Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Merrill The last word, or the next to the last word, on Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders’ ill-fated run for the presidency may be that of communist evangelist Karl Marx. In  The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte  Marx writes, “ Hegel  remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” This is the second time Sanders has run for president, succumbing the first time to former Secretary of State in the Obama administration Hillary Clinton and this time to former Obama Vice President Joe Biden. This, his second and one suspects last run for the presidency – Sanders is getting on in years -- may be a tragedy to the youth of the nation, who hung on his every word, but it is a farce for most grownups.

Twain The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it – Mark Twain I’m going to try and say some non-twitter-like, intelligent things about progressivism, Connecticut’s media and what Karl Marx, were he alive today, might call the “correlation of forces” in our own state. By the way, I’m not sure how many people reading this know that for about four years in the 1850s, Marx, then living in London, was the European correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune. He even exchanged letters with President Abraham Lincoln. Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote for a European, not an American audience. Their articles on the Civil War were later collected into a 325 page book, “ The Civil War in the United States.” It might be well to start this discussion with some undisputed claims.

Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders has been puttering in politics only four years longer than U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, and the two may have more in common than most suppose. Both were born in New York and entered politics about the same time, Sanders in 1981 as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and Blumenthal in 1985 as a member of Connecticut’s State House of Representatives. Neither political career has been marred by service in the private marketplace. Both are East Coast, secularized, cultural Jews. That is, they are Jews who have shaken the dust of orthodoxy from their feet. Religious discipline is too confining for either, and their attitude toward heterodoxy parallels that of Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick: “Speak not to me of blasphemy, man. I’d strike the sun if it dared insult me.” Blumenthal, in particular is well known as a champion of abortion provider Planned Parenthood. An orthodox Jewish Rabbi once was asked what the position of cultural Jews on abortion was. “...

If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country” – Barry Goldwater To people who have been stung by socialism – ask any American refugee from Cuba, Venezuela, or any of the Baltic States that only recently have thrown off Soviet tyranny – there is not much difference between professed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

State Representative Josh Elliot, a progressive Democrat from Hamden, views the state budget as “a moral document that can be used to create a more equitable and fair society,” the Hartford Courant tells us. The paper quotes Elliot on the point: “Are you taking an economic frame and saying ‘what can we do to grow GDP at all costs?’ … Or are you taking a moral and ethical frame and saying ‘what can we do to build up a just society?’ And I think those two questions are at loggerheads right now.” There is a welter of confusion here. The point Elliot appears to be making is that progressives like himself view the economy as having a moral dimension lost to free-marketers, i.e. redundantly rich capitalists concerned only – note the devil word “only” -- with growing the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It would not be possible in Elliot’s view for a free-marketer like, say, Fredrick Hayek, author of “The Road To Serfdom” -- a ruthless attack against the collectivist ethos that informs ...

Following Governor Ned Lamont's presentation of his budget to the General Assembly, the question remains: Is Ned Lamont Malloy II? He may turn out to be Malloy without the quills Lamont’s budget includes hefty increases in taxes; as defined here, a tax is any dollar that moves from private wallets into the public treasury. Accumulatively, Lamont’s tax extensions – they are not a revocation of tax exemptions – closely approaches the tax increases of the Malloy administration.   Taxes under the Lamont administration will also be made more progressive according to the reliable Marxian formula: "From  each according  to his ability, to  each according  to his needs." Because of past economic sleight of hand, the neediest recipient of state dollars, it turns out, is the state treasury. In the past, when expenses have gone up and revenue has plummeted, Connecticut has increased taxes to recover ensuing deficits. Lamont repeats the process in a higher key...

In “ History’s Bad Ideas Are an Inspiration for Progressives, ”  historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson examines the dark side of progressivism. Stymied by a Supreme Court that was a bit too traditionalist for his tastes – that is to say, a high court that faithfully interpreted the laws with reference to a real rather than a fictitious “living Constitution” --     President Franklin Roosevelt, Hanson notes, attempted to pack the court. His “convoluted proposal would have allowed Roosevelt to select a new—and additional justice—to the Supreme Court for every sitting judge who had reached 70 years, 6 months, and had not retired. And in theory, he could pack on 6 more judges, creating a 15-member court with a progressive majority.”

History, always messy, has a wrong and a right side, and sometimes the right side is the revolutionary one; such was the case during the American Revolution. When U.S. Senator Chris Murphy says that the National Rifle Association (NRA), and others who support the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights, is “on the wrong side of history,” he shows a lack of understanding concerning what history is, what being on the wrong side of it is, and possibly what “is” is. If the NRA is on the right side of the Second Amendment, it is on the right side of history, as were American revolutionists who fashioned it in response to a British attempt to deprive colonists of their weapons. The most prominent lawyer of the day, Judge St. George Tucker, appointed by President James Madison as U.S. District Judge for Virginia, characterized the right of citizens to bear arms as “ the palladium of liberty , the right of defense upon which all the other imprescriptible rights in the Bill of Rights d...

