— Photo by Heptagon
VERNON, Conn.
Former Vice President Joe Biden may have campaigned for president as a Kennedy Democrat, but his nose ring while in office has been fashioned in a far-left smithy. And whenever Biden feels the tug, he moves inexorably to the left.
When the late Barry Goldwater said “If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country,” he meant that the ideological and historical center of the country should be central to Democrat and Republican politics.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer naturally think differently. The locus of political power within the Democratic Party is precisely that portion of the country Goldwater would have lopped off, the New England states plus New York and California. Pelosi is from California, Schumer from New York.
Since the Obama administration, the national Democratic Party has been able to cobble together a majority by including within its “Big Tent,” more narrowly constricted ideologically than most people realize, an eccentric coalition of the supposed disenfranchised: African Americans, some of whom are now straying dangerously into conservative territory; working women, enfranchised by the 19th Amendment, enacted in 1920, and liberated from their kitchens by World War II; paroled criminals; libertarian drug users; chronic gamblers; citizens of Honduras who have crashed our border with Mexico and who, some mildly assert, may not be prevented from voting in U.S. elections if they are not compelled to produce at poll stations proof of citizenship; Critical Race Theorists who really do believe, solipsistically, that U.S. history has always revolved around a racial- discrimination pole; teachers who would rather stay home than teach; a Coronavirus-sidelined General Assembly that continues to rent out to Connecticut’s governor powers and responsibilities the constitution assigns to legislators; cities, most of them run by Democrats during the past half century, smoldering in violence and crime induced, leftists believe, by ill-mannered, unrestrained cops; and so on and so on…
We are witnessing the breakdown of this temporary and unstable coalition. And the battering rams smashing it are unblinking views of reality.
The mother of a three-year-old child murdered by a 19 year-old kid who couldn’t shoot straight knows, in her heart of hearts, that the politicians who showed up in Hartford to mug for the TV cameras were not there to help, because nothing they had done in the past half century in Hartford had helped to reduce crime or make any Connecticut large city as pleasant and prosperous a place to live as, say, Glastonbury, a suburb of Hartford lately experiencing its own uptick in crime.
In a previous posting, “Politicians And The Memory Hole”, this writer predicted at the time that “it would take politicians who turned up to commiserate with stricken family members – [Connecticut Sen. Dick] Blumenthal, known to show up, as he said, ‘at garage door openings,’ appeared to be absent without a by-your-leave -- only a few hours to forget the child’s name. A 29 year-old woman, walking her dog a few blocks from the murder scene, was asked by a reporter to comment. ‘I was raised in this neighborhood,’ she said, ‘It’s always been kind of a thing, especially when the weather starts to warm up. It’s kind of expected.’”
Along with the dominant Democratic Party in Connecticut, leaning left for a good many years, those who report on politics in the state also are left-leaning. Partly, this is natural. Reporters report on power-players, and the Connecticut GOP, especially in cities, has been unplugged for a long while. Editorial page editors listing left are temperamentally hostile to contrarians, many of them preferring supportive opinion that reaffirm editorial views.
It is human nature to purr at flattery.
“Everyone likes flattery,” Benjamin Disraeli, British prime minister in Victorian days, said, “and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.”
Leading Democrats in Connecticut are the state’s royalty.
Contrarian opinion on op-ed pages is a marker indicating editorial vigor. To put it mildly, one does not find contrarian opinion on matters affecting the state laid on with a trowel in most Connecticut news publications. Then too, it is easier, indeed effortless, to swim with rather than against the current. G. K. Chesterton, a favorite contrarian, tells us that even a dead thing can flow with the current, but only a live body can struggle effectively against the current. Swimming upstream against the current is becoming in Connecticut a rare heroic act.
If Republicans were to capture more seats in the General Assembly, maybe even the governor’s office, Connecticut’s media might, for business reasons, be more open to contrary opinion. And, of course, contrarian opinion just might enliven papers and boost sagging sales.
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
