Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

G.K. Chesterton somewhere writes that all barbers are would-be philosophers under the skin. The trade has changed over the years. Barbers used to be surgeons at a time before pharmacology and modern medicine branched off and began to produce physicians who knew a little more about human healing than the barbarous barbers who painted their poles red and white. In medieval Europe, barbers, not doctors, performed surgery, and the pole was a sign that indicated the blood and napkins used in their business, the barber’s most frequent customers being soldiers whose bodies had been shattered on the field of battle. Barbers left off surgery, but not philosophizing.

Twain The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it – Mark Twain I’m going to try and say some non-twitter-like, intelligent things about progressivism, Connecticut’s media and what Karl Marx, were he alive today, might call the “correlation of forces” in our own state. By the way, I’m not sure how many people reading this know that for about four years in the 1850s, Marx, then living in London, was the European correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune. He even exchanged letters with President Abraham Lincoln. Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote for a European, not an American audience. Their articles on the Civil War were later collected into a 325 page book, “ The Civil War in the United States.” It might be well to start this discussion with some undisputed claims.

Ned Lamont There are both advantages and disadvantages to chief executives elected to office from outside the political box. One of the greatest disadvantages relates to political navigation. Asked about Governor Ned Lamont’s first year in office, Republican leader in the State Senate Len Fasano said, “It’s a lack of understanding in that building that has been an impediment to the governor closing the deal” on transportation. “I think the business principles and brains are of value, but they are nullified if you can’t navigate the building.” On the matter of transportation, Lamont’s two pilot fishes in the General Assembly are President of the State Senate Martin Looney and House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz. The Democrat majority in the General Assembly is headed by Looney, a fixture in the General Assembly for 26 years, and Aresimowicz, a union employee fearful of fouling his own nest.

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice” --  A Defense of Humilities, The Defendant, 1901,  G.K. Chesterton Small “o” orthodox Christians of a certain age will be familiar with the cardinal virtues. They are: prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice – all under attack by a secular culture that, judging by Hollywood or Washington DC standards, appears to have won the battle. But, never fear, the four cardinal virtues form the breastplate of a church against which, its founder once proclaimed, the gates of Hell shall not prevail. The Cardinal virtues, St. Augustine tells us, better enable us to pursue the good life: “To live well is nothing other than to love God with all one's heart, with all one's soul and with all one's efforts; from this,  it comes about that love is kept whole and uncorrupted (through temperance). No misfortune can disturb it (and this is fortitude). It obeys only [God] (a...

History, always messy, has a wrong and a right side, and sometimes the right side is the revolutionary one; such was the case during the American Revolution. When U.S. Senator Chris Murphy says that the National Rifle Association (NRA), and others who support the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights, is “on the wrong side of history,” he shows a lack of understanding concerning what history is, what being on the wrong side of it is, and possibly what “is” is. If the NRA is on the right side of the Second Amendment, it is on the right side of history, as were American revolutionists who fashioned it in response to a British attempt to deprive colonists of their weapons. The most prominent lawyer of the day, Judge St. George Tucker, appointed by President James Madison as U.S. District Judge for Virginia, characterized the right of citizens to bear arms as “ the palladium of liberty , the right of defense upon which all the other imprescriptible rights in the Bill of Rights d...

I happen to be writing something on Mark Twain’s politics, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he might have thought rather than written – for Twain was fairly cautious, some would say over-cautious, while his wife and censor Oliva was still alive – about recent Connecticut politics. Surely Twain would have noticed that the flight of progressive politicians from their sinecures have followed the flight of businesses and entrepreneurial capital from his beloved state. There’s got to be some heavy levity, Twain’s specialty, in there somewhere. Not even Olivia, the keeper of Twain’s reputation, could have prevented him from poking fun at Connecticut’s political Grand Guignol. Following a fatal dip in the polls, Governor Dannel Malloy has chosen not to run again, and he has been followed out the door by his Lieutenant Governor, a promising Democrat gubernatorial prospect who has not spent time in prison, Comptroller Kevin Lembo, Attorney General George Jepsen, and other Democ...

“ It is shameful and disgraceful that this measure should be before Congress ” – U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal Even on a contentious issue such as abortion, it may be possible for people to draw proper distinctions between health care and abortion. Those who confuse the two ought to be asked to furnish four instances in which an abortion not performed to save the physical life of a mother improves the “health care” of the mother. Abortions performed after 20 weeks of a pregnancy -- the point at which, scientists tell us, the fetus feels pain -- certainly do nothing to improve the heath care of an aborted baby.

