Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

“ The moderate eastern Republican fell victim to Republican extremists from within, such as William F. Buckley, and the party started to disintegrate ,” so says former US Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker, who lost his position in the Senate when he was challenged by then Attorney General Joe Lieberman. Mr. Lieberman, a Democrat of long standing, was not an extremist conservative; neither, for that matter was Bill Buckley. But let us be generous and allow Mr. Weicker his point, for purposes of examination. What practical effect, if any, has Mr. Buckley’s conservativism had on Connecticut, which is part of the eastern seaboard? The honest answer to the question would be next to none. If politics in Connecticut were a dog, conservatives would represent the tip of the tail. And tails wag dogs only in the fevered imagination of ideologues. All past Republican Party members of Connecticut's US Delegation – Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons and Chris Shays – were fiscal conservative...

“Neutrality is at times a graver sin than belligerence” – Louis Brandeis Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s appearance at Yale in New Haven was preceded by the usual fuss. But she did appear, and that in itself was a minor triumph.  An earlier appearance at Brandeis at which Hirsi Ali was to receive an honorary degree was shut down by protesters who argued that the speaker was anti-Islamic, and Brandeis, a university named after Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, covered itself in dishonor by acceding to the protesters. Louis Brandeis, whose path to the Supreme Court was littered with anti-Semitism, knew that those opposed to free speech usually succeed in their aims by stirring up fear: “Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”

This may be the first time in Connecticut history that an irrelevant former Republican U.S. Senator of long standing has warned his former party that it faces irrelevancy. The new crop of Republicans in Connecticut – young, brash, conservative and determined to remember but overcome their past – may have trouble recalling who former U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker was. The past tense is important because Mr. Weicker, who once dubbed himself “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl,” scooted out the political door after he had, as an independent governor, imposed the second largest tax increases on young Republicans he now seductively courts in the op-ed pages of the Hartford Courant .