The 2026 State Elections, Feminism on the Rocks, and Paglia

Connecticut Commentary will not here forecast the race of governor in Connecticut and contingent races. It may be more instructive to lay out for voters the correlation of political forces in Connecticut most of which favor Democrats.

 

The last Republican governor of Connecticut was Jodi Rell, who got along famously with Democrats, as did her predecessor, Governor John Rowland, untimely booted from office during his historic making third term. Governor Ned Lamont hopes to replicate Rowlands’s record.

 

Since Rell, Republican influence in the state’s General Assembly has diminished significantly. Democrats now enjoy a nearly veto-proof majority in the state legislature, not that there is any pressing need to veto measures supported by Lamont. All so called “moderate” Republican members of the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation have been replaced by far less moderates Democrats who favor, unsurprisingly, leftist solutions to pressing budget deficits. Connecticut’s continuing deficit is hovering around $38 billion. The General Assembly is helmed by two left-leaning Democrats, President Pro Tempore of the state Senate Martin Looney, now in his sixteenth term, and Majority Leader of the state Senate Bob Duff, both occupying nearly impregnable safe seats. If we can put aside all the cackling we hear from Democrats concerning the perils of democracy, some of us realize that in a one-party state such as Connecticut, political business is managed in caucus rooms closed to both members of the minority party and the general public. Reporters are not welcomed in caucus rooms.

 

Ah, to be a fly on the wall, eh?

 

Progressive Democrats, in Connecticut and elsewhere, appear to be the prisoners of their past victories. One commentator put it this way: Democrats are the victims of their own past successes. Time has moved on, way past, to choose but one example among many, an authentic feminist movement, now caught in the undertow of stage three feminism. Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, among other books, has been a fierce critic of stages two through three – or is it four? She believes the evolving feminist movement has overstepped its rational. Like the giant in the fairy tale who with one step finds himself far ahead of the princess he is pursuing, postmodern feminists, have gone too far, too fast. And they do not realize that they are re-fighting battles already won.

 

Paglia’s feminism is rooted in biology, real rather than imagined history, and the remnants of the 17^th century Enlightenment period, only scant hints of which repose in 20^th century academia, a postmodern tangle of romantic anarchism and fairytale politics. Biological differences between men and women, a constant through the ages, cannot be overwritten by cultural or academic reforms. The ideological fizz added to both politics and cultural attempts at sociological reform is an anarchic attempt to resurrect a Marxist-Leninist effervescence that has – sorry about this – gone flat. And feminism already has won its most important battles.

 

On December 9, we were told by Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie, “Eighteen Democratic women serving in the legislature have signed on to an emphatic call to action in the First Congressional District. No more ‘being told to sit quietly and wait.’”

 

Bewildered Republicans cannot recall President Donald Trump, whose cabinet is top-heavy with strong and capable women, ever telling Attorney General Pam Bondi to “sit quietly and wait.” And the same may be said for the eight of twenty-four women serving in Trump’s cabinet, including Susie Wiles, the first-ever female White House chief of staff.

 

The eighteen women signatories mentioned by Rennie are interested in shoehorning a postfeminist legislator, Democrat State Rep. Jillian Gilchrist, into Democrat State Senator John Larson’s 1^st District. To this end, they’ve signed a manifesto that reads in part: “We’ve endured a world built without us in mind. We’ve overcome that by standing united. That unity won women the ability to vote, to get an education, to be financially independent. Despite our victories today, we’re still waiting for fair pay. For safe pregnancies [a right to abortion at any stage of a pregnancy]. For the freedom to make our own health care decisions [More money for Planned Parenthood or other feticide encouraging organizations, please]. For representation in rooms where our lives are debated, but our voices are missing…”

 

There are no Paglias in this group.

 

There may be half a dozen reasons for replacing Larson in Connecticut’s gerrymandered 1^st District with a woman. But Larson’s politics and his cultural misapprehensions differ only in degree, not in kind, from those of the signatories mentioned by Rennie. Does anyone believe that Larson, if reelected to office, would deprive Planned Parenthood abortionists of a single dollar of tax money, or that he would issue a manifesto telling the anti-Paglia, stage three feminists signatories – or is it four? – to mind their place in the grand scheme of things?