The driving force behind Western styled capitalism, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” says George Gilder, the Walt Whitman of Capitalism, is – hang onto your hats here – altruism. Or, to put it in terms that might best arouse the fierce antagonism of socialists, progressives and “Occupy Wall Street” san culottes, the primary notes of capitalism are: methodological experimentation, creativity and a concern for others – not greed. The very notion that altruism, a meeting of the wants and needs of others, rather than greed is the spark that sets the entrepreneurial spirit aflame is anathema to the ardent followers of Ayn Rand, the author of “Atlas Shrugged,” apart from the Bible one of the bestselling novels --   or, as some would insist,   polemical tracts -- of all times.

In card games, the country and western song tells us, “you gotta know when to hold them and when to fold them.” In politics, you gotta know when and how to take a victory lap after you’ve folded. Following Connecticut’s remarkably jam-packed “short” legislative session, Republicans and Democrats took the usual victory lap in their rhetorical chariots. But winners and losers there were. Republicans in the General Assembly were rolled over by superior numbers; nothing unusual there. They lost. And they will continue to lose pending that day when voters in Connecticut unite to “throw the bums out,” an American version of the Marxist battle cry: “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains, and a world to win.” Karl Marx may have been an economic dufus, but he certainly was a suburb ad-man and, were he alive today, might have made a valuable contribution to the 5th District U.S. Congressional ambitions of, say, Chris Donovan – also a loser . In a Machiavellia...

There are some people who may believe that U.S. Rep Jim Himes, a Democrat who narrowly defeated Chris Shays in a tight race, is the second coming of Shays, but Mr. Shays is not among them, according to a story in CTMirror . "The sweet spot of the 4th District,” Himes said, “is socially progressive, business-oriented, and fiscally responsible, and I think that describes me. It's an interesting question, if you put Chris Shays between me and Dan Debicella [Himes’ Republican opponent], who he would be closer to." There are some important differences between Himes and Shays. While in office, Mr. Shays had a RINO (Republican In Name Only) rating of 70%, which is to say he voted with his party in the congress 70% of the time, not a bad batting average for Republicans considered “moderate” by Connecticut’s left of center media. Mr. Himes’ DINO (Democrat In Name Only) rating is (94%), a score likely to raise the hackles only of progressive purists. Shays chortles at Himes’ ...

A sharp political analyst, Karl Marx -- who, appropriately enough, wrote for the New York Tribune -- used to talk about “the correlation of forces.” Marx was a lousy economist but a keen observer of people, countries, events and political movements. By the correlation of forces, Marx meant all the important powers that shape politics, the plow that forms the furrow in which politics flows and determines its course. The correlation of forces drifted to the top of my mind about two weeks ago when Gov. Jodi Rell surprised all of us by pulling a pin from her grenade and fragging the Democrat controlled legislature. The ensuing fireworks have been instructive. All the usual suspects retreated behind all the usual barricades. Roy Occhiogrosso, who has become the unofficial voice of the Democrat Party in the media, characterized Rell’s budget, on the Shelly Sindland show, as “a fairy tale.” Republican Party Chairman Chris Healy was sitting beside him, and for once his wits failed him. He migh...

Communist dictator Fidel Castro’s non-obituary is beginning to appear in newspapers, now that he has officially surrendered his position as president of Cuba. Castro held the position, bayonet in hand, ever since he seized power in Cuba on New Year’s Day, 1959. The communist dynasty now falls to his brother Raul, 76 years young. Despite keystone cop like attempts to remove the now ailing dictator and relieve Cuba of its incubus, the most serious of which was President John Kennedy’s Bay of Pig’s fiasco, Castro’s Cuba has been relatively free of the usual plots and mayhem associated with communist regimes. Other communist leaders were not so lucky. Trotsky died at the hands of an assassin sent to Mexico by Stalin, who dispatched the war hero and party theoretician with a hatchet. Stalin , “the Breaker of Nations,” authorized the Great Purge of 1937-39, which eliminated opposition from the Old Bolsheviks, and anyone else he thought might oppose his steely will. Stalin himself was poisone...

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY, finding herself among reddish ideological compatriots – a “Women for Hillary” gathering at a midtown hotel that added $250,000 to her political coffers – threw off her recently acquired “moderate” corset and unwound. Samplings of the senator’s spicy rhetoric follow: • “There has never been an administration, I don’t believe in our history, more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further (sic) their own agenda. I know it’s frustrating for many of you, it’s frustrating for me. Why can’t the Democrats do more to stop them? I can tell you this: It’s very hard to stop people who have you shame about what they’re doing. It’s very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government (sic) who don’t care. It’s very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth.” • According to a report from the Clinton friendly New York Times News Service, the se...