Political Discourse 2020

  I appreciate editor of the East Hartford Gazette, Bill Doak’s detailed article last week on the many legislative accomplishments of 10 th District Rep. Henry Genga. Without repeating the specifics laid out in Doak’s article, what comes across is Rep. Genga’s commitment to serve the needs of those he represents by delivering tangible benefits to them. I observed Rep. Genga hard at work recently at the Rivermead Pointe manufactured home community meeting between a homeowner’s group—the newly formed Rivermeade Council—and the management of the park in their discussion of critical issues raised that the resident group wanted to discuss.   I am uncertain as to the results of that meeting, but it was clear that Rep. Genga was there to work toward solutions in his encouragement of constructive dialogue between the two groups.     I also read the letter by Matt Harper in his endorsement of Salema Davis for her election as the next 11 th District House Representative. ...

I n 2013 President Obama’s Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Reform Bill passed the US Senate by a 68-32 margin. The bill provided a conservative pathway to citizenship that would take 13 years for most undocumented immigrants. It also included almost $50 billion for border security enforcement, an E-Verify mandatory employment system, and a “ renewable work visa for low-skilled workers, with annual quotas that depend on market demand.”  ( https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2014/6/30/18080446/immigration-reform-congress-2014-house-john-boehner-obama ). House Republican leadership tried to get the bill passed; due to the opposition of the prevailing conservative wing of the GOP, it was never brought to the floor. With its failure, the political climate over immigration policy took on an increased polarized cast.    Given his accusation of Mexicans bringing drugs and crime to the U.S., as well as being rapists, the polarization intensified once T...

  At stake in this upcoming presidential race is nothing less than the direction of the United States of America for the present and near-term future (circa 2025-2040). Given the role of the U.S., as the consequential nation throughout the world, the election not only has domestic significance, but high-level global implications. While there may be substantive differences on the nature of such direction among informed people who probe this matter, a baseline criterion for the assumption of public office is studied attentiveness to the core objectives this nation needs to address in the near- and longer-term. The alternative is that our political leaders get sidetracked on extraneous matters or subsumed in culture war outrage rhetoric and ignore the domestic and international matters that should arouse the studied attentiveness of this nation’s most informed political minds and decision makers.   For the Democratic Party such a pathway is based on the importance of the centra...

The working classes allied with the Democratic Party from the New Deal era (1930s) to the beginning of the Johnson administration in the mid-1960s. Through the domestic reforms of FDR, the patriotic fervor of World War II, and the flourishing of the post-war consumer economy, the Democratic Party was supported by a carefully balanced alliance of northern liberals, immigrants, workers, African Americans, and white southern segregationists. The durability of that coalition began to crumble as civil rights enactments aggravated southern stakeholders beginning in the 1940s. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origins, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to a mass exodus of the South from the Democratic Party. President Lydon Johnson, aware of the political costs in passing these bills, concluded that the South would be lost for the Democratic Party for a generation.    The social and cultural ...

In a previous letter, I focused on the enduring tension between racism and reform at the center of the Democratic Party from its inception in the 1830s through the 1960s. I also addressed the political dilemma that President Lyndon Johnson confronted in 1965 that in embracing the Civil Rights legislation on equal accommodations and voters rights, the Democratic Party would likely lose the South for a generation or more.    This helps explain the political decimation of the Democratic Party in the South over the next 60 years; however, the broader issue as to why the Party lost the white working and lower middle classes throughout the county is a more complex matter. This calls for grasping the dynamic power of the conservative reaction against the radical political culture of the 1960s based on its key pillars of the civil rights movement, the rise of a distinctively feminist consciousness, the anti-Vietnam War protests, and the counterculture, which, in their cumulative imp...

Travails of the Democratic Party  The Democratic Party, formed in the Jacksonian revolution of the 1830s, combined an explosive democratic impulse among white working and middle classes with the most egregious racism embodied in this nation’s history. This tension remained a pervasive feature of the Party’s political culture through the mid-20 th century.   This racist impetus intensified with the heating up of the sectional conflict with such Democratic stalwarts like Mississippi Senator, Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, Governor of Georgia, serving as President and Vice-President of the breakaway Confederacy. Fighting Radical Reconstruction, after the Civil War, tooth and nail, the Democratic Party in the South sought to destroy any vestige of an interracial democracy, which the Radical Reconstructionist Congress and its abolitionist allies sought to perpetuate. Led by the likes of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner and the preeminent Black abolitionist, Frederic...