Don Pesci: JFK Democrats and JFK Republicans fade into history

JFK in 1963

VERNON, Conn.

"Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others"

-- Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), German chancellor

New England – most conspicuously Connecticut and Massachusetts – has been a school of hard knocks for Republicans who in the past have been liberal on social issues and conservative on fiscal issues. This brand, popular for many years in Connecticut and Massachusetts, has not sold in either state for decades.

The last fiscally conservative, socially liberal congressman in Connecticut was Chris Shays, whose politics was a mirror image of that of Republican Party destructor-elect Lowell Weicker, a maverick U.S. senator for many years whose long run in Congress was cut short by then Connecticut Atty. Gen. Joe Lieberman in the 1988 election.

Wise heads conjectured at the time that Lieberman had bested Weicker because Lieberman was a Democrat who, like Weicker, was socially liberal and fiscally conservative – a Jack Kennedy kind of Democrat. Weicker’s political hero, he often claimed, was New York Sen. Jacob Javits, a Jack Kennedy Republican – certainly not a conservative.

For the past half century, conservatives had been zeroed out in Connecticut, and never mind that William F. Buckley Jr., who had helped reinvigorate conservatism through his magazine, National Review, had been a lifelong resident of Connecticut, a thorn in the side of such as Weicker, a fervent anti-Reaganite. Buckley called Weicker a gasbag. It sometimes seemed that Weicker regarded Ronald Reagan as a far greater threat to the nation than, say, Soviet ally Fidel Castro, the communist maximum leader of Cuba. Reagan referred to Weicker only once in his published diary -- he said Weicker was a “fathead.”

When Weicker lost his Senate seat to Lieberman, few politically awake commentators in Connecticut were surprised. Registered Democrats in the state, then and now, outnumbered Republicans roughly by a two to one margin, a gap that fully explains Weicker’s political overtures to socially liberal Democrats. Weicker’s liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating in the Senate during his last years in Congress, was higher than that of liberal Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd.

Sensing the whiff of postmodern Democrat progressivism in the wind, a combination of whipped Republicans, fervent Jack Kennedy Democrats, and politically unaffiliated independents, showed Weicker the door and voted for Lieberman.

On the opposite side of the aisle, fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republicans in Connecticut’s congressional delegation, beginning with Nancy Johnson and ending with Shays, were replaced by – how to put this gently? – fiscally progressive, socially progressive Democrats. The political moral of the tawdry tale is -- if you are a Republican pretending to be a Democrat, you will lose to Democrats who have moved sharply to the left.

Jack Kennedy, Bill Buckley, Weicker –and fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republicans -- all have disappeared in puffs of smoke, leaving the political shop in Connecticut to such progressive Democrats as former Gov. Dannel Malloy, state Senate President Martin Looney, and millionaire Gov. Ned Lamont.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, perhaps the last Jacob Javits Republican in New England {along with Vermont Gov. Phil Scott?} survived for a bit, but now even he has thrown in the towel. Like Vermont, where socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders rules the roost, Massachusetts has gone the way of Connecticut. Republicans, fiscally conservative on economic issues, liberal to moderate on social issues in both states have been vanquished.

The rout in Connecticut, nearly complete, has touched the congressional delegation, all Democrats, the constitutional offices in the state, all Democrats, and the General Assembly, mostly Democrats presided over by postmodern progressives.

The dead branches on New England’s political tree are fiscally conservative, socially moderate  Republicans, clipped in the bud for decades by New England academics, hungry postmodern progressives supported by an uncritical media almost wholly in the camp of the victors, and moderate Republicans, a politically unplugged species in Connecticut.

The live branches on the Democrat side of the political barricades just now are postmodern progressives, Gramsci cultists, traditional liberal enemies of the captains of industry, and radical redistributionists flying, knowingly or not, the flag of postmodern Marxism.

These are not Jack Kennedy’s political heirs. The liberalism of Jack Kennedy exists among some forlorn Democrats in the Northeast only as a consummation devoutly to be wished.

On the right in Connecticut, the conservative branch has put forth new buds. Both conservatives and libertarians in Connecticut make no attempts to accommodate their politics to disappearing moderate, fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republican antecedents. That way, they have learned from bitter experience, points to the political grave. These relatively new actors on Connecticut’s political stage are energetic, barely noticed, and tendentiously misunderstood by  nostalgic academics and old-time political religionists hoping for a resurrection of a once fructifying liberalism vanquished by postmodern progressivism, which has nothing in common with the liberal prescriptions recommended by Jack Kennedy in an address to The Economic Club of New York a year before he was assassinated.

