Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Harp and Elicker Mayor Toni Harp of New Haven,  Hartford Courant reporter Chris Keating tells us , “has won 14 consecutive elections in her hometown, dating to her first run for state Senate in 1992.” That is as close to invulnerability as one might expect in a Democrat machine run city. The Republican Party has been for years but a ghostly presence in Connecticut’s larger cities. The last Republican mayor of the city, William Celanto, a funeral director and its first Italian –American mayor, left office in 1953, more than six decades ago. Democrats, out polling Republicans by a ratio of 15-1, have owned the shop ever since.

The short and sweet answer to the question “Shall there be a constitutional convention?” ought to be a resounding “Yes!!!” The question appears on ballots once every twenty years, with predictable results. This year the party of the status quo – all the special interests that for years have been suckling on the now withered breasts of Mother Government – is especially enraged by the idea, which was put into the state constitution by committed Jeffersonians. It was Thomas Jefferson, a son of the enlightenment, who thought that the government of these states should participate in a bloody revolution every so often to clean the entrails of Mother Government of its detritus. After the French Revolution, Jefferson settled for constitutional change. The past, Jefferson thought, was younger than the present, because the past had not the advantage of current experience. The forces in Connecticut that have conspired to obstruct the calling of a constitutional convention obviously disagree. By r...

ISI Books, an imprint of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, has just released an authoritative reprint of Orestes Brownson’s The American Republic , which is, in addition to De’Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the much thumbed Federalist Papers , the most important post Civil War primer of American political thought. Brownson, whose father lived in the Waterbury area before he moved his family to New Hampshire, was the principal autodidact in an age of autodidacts. Standing at the bridge of the modern age and more familiar than other men of his time with the European godfathers of the modern era--Transcendentalism can be traced directly to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the German romantics--Brownson went through the defining movements of his day like a hot knife through butter. American Transcendentalism was an eclectic stew of oddments: Its moralism may be traced to the Puritans; it’s concept of intuition and the notion that the individual enjoys direct access to divine...

Very likely the answer to Islamic terrorism, when it arrives, will have a spiritual component. Terrorists in Syria, Iran and Iraq are driven by a vision of conquest and glory, as was Mohammad in the 10th century. The West, outwardly materialistic and secular, is driven by a different vision. As Islamic purists might see it, we are the flesh, they are the spirit, and the two are at war with each other. Profound secularists in the West and terrorists in the East do not understand that for much of human history the two have commingled and informed each other. A war between the flesh and the spirit in which one of the two permanently vanquished the other would lead to a tyranny of angels or devils. The struggle before us in the 21st century occurs in a theatre of thought and action in which lions may lay down with lambs, provided there is no final victory between, to put it in modern terms, the claims of science and the claims of religion. But in the mean time, terrorists are roving the wo...