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Some journalists believe it is the business of Connecticut’s media, or any media that proudly wears upon its breast a journalist’s badge of honor, to say the inconvenient truth boldly and often. A timid journalism will always avoid asking questions that make incumbent politicians uneasy, unless the politician falls on the wrong side of the ideological barricades. Connecticut’s media tends to veer left because they are pulled in that direction by a neo-progressive dark star.
Should conscientious journalists discriminate properly between liberals, progressives and neo-progressives?
That is an example of a good question, precisely the sort of question rarely asked or answered in public political discussions here in deep blue Connecticut.
For reasons not often discussed, western and eastern seaboard states have been trending left for decades. Progressivism, much older than people think, has little to do with postmodern neo-progressivism.
Bull-Moose Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican politician turned independent, has little in common with, say, soon to be former Governor of California Gavin Newsom. One cannot imagine Newsom racing up San Juan Hill along with a discreditable bunch of Roughriders. If as Governor of his state and Mayor of San Francisco Newsom ever proposed significant spending cuts, that would have been news indeed, because Newsome is a straight laced neo-progressive, and neo-progressives have pledged themselves to repeated increases in spending, mostly to satisfy state employee union lapdog administrators.
When Luther C. Steward, President of the National Federation of Federal Employees, beseeched President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to allow unions to strike the federal government, he was coldly rebuffed. Roosevelt wrote to Stewart: “I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare requires orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.”
End of discussion.
How times change. Both Lamont and Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and super–neo-progressive Chris Murphy -- have achieved union celebrity status by marching in strike lines.
Woodrow Wilson, a progressive egghead, was closer in spirit to neo-progressives but far apart, ideologically, from progressive precursors such as religion infused Democrat William Jennings Bryant, who ran for president several times and each time lost -- proudly.
Henry Mencken, possibly the most influential journalist of his day, railed against Bryant as often as possible. Here is Mencken on the recently deceased Bryant: “Wherever the flambeau of Chautauqua smoked and guttered, and the bilge of idealism ran in the veins, and Baptist pastors dammed the brooks with the sanctified, and men gathered who were weary and heavy ladened, and their wives who were full of Peruna [a patent medicine] and as fecund as the shad (Alosa sapidissama), there the indefatigable Jennings set up his traps and spread his bait.”
Then too, Wilson put Eugene Debs, a socialist with presidential ambitions, in jail. No neo-progressive Democrat has yet suggested Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders should be jailed. There are hosts of neo-progressive Democrats, some writing for the Times and the Associated Press, who would rejoice – privately of course, never publically – to see President Donald Trump spend his remaining years in the hoosegow.
When the relevant lords and ladies of the neo-progressive movement in the United States proposed letting the FBI dogs loose on Latin Mass Catholics, few on the left made much of a defensive stir. One cannot imagine Mencken preserving a discreet silence on such matters. A practical atheist and admirer of Nietzsche, Mencken was never-the-less morally courageous. He was among the first serious journalists on the eastern seaboard to pillory KKK mobsters and hangmen. And he would have heartily agreed with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s remark that anti-Catholicism was the oldest prejudice in the United States as well as looming large in the KKK’s agenda.
In any case, there are exceedingly important differences between liberals, progressives and neo-progressives. Journalism, which is, among other things, the art of naming things correctly, should responsibly point out the differences.
Why, exactly, do eastern seaboard progressive journalists decline to defend robustly Catholics who attend Latin Masses? Is there no one in Connecticut’s academia – stout defenders of the First Amendment – willing to brave stern looks from their comrades in arms in defense of the freedom of the religious expression clause of the very same amendment that provides a wide door of liberty to freedom of expression for journalists?
Why so timid in defense of Constitutional protections?