Just as Weicker may have been the last Jacob Javits Republican in New England, so Jack Kennedy may have been the last classical liberal U.S. president.

You can learn a great deal from history, but you cannot set up house in the past. Those who do so are doomed to irrelevance, because time marches on – usually over the prostrate bodies of those who have, as Otto von Bismarck said, learned from their own mistakes but rendered themselves vulnerable by refusing to learn from the mistakes of others.  

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Self-interview of a Republican columnist in a deep Blue State

The Connecticut seal. By the way, there are some very good vineyards in what used to be called “The Land {State} of Steady Habits’’.

VERNON, Conn.

Q: Reading over your blog, “Connecticut Commentary: Red Note From A Blue State”, I don’t see many “I’s”.

A: Modesty.

Q: No really, why?

A: Political commentators fall into two categories: those who write about themselves, and those who write about others and ideas. This last group tends to dispense with “I’s”. 

Q: Well, we’ll see if we can remedy that lapse here. You have quoted Chris Powell, for many years both the managing editor and the editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn. on his motivation. You said to him once – correct me if I’m wrong – that he had been writing opinion pieces longer than you, and you have been working in the commentary vineyard for more than 40 years. You complimented him. His opinion pieces were perceptive, well written and necessary, a tonic for what ails the state, you said. Yet, politicians at the state Capitol who decide Connecticut’s destiny did not appear to be paying much attention. So, you asked, what keeps him going. He flashed a smile and said, “Spite.” Does spite keep you going?

A: I doubt Powell ever bought the notion that political behavior swings on the writings of political commentators. His primary motivation is plain on the face of his opinion pieces, both editorials and op-ed commentary. He wants to set hard truths before the general public, hoping that not every citizen is motivated by spite or enclosed within a Berlin Wall of invincible ignorance. Off camera, so to speak, Powell has a quiet, infectious sense of humor. And a sense of humor is a sense of right proportion. He was joking. It’s possible that joking in the 21st Century will be a capital offense punishable by exile, as were serious crimes against the state in Roman and Greek times. In modern times, burning down buildings, liberating high-toned stores of merchandise, throwing Molotov cocktails at police buildings, are all okay; but we draw the line at making jokes. The Greek tyrant Creon feared Aristophanes as much as an invading army. One day, one of Creon’s factotums met Aristophanes in the street and asked him in a fury, “Don’t you take anything seriously?” Aristophanes answered, “Yes, I take comedy seriously.” Mark Twain also took comedy seriously, and his long suffering wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, worked tirelessly to protect him from a public whipping. In "The Chronicle of Young Satan, Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts,” Twain has Satan say, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” 

Q: So, you are not spiteful then? 

A: Spite, like humor, is salt, to be used always sparingly. I acknowledge that every sealed closet has some bones concealed in it. I can only say I don’t feel spiteful, though I do think spite can flower into gorgeous commentary. I’m thinking of Alexander Pope’s long poem, “The Dunciad”. We should love lovable things and hate hateful things. The record -- and it’s a long one; “Connecticut Commentary” contains to date about 3,141 separate pieces, nearly all submitted as columns to a host of Connecticut papers – I think will show that I’m interested in the public persona of politicians, the face they present to their constituents. I’m certainly not interested in delving into the private soul of, say, U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, of this state, about whom I’ve written a great deal, much of it unpublished by Connecticut’s print media. It’s best to stay away from amateur psychology. Rummaging in private souls is very much like rummaging in attics – too many spider’s webs, hanks of hair, abandoned diaries, and moldy, old dolls.

Q: I’ve seen the Blumenthal cache. Much of it is well written, certainly publishable.  And you’ve said that nearly all of that cache had been sent out to various Connecticut newspapers. Much of it never saw print. Why not?

