Is Lamont On His Way Out In A Democrat Party Neo-Progressive Coup?
Liberal [neo-progressive] Democrats, we are told by the Hartford Courant, are angry at Democrat Governor Ned Lamont, and their anger has suddenly overflowed. The anger directed at Lamont, by most accounts a halfhearted neo-progressive – has yet to reach Thermador. It has been stoked by Lamont’s “high-profile veto of an affordable housing bill written by Democrats and his endorsement of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayor’s race.”
Lamont’s operative principle on the question of affordable housing, though he dare not say it, is that price controls generally make goods and services, including housing, less affordable and less available.
Pointedly, Lamont’s endorsement of Cuomo was a signal that Lamont had not changed his “moderate” ideological stripes. In an era in which Connecticut neo-progressives have command of most of the levers of political power, Lamont continues perversely in the tried and true fashion of past Connecticut governors. He is now, and perhaps always will be, a fiscal moderate and a social liberal. The governors preceding Lamont as well as all the Republican members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, now displaced by neo-progressive Democrats, were in the good old days fiscal conservatives but social liberals.
Deputy House Speaker Rep. Josh Elliott threw down the campaign gauntlet. “Lamont will definitely face a primary challenger from the left,” he announced. And if no other candidate comes forward to challenge the governor, “Elliott implied that he would run in the same way that he challenged then-sitting House Speaker Brendan Sharkey in a 2016 primary before Sharkey abruptly retired.”
“Of the hundreds of conversations that I’ve had over the last couple of weeks,” Elliot continued, “I cannot tell you a single person who is excited about [another] Ned term. Not one person. He doesn’t realize how much people are struggling because he’s just living in an alternate reality. So he’s trying to convince people that things are better than they are because he might actually believe it. He is totally divorced from reality.”
Lamont, of course, offered a different view on the status of Connecticut and his administration.
“I like where we are as a state,” the governor said. “I think we’ve had a very strong, progressive agenda, and we’ve been able to do it within a balanced budget and paying down a lot of debt. I think we’ve got a good balance… I saw what the progressive agenda was there. They said, number one, they wanted to have universal early childhood and pre-K. We’re already making a down payment on that. Look what we’ve done on the minimum wage. Look what we’ve done on paid family and medical leave. Other people can promise, but look what we’ve delivered.”
Why, oh why, are those in government crying “more!” never satisfied with more?
A moderate Democrat who delivers partial victories will not slake the hunger on the left for a leader who will give full rein to neo-progressivism.
Neo-progressive roots are deeply buried in the lush soil of Marxist revisionism. In New York this political season, these roots, long thought dead, have sent up a shoot in the person of neo-progressive heart throb socialist Zohran Mamdani, who just won a New York Democrat Party primary contest for Mayor of New York City over kaput moderate Democrat Andrew Cuomo.
A few days ago, Lamont damned Mamdani with faint praise. CTMirror reported, “’Mamdani ran a hell of a race, didn’t he?’ Lamont said, as a Democratic Party in the throes of an identity crisis rushed to find larger meaning in the upset. ‘He surprised the hell out of the establishment world down there. And I salute him for the job he was able to get done.’”
Since cinching the Democrat primary contest for mayor of New York City, Mamdani has been fleshing out his political program – which includes stern warnings to millionaires and ICE agents in New York that they will not be welcomed in the city over which he hopes to preside as mayor. Capitalists, the prospective Democrat-Socialist mayor said recently, need not apply. And if you are white, you will be treated as a second class citizen.
Lamont, who is a millionaire, a capitalist and white as the driven snow, likely would vehemently oppose such positions, when he is alone with his conscience and there are no cameras in the room.
Mamdani‘s astonishing victory in New York will force reporters and commentators to focus laser-like on the status and future of the Democrat Party, especially in the Democrat reliant east and west coasts – most especially in Connecticut, a one-party Democrat state where resistance to neo-progressivism is mild and uncomprehending. The problem with neo-progressivism is that structurally and intellectually it is a variant of neo-Marxism. New England, sliding leftward for many years, may not be prepared for a future in which the rich are reviled, the middle class is plundered on behalf of urban poor people locked into welfare poverty, while an omnipotent centralized state looks upon its work benignantly, like the dark political gods in charge of an earthy heaven during the Stalin years.