Self-Interview, May 2023

Someone, taking umbrage at something I had written, asked me the other day, “Who do you think you are?” I’ve attempted below in a self-interview a brief answer to the question. There will be no forthcoming autobiography.

Q: You have been writing on Connecticut politics for more than 40 years, and your blog site, Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State, is the oldest commentary site devoted to Connecticut politics in the state. How would you characterize yourself politically?

A: I like to call myself a contrarian journalist.

Q: Not a conservative?

A: My wife, Andree, and I were good friends with Bill Buckley, who was, in the view of friends and enemies alike, responsible for the modern American conservative movement. I don’t think he considered me a conservative. He liked my columns and agreed with many of them. But conservatism and its political opposite, neo-progressivism, are political orientations, not philosophies. My orientation is perhaps more cynical, in a good sense, than either of them.

Some people may be surprised to learn that Buckley styled himself a libertarian, though of course not an Ayn Rand libertarian. “Happy Days Were Here Again” – note the past tense -- is subtitled “Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist.” I hope I am a contrarian in the fashion of Sam Adams, Voltaire, many of the founders of the country, and my wife, who is far more conservative than I am. By the way, those journalists in the state who falsely pride themselves as being bi-partisan and objective will agree that any true contrarian journalist in Connecticut must be more conservative than -- to choose but one Democrat legislator in the state’s neo-progressive General Assembly -- President Pro Tem of the State Senate Martin Looney.

Q: So, can we say you have a warm spot in your heart for both conservatives and libertarians?

A: If you choose to frame it that way, I have no strong objection. What I am practicing, however, is contrarian journalism. In a state brimming over with neo-progressives, the contrarian necessarily is forced into the arms of conservatives and libertarians. Buckley somewhere talks about his alliance with Albert Jay Nock, one of his tutors at Yale, a true contrarian and the author of Our Enemy the State. Elsewhere in his writings, Buckley mentions that Nock was incapable of having more than one friend at a time. Buckley was just the opposite. At his house in Stamford – painted pink, his wife Pat said, “to attract the sailors” – one could find all manner of people chatting together amiably. A good newspaper, Joseph Pulitzer once said, should have no friends.

Q: You’ve said somewhere – I can’t remember where – that Athanasius’ motto, “Contra Mundum,” appeals to you.

A: Yes, “Man Against The World.” There ought to be more of that in today’s journalism, if only because journalism is the art of depicting reality, rather than succumbing to political fantasies.

Q: So, the contrarian journalist in Connecticut, if true to Athanasius’ dictum, probably would find himself or herself flirting with conservatives or libertarians.

A: That alliance, always impermanent, is inescapable. One of the problems with neo-progressive journalists is that they have too many neo-progressive friends, many of them in-office politicians, and lack the integrity embraced by Athanasius, a solid and solitary Christian among a throng of dominant pagans.

Q: You don’t like one-party states.

A: I don’t. Neither should anyone who prizes liberty and free – meaning wide-ranging – discussions among the friends of democracy and republican governance. In a room of neo-progressives, doors are necessarily closed to alternative political visions. Former Governor of Connecticut Dannel Malloy was famous for shooing out of caucus rooms state Republicans tainted with contrary notions. Governor Ned Lamont is different. He is not uncomfortable with free market ideas, an overlooked political strength. Lamont is, on the other hand, new to state politics, a fever swamp of rival ideologies. One can always spot an ideology. Strike it with a sledge hammer and it will give off a tinny sound, like the tinkling of an unexamined prejudice. The curtsey to leftist notions, however absurd, is the sign of a true ideologue.

Q: And political campaigns leave you cold.

A: Political campaigning – in Lear’s words, a hypersensitive concern with “who’s in, who’s out” –is the bane of modern politics.

Chastised by events over which he has no control, Lear says to his only faithful daughter, Cordelia:

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.

We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—

Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—

And take upon’s the mystery of things

As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out

In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones

That ebb and flow by the moon.

Such is the life of spent politicians on their way to secular oblivion and straight and true journalists -- “God’s spies.”

God may forgive Lear, the politician, his sins. But his political enemies will withhold forgiveness, convinced, as Lear once was, that today and tomorrow are eternal.

Q; And your advice to journalists would be what?

A: G. K. Chesterton used to say, “Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”

Stick in there. Chesterton did, and he produced about 14 volumes of re-readable and quotable journalism.