Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter, YouTube
Orestes Brownson, (1803-1876), went through the political and religious enthusiasms of his day like a hot knife through butter. His forward motion progress came to an abrupt halt when, friendless afterwards, he formerly joined the Catholic Church. Some scholars theorize that Brownson was in his day America’s Cardinal John Henry Newman, author of The Development of Christian Doctrine and principally responsible, after his own conversion to Catholicism, for founding the influential Oxford Movement in Western Europe.
During one of his intellectual meanderings from atheism, through Transcendentalism, to what Hilaire Belloc later would call The Path to Rome, Brownson, the author of The American Republic, would insist that throughout history there were only two political parties: the party of stasis, and the party of forward movement, falsely identified by our current neo-progressives as progressivism.
Brownson’s observation remains true today. But how does one calculate the standing of each party within Connecticut’s post-modern politics, circa 2026?
Is progressivism in Connecticut a regression or a progression forward from the status quo? What is the current political status quo? The answers to such questions are not what one would expect, because political terms are fungible. Time, as the philosophers say, moves on, burying in its wake standard definitions. The liberalism of President John F. Kennedy is not the progressivism of, say, US Senator Chris Murphy. Neither is the progressivism of President Teddy Roosevelt the progressivism of U.S. Senator Chris Murphy.
Two years ago, US Senator from New York Chuck Schumer was what might be called a moderate liberal Democrat, not unlike President Kennedy. Most recently, for campaign rather than policy reasons, he has more in common with Vermont socialist US Senator Bernie Sanders or Marxist flavored Mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani. That is because Schumer constantly has a wet finger raised to measure the prevailing political wind, and the Democrat wind for the past few decades has been blowing right to left. Within the Republican Party the political wind, ever since Bill Buckley more or less invented American conservativism, much different then British conservatism, has been blowing left to right.
What of the moderates in both parties? Such are the political enthusiasms within both parties that these ever–shifting movements have crowded out the middle. My waitress at a diner in Manchester tells me that there no longer is a political middle, and she blames the displacement on 24/7 campaigning. “It’s enough to drive you nuts,” she says, moving at warp speed to deposit a plate of eggs, hash browns and sausage at a neighboring table.
There can be no room in an either/or for polite differences. Every word becomes an act of war, but food, my mother often mentioned, makes people less volatile. Rose Pesci would not permit political discussions during festive occasions – Thanksgiving, Easter, and Christmas – when the extended family showed up in force, tongues wagging. We all waited until she was in the kitchen before violating imposed truces.
The war on the part of Democrats is a campaign war, one involving political positioning and power politics. Connecticut Republicans are concerned with policy and political issues: Does state spending exceed the state’s gross domestic product (GDP)? What is the relationship between power politics and the wellbeing of a majority of Connecticut residents? What are the representational drawbacks to a one-party state? Does Connecticut have a spending rather than a budget problem? During the past 30 years under autocratic Democrat Party control, have Republicans in the state Assembly been marginalized by progressive-minded committee Democrats in charge of admitting bills to the legislature? And most recently, should important decisions concerning public and private schools in Connecticut be decided by parents, municipalities or state government officials?
In Connecticut, the Democrat Party has been for more than three decades the party of stasis. Especially in urban areas, nothing changes. We may say, along with the French -- the more things change, the more they remain the same. The last Republican to have been elected mayor of Hartford was Ann Uccello, in 1971. Figures are similar in other large metropolitan areas. Outmigration in Connecticut, driven by high taxes, excessive regulations and frustrating one-party politics, is mounting, along with stale profitless party rhetoric. All the signs of the times point to a hunger for change and anti-establishmentarianism.
If the political establishment is neo-progressive, real change can come only from the right, not the left. The political substructure, if not the culture and history of New England and New York, presently are neo-progressive. A politician such as current mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani, popular with uncritical reporters and commentary writers, is wallowing in a castoff quasi-communist socialism older than the failed anti-democrat communism of impoverished Latin American states such as Venezuela and Cuba. They are stepping backwards, not forward.
They are, in a word, unprogressing.
One can only imagine how the Author of The American Republic would attack such foolishness. Like George Orwell, he likely would remind us that every political corruption is preceded by a corruption in the language.
Stay updated with the latest in the Constitution State with The CT Centinal
