Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Eventually, necessary information trickles up to Connecticut’s left of center media. On April 23, days after Governor Ned Lamont announced a date positive for the partial re-opening of Connecticut’s shuttered economy in June, CTMirror ran a story titled “ Coronavirus is breaking the food supply chain .” But Coronavirus is doing no such thing. The supply chain has been broken by the very first, intentional national recession. And the national recession has been caused by businesses shuttered by politicians who have settled upon the shuttering of businesses as a way to contain Coronavirus.

In any representative system, there will always be what the French call “frisson” between an administration and its rank and file members, particularly in democratic systems in which the administration is regarded as a distributive mechanism in which the will of the rank and file is supposed to be faithfully represented by its elected or appointed representatives. In national elections this year, both socialist Democrat Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump – a sometime Democrat, sometime Republican – have exploited the gap that occasionally opens up between the electorate and the leaders of both political parties. But the gap is present in all representative organizations – including public worker unions in which union administration may occasionally wander from its democratic mandate.