The phrase is French -- La Trahison des clercs”, meaning roughly the treason of the intellectuals. This particular phrase, launched by Julien Benda in 1927, could only have popped out of a French head. Benda’s beef was that the intellectuals of his day were placing the virtue of action above the necessity of lucid thinking. Opinion makers, Benda feared, were allowing political commitment to strangle thought. As Roger Kimball put it in a  1992 essay in the New Criterion , "Benda claimed, politics was THE ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the ' desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action .'” When intellectuals abandon “the universality of truth” for political reasons, they are guilty of intellectual treason. During Benda’s own day, politicians were wearing convincing but false mas...

No one quite knows for certain how the play will unroll during the upcoming 2018 elections, but the cast of characters is slowly taking shape. Last April, Governor Dannel Malloy announced   he would not be running for a third term. Said Malloy, a rare emotional hitch in his voice, “I am today announcing that I will not seek a third term as governor. Instead, I will focus all my attention and energy – I will use all of my political capital from now through the end of 2018 – to continue implementing my administration's vision for a more sustainable and vibrant Connecticut economy." Malloy’s announcement opened a Pandora’s Box.  Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman, who rode shotgun on Governor Dannel Malloy’s coach for eight years, has only recently bowed out of the race. Wyman, it appears, has children and grandchildren whose company, she has belatedly said, she at long last would like to enjoy. Her bow-out, we are to understand, had nothing to do with Malloy’s failed...

People in Connecticut may be suffering from something worse than progressives who are striving mightily to destroy the state. They may be suffering from a sort of moral atrophy. G.K. Chesterton addressed the question of moral atrophy in the following few lines about Pimlico, a town in England that, in Chesterton’s day, was what we might call a hopeless case: “Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico w...

I began writing “Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State” more than 23 years ago because early on I glimpsed the dark at the end of the tunnel, and I was determined to make a record of the destruction of Connecticut, so that, years in the future, if anyone, poking his or her head above the rubble, wished to consult a record that tried valiantly to answer the questions – What went wrong, and who were the culprits?– he or she would have a faithful reference point. Today, I have an opportunity to render an abbreviated version of the longer account. I plan to touch here on the wrong-headed policies that have led us into the dark tunnel, some of the personalities involved, the rise of progressivism in Connecticut under the stewardship of Governor Dannel Malloy, the political repercussions of unsound policies, and what the French have called “the treason of the intellectuals.” Not to paint too bleak a picture – people generally don’t want to hear bad news – I should s...

Thermidore was the eleventh month in the French revolutionary calendar, derived from the Greek word “thermos,” which means hot. And it was hot indeed, particularly for the French monarchy. Heads rolled after a particularly severe bread shortage in Paris, which was caused by a monarchy inattentive to an overtaxed middle class about whom Marie Antoinette reportedly said “Let’em eat cake.” Poor Marie likely did not say it, but this did not prevent the French revolutionists from cranking out convincing propaganda or, as we are now pleased to call it “fake news.” Connecticut may be approaching Thermidore, that point at which the patience of a majority of the people finally snaps. CTMirror pretty much comes right out and says it in a readable series written by Keith Phaneuf, “ AS CUTS GET UGLY, LEGISLATORS FORFEIT POWER, TRANSPARENCY .”  

The national elections at this point may remind poor battered voters of Oscar Wilde’s description of fox hunting: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable!” Republicans, Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review, will have much repair work to do after the election – whatever happens. National Review has not been hospitable to Donald Trump’s candidacy, but the election should awaken second thoughts among conservatives. In “ Conservatives Should Vote For The Republican Nominee, ” Hanson takes a birch switch to what Trump supporters might call disdainfully the Republican Party Establishment. Here is the central premise in Hanson’s piece:   “Something has gone terribly wrong with the Republican Party, and it has nothing to do with the flaws of Donald Trump. Something like his tone and message would have to be invented if he did not exist. None of the other 16 primary candidates — the great majority of whom had far greater political expertise, more even temperament...

It took a while, but Connecticut is now lying prostrate on its back, thrashing about and gasping for air. Those who have not fled the state in search of more propitious business circumstances elsewhere remember a time when Connecticut was a magnet for companies that provided high paying jobs and, not incidentally, a rich source of revenue that kept the wolves – other ambitious states that seek to lure Connecticut companies to their own lairs – at bay. It seems only yesterday that former Governor Lowell Weicker, attending a function at the Hartford Club, clutched his head in his hands, when shown a graph that depicted Connecticut’s disappearing surpluses, and moaned loudly, “Where did it all go?”

