What’s Next?

Fazio and Lamont

The off-year presidential elections will soon be over. Few expect breathtaking surprises. It is traditional in national off-year presidential elections for the party out of power, in this case Democrats, to gain seats in the U.S. Congress. In Connecticut, Democrats are expected to hold back an anticipated Republican eddy. Republicans have been telling us recent polling is defective. Nationally, Republicans are expected to lose some seats in the U S Congress. Statewide, Democrats are expected to maintain their margins. The obvious question at this point is: What comes next?

 

The tradition mentioned above concerning off-year presidential elections may be the only tradition that, for the time being, the rebels without a cause among American Democratic Socialist (ADS) are willing to tolerate. Their revolutionary movement calls for a unitary national legislature – no more U.S. Senate -- additional seats as socialist ballast to be added to the U.S. Supreme Court, a vast increase in the power of the executive branch, and a new convention on the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution first proposed by progressive Democrat President Woodrow Wilson according to which constitutional provisions should be regarded as having no more authority than statutory regulations, among other reforms that, taken together, would radically reshape the future of American politics.

 

When the ADS is finished tinkering with long settled American constitutional governance, the end result will be a monarchical government in which the legislative branch has been reduced to a powerless shadow of itself; the judicial branch, the membership of which will be subject to a popular vote, has been emasculated as a check upon the magisterial executive office; and the No-Kings movement can be shelved as hopelessly irrelevant to the newly reformed socialist political order. What the ADS really wants is a government not unlike that of any respectable serfdom tyranny in which the electorate is expected to surrender its assets unquestioningly to a rapacious government and shut up.

 

Vermont socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders appears to be basking in his glory. He has predicted a socialist tsunami sweeping all before it in the upcoming elections. A future presidency is twinkling in Democrat state Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s left eye. Her political pockets have been deep enough to allow her to transfer $1 million last Friday to a political account that will help elect fellow socialist/progressive Abdul El-Sayed to the U.S. Senate.

 

I’d rather be right than president, Henry Clay once said. Sanders has trumped that one. He has rarely been successful in most of his far-flung leftist ambitions. He has always wanted to plunder the assets of billionaires – be it noted, not millionaires. Sanders, since his first election to office, has now become a millionaire. He plans to spend the seized assets on increasing the power of governance to seize assets. And what will he purchase with the seized assets? Answer: more power to seize more assets in the future, almost certainly from non-millionaires. The 1861 Civil War income tax, historians may recall, was a tax levied on equivalent “millionaires” of the day that was supposed to be temporary. Alas, owing to improvident inflation producing spending, the post-Civil War “millionaire’s tax” has now trickled down to non-millionaires, where it rests today, eating out the substance of middle class workers. Taxes, once they go up, are not subject to the laws of gravity whenever spending increases proportionally. They rarely come down.

 

In Connecticut, as well as much of New England and California, the feverish dreams of leftists have come true. We are, and have been for the last three decades, a leftist “conspiracy.” The word “conspiracy” is here used in its Shavian sense. George Bernard Shaw once quipped, “Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.”  Democrats in Connecticut are without question pedantic professionals. They outnumber Republicans by a two to one margin. There are slightly more Independents or Unaffiliateds than registered Democrats in “the land of steady habits.” In the state’s General Assembly, Democrats boast a veto proof majority. All the members of the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation are Democrat. Jodi Rell, the last Connecticut Republican governor who died two years ago, left office in 2009 and retired to Florida. All current justices of Connecticut’s Supreme Court were appointed to office by Democrat governors. The media in Connecticut has been soft on Democrats for decades, some say because the media always knows who butters its bread. This is a high hill to climb.

 

We have only to wait a few days to find out who won and who lost. The larger and more important question is:  What will the winners do with their victory? A Democrat victory will represent the continuation of a left leaning status quo in Connecticut. Almost certainly this will mean a hardening of what some political analysts are calling Connecticut’s Democrat hegemony. Hegemonic governments are nearly always tyrannical, because hegemons such as we see in Putin’s Russia,  Xi Jinping’s China and Shia Islam’s terrorist conspiracy with Iran need fear only an awakened and effective resistance to tyrannical rule.

 

We shall see in coming days if fellow cynic H.L. Mencken’s definition of democracy -- “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard” – is on point.