked
to define American conservativism.
For months, during and after the recently concluded
national elections, Democrats manning the anti-Trump battlements assured us
that the elevation to the presidency of former President Donald Trump would
cause the pillars of American democracy to crumble and fall. Were Trump to be
elected president, we should all end up in a fascist dystopia, said people who
know little about Nazis, Germany’s National Socialist party, still less about
Stalinist Russia, and perhaps less about Trump, who is a multi-millionaire capitalist
entrepreneur, not a fascist socialist, as depicted by neo-progressives in
Connecticut and the nation.
The expression “millionaire socialist” should be an
oxymoron in deep blue neo-progressive New England. Socialist U.S. Senator
Bernie Sanders of Vermont is both a socialist and a millionaire, and the
jarring disjunction has not interfered with his ascendancy among
neo-progressives. President Ulysses Grant died impoverished. Former President
Joe Biden has been enriched in part through the dubious clandestine foreign economic
activity of son Hunter and shady pals.
Murphy is not yet a millionaire, but his rhetoric
on big business and nefarious Republican millionaires -- Democrat millionaires
are left to pasture in peace by Democrats who benefit from their substantial
campaign contributions -- is every bit as intense as the potboiler rhetoric
dispensed by Sanders.
Political watchers know that the courage of the
average politician is directly related to the number of years that elapse
before re=election to office. As Election Day approaches, even extreme leftists
who have been stoking the fires of socialist tinged Wokism, now retreating from
assaults launched in their direction by multiple Trump cabinet appointees, trim
their views and move cautiously to middle ground, some --- term limited
Governor of California Gavin Newsom, for instance – more awkwardly than others.
The cowardice of safe politicians, most political
watchers know, is inversely related to their reelection date. Murphy has nearly
six years left to this term before he once again faces election. He can use these
six years to raise campaign money, for both himself and others, by engaging in
muscular opposition every time Trump opens his beak to sing the usual refrain.
Even mild mannered Connecticut House Republican leader Vincent Candelora of
North Branford acknowledges that Murphy is a masterful money producer. But,
Candalora said, “As a public official, our job is to represent the public. I
think Chris Murphy is becoming the personification of what is wrong in
politics. You can disagree with President Trump’s policies, but to be an
obstructionist and an underminer is very unbecoming of a public official.
Speaking as somebody who for 18 years has operated from the minority in
Connecticut, and having to work with a Democrat governor, a Democrat Senate,
and a Democrat House, I would never want to be looked at in this chamber as ‘the
resistance.’”
Louder conservative voices are content, just now,
to skewer Murphy whenever possible. The Hartford Courant
tells us:
In an opinion column titled, “Democrats’ New
Spokesman Might Be The Biggest Gift They Could Give Trump,” conservative author
John Loftus said that Murphy is “pretty much the male version of [Hillary]
Clinton and embodies everything that has made the Democratic Party’s brand
unpalatable in the Trump era. Elitist career politician? Check. Pedantic user
of the notorious d-word, ‘democracy’? Check.”
Loftus added, “Murphy may be making the rounds on
YouTube and political podcast shows to reach younger voters, which is smart,
but he’s hawking the same old Joe Biden/Harris platform that cost Democrats
dearly in 2024: ‘We are the actual populists, and we are going to protect you
from fascists and save American democracy.”’
These are palpable hits, but much of the response
to Murphy’s hyperbolic exaggeration of the possible effects of Trump’s second
four year term will be forgotten by the time Murphy is to face the voters after
his term in office expires. Registered Democrat voters in Connecticut outnumber
Republicans by a two to one margin. In politics, numbers matter, and majorities
are moved usually by entropy rather than political ideas.
In his Courant interview, Murphy has acknowledged
that his party has been sundered by Trump’s undisputed election to the presidency:
“There is obviously a debate inside the Democratic Party. There are some people
who want to sit back and wait for Trump to fumble and then activate when the
moment is right. I do not subscribe to that model of using and exercising
power. I think (Republicans) flood the zone every day, and we’ve got to flood
the zone. I think people won’t trust you if you run a campaign saying that if
Donald Trump is elected, he’s an existential threat to democracy, [and a
fascist as well] and then you retreat. If he’s such a threat to democracy, then
you need to be fighting every day… I haven’t been shy about my belief that the
Democratic Party is pretty broken as a brand. We also have to do some hard work
to make sure that people know we are the party that actually stands for the
breakup of concentrated power, increasing wages, and the pushback against the
corporate control of our economy. So this can’t be all resistance. We’ve got to
do some work to rebuild who the Democratic Party is and what we stand for.”
Once you have broad brushed your political opponent
as a fascist – and, perhaps worse, as an anti-socialist billionaire – you have
cut off all retreat. That was the losing message of the Biden-Harris campaign.
Some Democrats are now in retreat, but not Murphy, the Bernie Sanders of
Connecticut.
There once was a very proper English gent during
the age of Queen Victoria who was asked to say a few complimentary words about
coitus.
“Sir,” the gent said, “the posture is ridiculous.”
In the aftermath of the Biden-Harris drubbing,
Murphy’s political posture of unremitting, unending opposition to supposed quasi-fascist
and destructor of democracy Trump – as of this writing, it has been 42 days
since Trump was sworn into office, and the Republic still stands – is
ridiculous.
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