An obedient Democratic National Convention soldier, U.S. Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty has always eagerly followed orders, according to hacked  emails dumped on the general public by Wikileaks. The dump coincided with the opening of the Democrat National Nominating Convention in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. CtNewsJunkie reports   that “A majority of the emails involve her [Esty’s} participation in a DNC conference call with reporters a few months ago regarding the issue of gun control. The call followed Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump’s appearance at the NRA leadership forum.” The false exclusive connection between the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association (NRA) – Democrats own guns too --promises to loom large in the upcoming General Election, owing to the efforts of Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, and the state’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional Delegation.

The reader should note the quotations marks around the word “plagiarism.” The quote marks are intended to bracket the word in doubt because plagiarism often lies in the mind of the accuser. Note to the reader: I borrowed this thought from someone else, changing it slightly from “beauty lies in the mind of the beholder,” a sentiment some have traced to Plato. Was Shakespeare plagiarizing when he borrowed heavily from Montaigne and Boccaccio? Or, as seems more likely, was he merely capturing their bright flags? We are not the inventors of the words we use to encapsulate our thoughts. In fact thoughts themselves have a parentage. C. S. Lewis put it this way: You cannot invent a new primary color. The attribution game is, in some cases, a tangle that has ensnared many an “expert.”

Somewhere along the line, national and state Democrats discovered that most Americans do not cotton to extremists. For this reason, progressives in the state of Connecticut – nearly all politically active Democrats -- have taken to calling “extremists” those who oppose some of their more radical political positions. V. I. Lenin, an extremist of the first water, knew that if you effectively labeled an opponent or an idea, you did not have to argue with either. If you have successfully identified in the public mind as an extremist anyone who disagrees with you on a political or social point, you need not address his nuanced arguments. You need not bother to confront his arguments at all; the mud you throw – knowing full well that some of it will stick – will be sufficient to convince a majority of people that your position is superior to his, because you are superior to him: He is an extremist, and you are not. In cases such as these, arguments are won not through debate or the pr...

First a disclaimer: Nothing in this piece should be taken as a formal endorsement of the candidates mentioned below. In more than thirty years of column writing, the author has never made a formal endorsement, and it would be a pity to ruin a perfect record. That said, it’s almost impossible to avoid noticing that the Republican Party in Connecticut has been crowded lately with young blood, not to mention the women upon whom Republicans are supposed to have declared war. This is partly the result of the Republican Party’s years in the wilderness.

Some notable politician who is not Catholic really ought to come to the defense of Catholics – because they are now under assault from anti-Catholic Catholic politicians. Just as there is no anti-communist so fierce as an ex-communist, so there is no anti-Catholic quite so energetically opposed to Catholic orthodoxy as a Catholic politician on the make and in need of votes from others who may share his distaste for all things Catholic. The uninterrupted assault on Catholics, the Reverend Robert Barron points out in National Review , is bone wearingly old. Arthur Schlesinger, the reliably liberal historian and social critic, used to say that a poisonous anti-Catholicism was the oldest prejudice in the United States, an early bloom that washed upon our shore with the arrival of the Mayflower. In the Boston of Sam Adams’ day, anti-Papists used to place an effigy of the pope in a chair that was paraded through the streets – Boston’s version of the English Guy Fawkes celebrati...

  “The ink war.” That is how Tom Dudchik of Capitol Report styled the controversy between Chis Powell, the icon busting editor of the Journal Inquirer, and, following a rebuttal editorial in the Hartford Courant, pretty much everyone else manning the barricades on the left who ever lifted a pen or pounded a keyboard in defense of the liberal view of the decline of print media. The controversial pieces are printed here as they appeared, in chronological sequence; first, Mr. Powell’s initial column; then the Courant’s editorial rebuttal; then, an interview with Jim Romenesko; then Mr. Powell’s response to what he regards as the distortions of his critics; and finally a Courant rebuttal accusing Mr. Powell of having defended the indefensible – namely, himself. Unprinted here are a slew of editorials and commentary pieces, all more or less bearing the same message: that Mr. Powell has attacked all single parent moms; that he is a holdover from those glorious days of yore when ...