How Connecticut’s Ruling Class Forgot Who They Serve

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A few weeks ago I did something that used to be ordinary in American journalism and now feels almost subversive. I asked Governor Ned Lamont a direct question in public.

He had told reporters that “people of color” in Connecticut were too afraid to vote. I wanted to know what evidence he had for that claim and why a sitting governor was pushing it. The exchange went viral because it was rare. Lamont looked startled, as if someone had broken an unwritten rule.

A month earlier I finally got Attorney General William Tong on camera and asked why the video of J’allen Jones’ death in state custody still had not been released months after his office promised it would be out after Thanksgiving. Tong didn’t want to discuss transparency. He wanted to lecture me about things I had said on my show that he found “deeply offensive.”

Those moments exploded online not because they were rude, but because they were real. Connecticut voters are hungry for real.

What those clips revealed is bigger than two politicians and one radio host. They revealed a ruling class that no longer sees itself as serving the people. It sees itself as ruling the people. And rulers do not like being questioned.

To understand how we got here, we have to take a walk through history. Not a quick recap. A real journey. Because this didn’t happen in one election or one scandal. It happened slowly, over decades, while most of us were looking the other way.

Let’s start at the beginning.

The men who wrote the Constitution were terrified of a permanent political class. They had just fought a war to escape one. George Washington stepped down after two terms even though the country begged him to stay. The idea of “citizen legislators” was not a slogan; it was a safeguard. Serve a few years, then go home to your farm, your business, your life. The power was never meant to be a career. It was meant to be a temporary trust.

For the first century and a half, that ideal mostly held. Even during the Gilded Age, when corruption was rampant, the expectation remained that public office was a duty, not a throne. Politicians who stayed too long were often viewed with suspicion. The people still believed they held the ultimate power.

Then came the 1930s.

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal changed everything. In the middle of the Great Depression, the federal government exploded into areas it had never touched before—banking, agriculture, labor, housing, welfare. Dozens of new agencies were created overnight. The “alphabet soup” of the New Deal—NRA, WPA, CCC, SEC, and the rest—required thousands of permanent employees. For the first time in American history, a massive, unelected bureaucracy took root in Washington. These were not temporary servants. They were career government workers whose jobs depended on the continued growth of government.

The New Deal didn’t just expand programs. It expanded the idea that government was the permanent solution to every problem. And once that idea took hold, the people who ran the machinery started to see themselves differently. They weren’t temporary stewards anymore. They were the experts. The professionals. The ruling class in waiting.

World War II accelerated the shift. The federal government that had grown during the Depression now managed a global war. When the war ended, the bureaucracy didn’t shrink. It stayed. The men and women who had built it stayed too. A permanent class of government insiders was now embedded in the capital.

But the real maturation of the ruling class came in the mid-1960s.

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was the New Deal on steroids. Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty, federal aid to education, housing programs, and dozens more initiatives poured billions into new agencies and new careers. Suddenly there were even more federal programs, more federal money, and more federal employees. And here is the crucial part: all of that money and all of those programs flowed through members of Congress.

Incumbents now had something powerful to give their districts—federal dollars, federal projects, federal jobs. David Mayhew later called what happened next “the vanishing marginals.” Starting around 1966, close congressional races began to disappear. House reelection rates climbed toward 90 percent and stayed there. Challengers found it almost impossible to unseat sitting members. The job had become a lifetime appointment.

At the same time, campaign finance began to favor incumbents. Fundraising networks, PACs, and later soft money created a permanent money advantage for those already in office. The people who stayed in Washington the longest had the easiest time raising the cash needed to stay even longer.

And the voters? Many of them cheered.

When the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, millions celebrated the end of legal segregation. When Roe v. Wade came in 1973, millions celebrated the new abortion rights. But in both cases—and in many more that followed—something important happened. Hot-button moral and cultural issues were taken out of the hands of voters and state legislatures and placed into the hands of nine unelected justices in Washington.

