The Political Underpinnings of the One Party State

Connecticut’s General Assembly biennial session has ended. Conservatives and right of center moderates in the state will be put in mind of Gideon Tucker’s quip: “No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.”

Connecticut voters, too many of whom have left the state for greener pastures elsewhere, have long understood the inverse connection between taxes, state regulations and a vibrant economy. Just as wide awake voters know that a tariff is a hidden tax on consumption, so the same voters know that a regulation is a tax and a drag on productivity. Profits and creative business development are casually linked. When business profits are drained off by taxes and regulations, creativity, the lifeblood of successful business enterprise, is curtailed.

Voters also know that whatever you tax tends to disappear. If you raise the tax on millionaires – the so called “idle rich” progressive politicians intend to plunder to pay for their improvident and reckless spending -- millionaires will disappear. And the same is true of business opportunities.

Legislative bills are called bills for a good reason. Someone, most often middle class taxpayers, must eventually pay the bills. The federal income tax, it may be recalled, was first introduced as a means by which “millionaires” of the post-Civil War period might discharge the nation’s war debt. The millionaires’ tax quickly was extended to non-millionaires. Today, federal and state taxes, rising costs, inflation and stagnant wages have considerably decreased the marginal assets of Connecticut’s working class. Over the years, private budgets have increasingly been reduced by all four culprits mentioned above.

Deficit spending kills both productivity and marketplace creativity. Taxes and regulations do the same.

We’ve known for decades that the predictable consequences of a one-party state present disruptive cultural and economic problems.

The one party state historically has been the oppressive anti-democratic state: the monarchical state of French King Louis XVI before he lost his head to the guillotine; the anti-republican Roman state of Julius Caesar before he was assassinated; and the failed socialist/communist/fascist states of Joseph Stalin in Russia, Adolf Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy and Mao Zedong in China. Asked to define fascism, Mussolini summed up the fascist doctrine this way: Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state, hardly a conservative or libertarian rubric. And an autocratic state needs a single party to effectuate its rule.

The difficulty with the single party state is not that it cannot do certain things. Just the opposite is true. The chief difficulty of the one party state is that, in the absence of practical opposition, it may do everything it pleases.

"If God does not exist, anything is permissible" Ivan tells us in Feodor Dostoyevsky novel “The Brothers Karamazov.” In a unitary state, anything is permissible.

This was not regarded as a difficulty by the most powerful autocrats of the 20^th century, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Mao. They were content to dispense with republican political forms that limited the scope of state power, such as an independent congress, a politically disinterested judiciary and a working constitution. Along with the Sun King, all four 20^th century autocrats could truly say “L'État, c'est moi (I am the state),” and the single party, of course, is the administrative arm of the unitary state, ultimately serving at the will of a single party leader – or, perhaps worse, at the behest of a single party caucus.

The real danger of the single party state is that its leader or leaders become, in the absence of an active and corrective opposition, the political equivalent of secular gods, the ultimate anti-democratic arbiters of the public good.

For all practical purposes, Connecticut has been a one part state for the past three decades. Democrats now control the governorship, the General Assembly, and the judiciary, all or nearly all the state Supreme Court justices having been selected by Democrat Party leaders and the governor. In addition, Democrats control all the state’s constitutional offices, such as the office of Attorney General. Before moving into the U.S. Congress, Dick Blumenthal had held the office for two decades. His predecessor, U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman was Attorney General for six years. Some believe current occupant William Tong is readying himself for a U.S. senatorial bid should one of the two U.S. senatorial offices fall vacant, whether through accident or design.

For the past fifty years, Democrats have controlled Connecticut’s larger cities, and the cities have become political welfare dependents of the dominant party. While complaining volubly for the last few decades that state Republicans have turned a cold eye to the constitutional separation of powers, state Democrats presently are hotly pursuing a municipal power grab that would make cities and towns more not less dependent upon Connecticut’s single party state. The attack on a historical separation of state and municipal powers is a project of the single party state nearing completion.

State Republicans have objected vociferously to the centralization of political power as offensive to both democratic and republican principles, but objections, it should be plain to everyone by now – even to co-opted news people – can have no practical effect in a one party state.