A: Thanks for your labor of love. It’s a good question. I suppose much of it may have rubbed editorial fur the wrong way. Part of this is business. Smaller newspapers, as you know, have been swallowed up by journalistic leviathans. The larger chains have a stable of dependable writers they may draw from. The whole of New England is a left-of-center political theater and has been for a long while. The General Assembly in the state has been dominated by left-of-center Democrats for a few decades; all the constitutional offices in the state are manned by Democrats; there are no Republicans in the state’s U.S. congressional delegation; virtually all the justices of the state’s Supreme Court have been placed on the bench by highly progressive former Gov. Dannel Malloy. Larger cities in the state – Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford – have been, some would say, mismanaged by Democrats for about a half century. And it is not news that the media do political business mostly with incumbents. So, while it is not at all excessive hyperbole to say that most of the state’s current difficulties may be laid squarely at the feet of immoderate Democrats, incumbents are, mostly for business reasons, lightly leashed.

Q: Why lightly leashed?

A: You cannot get water from a rock, and you cannot get printable news from non-incumbents. If the political state is largely progressive, the state media will follow suit.

Q: Why “immoderate” Democrats? 

A: Because Connecticut Democrats are no longer moderate, no longer centrists, no longer “liberal” in the sense that President John Kennedy or justly celebrated Gov. Ella Grasso were liberal.

Q: You knew Grasso.

A: I did. She, her family and my father and his family, while occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum, were friends all their lives in the social and political petri-dish of Windsor Locks. During those times, friendship transcended politics. And politics itself was well mannered and soft spoken.

Q: Not now.

A: No longer.

Q: What changed?

A: Do you mean nationally or statewide?

Q: Both.

A: Nationally, the Huey-Long-like personality of President Trump has thrown the right-left national polarity into sharp relief, but this polarity preceded Trump by decades. When everyone, including the overarching, permanent political apparatus and a politicized media, has a dog in the fight, a permanent dog fight should surprise no one. Statewide, Connecticut has become, within a very short period of time, perhaps the most left-leaning state in the Northeast. The drift leftward here began long ago. It was “maverick” Republican Lowell Weicker who,  first as senator then governor, took the road not taken by pervious governors when he forced through the General Assembly Connecticut’s income tax, a levy that has resulted in improvident spending, outsized budgets, preening politicians and a poorer proletariat. 

Q: That was the turning point? 

A: It was a crossing of the Rubicon by a small-minded man who had contemplated for years the destruction of his own state Republican Party, which Weicker had betrayed numerous times, that finally gave him the heave-ho. Without turning over the molding psychological dolls in Weicker’s attic, I think it is proper to conclude that the man was motivated principally by unalloyed malice, what aphorist-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would have called resentment, an awful curse. “Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche warned, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” I never heard Weicker toss off a laugh line that was not spiked with malice. I’m referring here only to the man’s public persona, you understand. In private, he may have been Henny Youngman, for all I know. In politics, it is the characters who determine the play. And in Connecticut, neatly all the characters who advance the play are progressives motivated chiefly by a rancid lust for power, very Nietzschean. Without will, you cannot secure your ends. But when the will becomes the end, it’s doomsday. Nietzsche never quite worked that into his calculations. But the great tyrants of the 20th century – Hitler, Stalin, Mao – did. Without God, Dostoyevsky said, “anything is possible” – even Weicker, the first of many of Connecticut’s “savior politicians.” The business of these savior politicians is to create the problems from which they pretend to save us.

Q: That seems a bit cynical.

A: Critical and descriptive, not cynical. The real cynics among us are those who believe positive knowledge is impossible. A perverse inability to see what lies right under your nose, George Orwell’s formulation, is the very definition of cynicism.

Q: Can you give us an example.

A: I think it is cynical to pretend not to notice the predictable effects of Gov. Ned Lamont’s shutdown of state businesses. Even a state legislator hiding under his bed, trembling in fear of Coronavirus, cannot fail to have noticed that a prolonged business shutdown would result in a diminution of state revenue; that the fatal failure of state government to provide adequate and targeted resources to nursing homes would result in needless deaths among people exposed to Coronavirus; that tax increases always transfer power and responsibility from citizens to the unelected administrative state, a descriptive rather than a cynical term; that a one-party state necessarily results in political oligarchy, which easily dispenses with representative government; that...

Q: Alright, alright, we don’t have all day here. Without being too cynical – excuse me, too descriptive – how do you see Connecticut’s future unfolding. 