Every time the public cheered a court decision that gave them what they wanted, they quietly surrendered a piece of their own power. They stopped fighting the hard fights in their statehouses and at the ballot box. They outsourced the toughest questions to judges who could never be voted out. And they did it again and again—on abortion, on guns, on religion, on marriage, on race, on education.

The pattern was the same: voters ceded control, then acted surprised when the people holding that control started behaving like it belonged to them.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the transformation was complete. Politics had become a profession. The average member of Congress now stayed for decades. Staffs ballooned. Lobbyists and interest groups became permanent fixtures. The revolving door between government, K Street, and the media spun faster and faster. And the old idea—that you served for a time and then went home—became almost quaint.

In Connecticut, we saw the same pattern on a smaller scale. Career politicians replaced citizen legislators. The state bureaucracy grew. The same incumbency advantages that protected members of Congress protected members of the General Assembly. And the media, which should have been the check on all of this, grew comfortable with the arrangement.

That brings us to today.

Governor Ned Lamont is running for a third term with the slogan “We’re Just Getting Started.” Attorney General William Tong is busy suing the federal government and positioning himself as the moral conscience of the state. Both men have spent years in public office. Both have grown accustomed to the perks, the deference, and the insulation that come with being part of the ruling class.

So when I asked Lamont a straightforward question about his own words, he reacted like a man who had been insulted. When I asked Tong why a promised video still had not been released, he tried to change the subject to my radio show. These were not the responses of public servants. These were the responses of people who believe the power is theirs by right.

And they are not alone.

In recent months, multiple politicians in this state have picked up the phone and called newsrooms. They have contacted reporters’ bosses. They have complained about “unfavorable coverage.” They have tried to intimidate journalists the old-fashioned way—through the people who sign the paychecks. Because in their minds, the voters already gave them the throne. Criticism is no longer accountability. It is insubordination.

The traditional media has made it easy for them.

Too many newsrooms in Connecticut have quietly reworked their business model. They no longer operate like watchdogs. They operate like political versions of Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight. The goal is not to hold power accountable. The goal is to maintain access. Softball questions. Carefully worded stories that never quite say what everyone in the room already knows. Fear of losing the next briefing, the next one-on-one, the next invitation to the governor’s mansion. That access is the currency now. And once you trade your independence for it, you are no longer a journalist. You are a courtier.

That is why my style of reporting—direct, on-camera, no script, no handlers—feels so jarring to them. I am not trying to preserve access. I am trying to do the job the Founders expected journalists to do: ask the hard questions, demand answers, and let the public decide. I am trying to return to the old model where the people, not the politicians, are the ultimate bosses.

The ruling class hates it. They have grown used to a media that protects them and a public that mostly tunes out. They have grown used to treating their seats like hereditary titles. They have grown used to the idea that they know better than the voters who sent them there.

But something is shifting.

The people of Connecticut are waking up. They are tired of being talked down to. They are tired of watching videos of people dying in state custody while the attorney general lectures a radio host instead of releasing the footage. They are tired of a governor who expands food kitchens while bragging about “just getting started.” They are tired of a political class that calls news directors when someone asks an uncomfortable question.

The days of Connecticut politics as usual are over.

The ruling class feels it. That is why they are reaching for the phone. That is why they are trying to turn the volume down on anyone who still remembers that government exists to serve the people—not the other way around.

They can call the bosses. They can complain. They can posture.

But they cannot un-ring the bell.

Because the uncomfortable truth is this: we the voters helped build the throne they now sit on. We cheered when the courts took power away from us. We accepted lifelong incumbents. We tolerated the permanent bureaucracy. We let the media trade accountability for access.

Now we are taking it back—one direct question at a time.

And no amount of phone calls to newsrooms is going to stop it.

The people are watching again. They are recording again. They are asking the questions the comfortable class doesn’t want asked. And this time, they are not looking away.

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