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When we say “Throw the bums out!”-- a common expression in politics -- by “bums” we generally mean incumbent politicians. P olitically neutered minority politicians warming their backside on the backbenches are no threat to the state or voters. A politician unplugged is like a lamp disconnected, powerless and incapable of shedding light or producing active policy prescriptions.
In Connecticut, during the last few decades, Republicans in the state have been unplugged. We may leave it to academics to tell us when this political mudslide began. Presently all the constitutional offices in Connecticut are occupied by Democrats; all the members of Connecticut’s US Congressional Delegation are Democrats; in the General Assembly, Democrats enjoy a nearly veto-proof majority, and Connecticut’s media appears to be suffering from a severe leftward-ho tropism.
As is the case with the national media, Connecticut’s corporate media, less independent every day, is owned by large national media chains. If there were a national neo-progressive party, corporate media would be petting it daily in the same way they now are stroking affectionately Connecticut’s left-leaning Democrat incumbent politicians.
Former 4th District US Representative Chris Shays, tossed out of office in 2009 by neo-progressive Jim Himes, was the last casualty of a Democrat neo-progressive insurgency that left the state’s US Congressional Delegation shorn of “moderate” Republicans. Prior casualties included Nancy Johnson and Rob Simmons. Republicans serving for years within a nearly evenly divided US Congressional Delegation billed themselves as moderates who were “fiscally conservative” but liberal on social matters.
In a not so odd twist of fate, all Republican social liberals have been displaced by leftist neo-progressives. And Republican fiscal conservatives have been displaced by left of center neo-progressives deeply committed, whether they know it or not, to discredited quasi-Marxist notions.
As the new political plant matured in the following years, once liberal Democrats became neo-progressives, Republicans were unplugged, and the media, always in service to the reigning political power, purred uncomplainingly in the heart of the new political dispensation.
The current Democrat majority in Connecticut may best be described as out-of-the-closet neo- progressives, none of whom draw from the same intellectual well as did traditional Democrat liberals such as former President John F. Kennedy, former Connecticut Governor Ella Grasso, or former US Senator Joe Lieberman.
The reader may wonder why I am using the term “neo-progressive.” I am using it to sharply distinguish former President John F. Kennedy from current President Joe Biden and his supporters, among whom we may count current Democrat Party presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.
It is, a few remaining non-partisan political reporters may note, a bit of political sleight of hand to regard Harris-The-Joyful as having been “nominated” by Democrat primary-pledged delegates to the Democrat Nominating Convention of August 19 through August 22. When the convention convened, only a handful of delegates were not pledged to cast their votes for Democrat primary winner President Joe Biden. The convention, in fact, was a subversion of normative convention processes – not excluding the presentation to the delegates of a detailed party platform. Harris’ platform was, then and now, a string of glowing platitudes – not well defined planks that would give footing to Democrats in a presidential campaign. No planks, one political writer pointed out, no mandate to govern. Policy-wise, Harris remains, less than a month before the election, an unknown quiddity.
Kennedy was a classic liberal. That is to say he was one among many Democrats in a formative queue -line that runs down the ages to the great defenders of the Roman Republic such as Cicero, the author of The Roman Republic, assassinated by agents of Julius Caesar, dictator and autocrat. Nearly all the founders of the American Republic were familiar with Cicero’s valiant defense of the republican state.
Sam Adams was playing Cicero when he wrote, encouraging his compatriots to join a small “r” republican military offensive against autocratic government, “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
So then, here we are.
Connecticut, virtually all political reporters will acknowledge, has dodged a conservative bullet. Political progress on the entire east and west coasts has moved left – very far left, conservatives sometimes admonish – because in the views of leftists there are no enemies to the left, and even a shriveled conservative response to a regnant far left political conglomerate is an insult never to be born in silence.
That, by the way, is one of the reasons reportage and political commentary in Connecticut and environs is so damned boring.
