Don Pesci: What Biden may have learned from Connecticut, a progressive Petri dish

Petri dish

VERNON, Conn.

In mid-August 2020, relying largely on then presidential nominee Joe Biden’s Democratic Party platform, I noted that the Biden Administration, in both foreign and domestic policy, would be a repeat of the Obama administration, in which Biden, of course, served as vice president.

This prediction was a bit off-point. The policy prescriptions adopted by the Biden administration indicate that he has bypassed Obama and now postulates Obama prescriptions raised to the third power. Socialist Bernie Sanders, it may be recalled, was more than satisfied with the Democratic Party platform he helped construct.

Biden was sworn in as president on Jan 20.  During an unusually long honeymoon, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Biden have used a narrowed split in the House and a fifty-fifty split in the Senate to consolidate their triumph over former President Trump and Republicans both moderate and conservative.

Just as Roman emperors used to debase their predecessors by a form of cultural evacuation, so the Biden administration has sought to deprive Trump of any lingering accomplishment by reversing his policies, however efficacious and popular. Some inexpungible policies were retained by the Biden administration; there are no signs at present that Biden-Pelosi-Schumer intend to scotch Trump’s successful effort to bring Coronavirus vaccines on line as quickly as possible by throwing overboard some time-consuming federal regulations. But successful policies of much resented predecessors may be allowed to die on the media vine through benign neglect. You lightly touch your predecessors virtues, if at all, and pound like a madman on the vices.    

To mention one notable instance, Biden has reversed Trump’s border policies. And the reversal has reignited a huge onrush of border jumpers seeking to avoid a cumbersome legal-immigration process. Once again, the U.S. border with Mexico has become little more than a demarcation line on a map. The bums-rush of the U.S. southern border by Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans following Biden’s Trump purgation means, minimally, two things: One, Trump border policies were successful in stemming illegal immigration; and two, unintended consequences often attend the spiteful reversals of prior policies the new regime considers useful for election purposes.

There is, Americans will have noticed during the past few decades, a profound difference between electing battalions of Democrats to Congress and proper governing.

Then too, no one, friend or foe of Democrats, can have failed to notice that the media honeymoon period enjoyed by Biden has been far more prolonged than that of his predecessor Trump, whose honeymoon with a hostile media was as short as the flickering of a firefly’s light at midnight.

Pelosi’s daughter sized up her mother well when she said, “She’ll cut your throat, and you won’t even know you’re bleeding,” a sentiment that might have applied equally to Lucretia Borgia. Years spent in the House seeking to upend Republican majorities have focused Pelosi’s mind wonderfully. Eliminating the filibuster at a time when the House is split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans and a faltering attempt to halt federal aid to states that persist in cutting taxes is the political equivalent of the Borgia bad habit of spiking the drinks of political opponents with arsenic, strychnine, cantharidin and aconite, poisons used effectively by the millionaire, politically well-placed Borgias.

If you can silence the opposition – regularly done in Connecticut by marginalizing the Republican minority – you need not argue the fine points of constitutional law or the untoward consequences of ruinous policies. What used to be known in healthy, vigorous and necessary media as contrarian opposition simply disappears, both in the General Assembly and in the pages of an increasingly partisan media. Opposition that has no tongue cannot seed the political ground with inconvenient truths. Such truths are strangled in their cribs, or aborted early enough so that an unborn opposition may cause no problems to the ruling class, a potpourri of progressive Democrats allied with a permanent administrative apparatus untouched by moderation and serving always as a permanent fortification against a disappearing “loyal opposition.”

Connecticut, for the last three decades, has been a Petri dish in which progressive policies have flourished. Progressives, programmatically different from liberals, have been most successful in the state’s larger cities, controlled by Democrats, former Republican gubernatorial challenger Bob Stefanowski never tires of pointing out. Stefanowski has incurred the wrath of Democratic-mayors-for-life in the state’s larger cities because the majority party knows that retaining votes in cities is important to all Connecticut Democratic officeholders. With three of the most populist cities in their clutches, Democrats know they have an insuperable advantage over Republicans in a state in which Democrat voters outnumber Republicans by a two to one margin.

The Biden-Pelosi-Schumer triumvirate seeks to repeat on a national stage the “victory” of sorts won by Democrats in Connecticut’s petri dish.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.