A: What was it Yogi Berra said – the future ain’t what it used to be? In a representative republic, we used to rely on the common sense of voters to turn out politicians who pursued public policies inimical to representative government and the public good, one of the reasons Grasso agitated against an income tax. One of Grasso’s biographers is Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, who argues that Grasso, a great governor, was wrong about the income tax.  Well, Grasso was right about the income tax, and she was right for the right reasons. Weicker was right about the income tax when he said, during his gubernatorial campaign that instituting an income tax in the midst of a recession would be like pouring gas on a fire, and he was wrong when, as governor, he poured income tax gas on Connecticut’s recession. The progress from Grasso to Bysiewicz, from Grasso to former Gov. Dannel Malloy and Ned Lamont is a fool’s journey in the wrong direction. The false solutions and the consequent havoc lie right under our noses. And it is long past time for Connecticut’s media to realize that the whole purpose of journalism is to describe accurately, in Orwell’s words, “the thing that lies right under our noses.” So, given our recent past history, our one party state, our wall-eyed media, our seemingly indifferent citizens, our representative-shy, inoperative General Assembly, which has just decided to surrender even more of its constitutional and legislative responsibilities to an incompetent governor, I would say Connecticut’s future looks bleak. 

Q: Just one more quibble before we go. You lament the want of common sense among voters. What made common sense a casualty of modern politics?

A: Both common sense and the conscience, an inseparable pair, have been surrounded and taken prisoner by wily politicians and a cowardly media. The founders of the republic feared, almost to a man that common sense – the moral imperative, the ethical genius that lies in all of us – could not survive immoral and ambitious politicians seeking to promote their own rather than the public good. We can only pray to God for the restoration of a moral order. God, Otto von Bismarck once said, favors drunkards, the poor and the United States of America. Pray he was right, because, except on their tongues, politicians in Connecticut, mostly pretending to be progressives, favor none of the above. And, once again, I am being descriptive here, not cynical.

Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon, Conn.

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Don Pesci: Where Democrats are the status quo party

Quite suddenly, the enabler for the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition (SEBAC) in Connecticut’s General Assembly, Speaker of the House Joe Aresimowicz, has contracted a wicked case of ants in his pants.

The state legislature closed for official business on June 7, nearly two months ago. But Aresimowicz, the gatekeeper in the House without whose approval no bill may reach the floor of the General Assembly, dawdled delinquently and brought no budget to the floor. In truth, the Democratic leader in the House had no budget bill in hand to present to the legislature – none. Aresimowicz was waiting for state employee rank and file union members to vote on a closed door deal being shaped by Gov. Dannel Malloy and union chiefs.

The fiscal year ended on June 30. Democrat legislators still had not produced a budget. In the meantime, Republicans – who had fashioned a budget that had been vetted and pronounced balanced by the State Budget Office – were unable to get their budget bill  to the floor so that it might be discussed and voted upon. Unlike Democrats, Republicans were budgeting for the Connecticut’s imperiled future, Republican leader in the Senate Len Fasano later would say.

The obstacles were Aresimowicz, presently employed by a union, Malloy, who in the past has marched with union protesters on strike-lines, progressive legislators in the General Assembly agitating for increased taxes on remaining wealthy taxpayers in the state who had not yet bolted for less predatory states, those in Connecticut’s media who prefer the current ruinous status quo,  and confused and unorganized taxpayers, soon to be plundered again by the progressive legislative proponents ofthe largest and second largest tax increases in state history.

The Democratic Party “resistance” was waiting, as usual, upon unions to make “concessions.” The SEBAC-Malloy-Aresimowicz fait accompli would not come out of the closed to the public closet until July 18.

So – wait for the concessions.

The SEBAC-Malloy-Aresimowicz-progressive Democrat deal resembled to a “T” past SEBAC-Malloy- Aresimowicz-progressive Democrat deals. So pro-union was the deal that it passed a vote by rank and file union workers in the blink of an eye. The deal guarantees annual raises of three percent per year; it includes a no-layoff provision; and – most importantly – pushes out the termination of the agreed upon contracts until 2027, by which time Malloy, Aresimowicz and not a few retired union leaders may have shaken the dust of Connecticut from their feet and become residents of Florida. Former Gov. Jodi Rell, once thought to be a firewall that preventing union arsonists from burning down the house, is now a citizen of Florida.

This is the status quo in Connecticut: tax increases, spending increases, business flight and reduced revenues – which, of course, necessitate higher taxes, more spending, more business flight and diminished revenues.  At this remove, no one any longer remembers former Gov. Lowell Weicker’s prophetic campaign prediction: “Raising taxes in the middle of a recession would be like pouring gas on a fire.” The recession that greeted Weicker when he became governor – and instituted an income tax – lasted more than a decade. The current recession that wafted Malloy into office officially ended in June, 2009 – but not in Connecticut, where the tax-increase fire still burns in the basement.

While Democrats in the General Assembly have yet to produce a budget, they are now using the state crisis they have caused to force Republicans who do not support the state deadly status quo to lend their shoulders to push forward a union deal that will secure so-called union “concession” to 2017 – thus preventing future governors and future legislators from successfully attacking the real causes of Connecticut’s discontent.

The Democrat Party is now the last refuge of scoundrels who wish to maintain the status quo. The Republican Party has become the reform party.

Suppose, critics of the proposed contracts ask, there is another recession. Given the present SEBAC-Malloy-Aresimowicz fait accompli, what can a future governor or a future legislature do to mitigate the ruinous consequences of a third recession? Answer: nothing. Bound by inflexible, court enforceable contracts, future governors and legislators will not be able to reduce unionized benefits, modify salary increases or curtail contractual layoff protections until the ironclad contracts elapse in 2017. A Republican reform – so far resisted by union employed Aresimowicz, pro-union governor Malloy, and progressives in Connecticut’s status quo General Assembly – would allow the legislature to escape the contract trap by changing from contract to statute the means government may use to snatch democracy from the jaws of SEBAC.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Chris Powell: Have politics reformed away the virtue of the citizenry?

Connecticut's former and sometime Republican U.S. senator and governor, Lowell P. Weicker Jr., told the Connecticut Post the other day that Donald Trump's capture of the party's presidential nomination may be the “last act“ of the party's destruction nationally, leading to “total reformation“ of the party.

Maybe. But Trump's ascendance may be that reform already, and since polls show him running competitively against the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the decisive states of Ohio, Floridaand Pennsylvania, the demise of the Trumpian Republican Party is no sure thing.

Yes, Trump's success suggests that the Religious Right's influence in the party has been greatly exaggerated. His reference during the campaign to “two Corinthians“ when he meant “Second Corinthians“ was among his big gaffes, but it did him no more harm. He embodies an entire environment without fear of God or even concern for ordinary decency. But no matter -- the candidate of the Religious Right, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, was easily turned aside even in the Bible Belt.

Meanwhile the candidates from the presumably sane section of the party -- Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and John Kasich -- only divided it fatally.

Disparaged as they may be by respectable news organizations, the major grievances of Trump supporters are legitimate: illegal immigration and the political establishment's calculated devaluation of citizenship; the disastrous failures of U.S. foreign policy; and the steady decline in incomes. In response to these grievances Trump has gotten away with offering only demagogic nonsense because little else is on offer.

No wall along the Mexican border would be necessary under a government that enforced immigration law against employers. But Trump prefers the wall because it lets him vilify powerless foreigners instead of powerful citizens.

Trump's foreign policy is merely incoherent rage: “America first“ except when certain foreign powers are so repugnant that he wants to nuke them. 

As for incomes, no one more than Trump has used a system of cronyized government credit and corporate welfare that has pushed wealth upward.

But no matter again, for reveling in his vileness, Trump even more than Bernie Sanders has captured the political mood -- a contempt so complete that people feel exempted from responsibility even for their own place in public life.

It's not hard to see what caused this contempt -- the exploitation of most basic institutions of government by their supposed custodians, from government employment to finance to education and medical care, undertakings where service to the public has become secondary, service to self primary, and elected officials have done nothing to reverse the trend.

Democrats have “reformed“ too. They have managed to become the party of both Wall Street and the slob culture, of corporate and individual welfare. To try to win a pass from the masses for delivering the economy into a new Gilded Age of plutocratic consolidation, the Democrats promise free college tuition for students who never master high school, encourage racial and ethnic minorities to think that their lagging has nothing to do with their own lack of effort, and righteously contrive constitutional rights for any sexual oddity no matter how trivial its grievances nor how much it tramples on social conventions.

So not only has the country's political health collapsed. Its basic social health is collapsing as well under waves of drug addiction and suicide. 

Yes, what if the political "reform" is already here -- not just with Trump and the Republicans but with Clinton and the Democrats too? What if politics has reformed the people themselves out of their virtue?

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.