Class war will not vanish if Republicans ignore it

With the primaries over and the general election campaign beginning, Connecticut’s political geography favors the Democrats, as usual. They lead the Republicans in voter registration by far, and while unaffiliated voters are the biggest group, government employees and their dependents constitute more than 20 percent of the electorate and are always motivated to vote for and donate money and labor to the Democrats, the party of government.

But the issues couldn’t favor the Republicans more — starting with state government’s bankruptcy and continuing with the collapse of Connecticut’s private economy and state government’s disastrous failures with urban, education and welfare policy.

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On the day after his stunning triumph in the Democratic primary, former Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy seemed to sense the disadvantage to his party in the big issues. Reflecting on the campaign ahead, Malloy said he represents “the middle class� while the winner of the Republican primary for governor, businessman and former Ambassador Tom Foley, represents “a different class.�

Foley quickly tried to dismiss “that kind of class-warfare stuff,� adding that he aims “to bring people together to solve our problems� and doesn’t want to be “pitting people against each other.� But Republicans aren’t going to win elections in Connecticut with meaningless mush like that. If they want meaningless mush, people can stick with the majority party, the Democrats.

Foley and the Republicans have been warned. To distract from the big issues, Malloy and the Democrats will wage class war. So who will define the terms of that war? For when the Democrats say they represent the “middle class,� they mean the government class.

Half the state budget and at least two-thirds of municipal budgets are spent on compensation for government employees, compensation that labor law secures as an untouchable “fixed cost� of government outside the democratic process.

As New Jersey has discovered under its clear-eyed and tough new Republican governor, Chris Christie, no amount of asking nicely will persuade the government class to give up its privileged position. The class war long has been under way — waged by the government class against the taxpaying class. Unlike in New Jersey, in Connecticut the taxpaying class still awaits its general.

A new front in the class war was opened the other day by the Democrats in Congress and President Obama as they appropriated $10 billion to be sent to the states in the name of saving 160,000 teaching jobs. The real purpose of the legislation is to allow teacher unions to avoid contract concessions and the reduction in living standards being endured by the people who pay for teachers. Some of that $10 billion was taken from appropriations for food stamps. To buy off the teacher unions, the Democrats starved the poor.

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Nor is Foley likely to get far with his cliche that state government needs a business executive like himself to turn it around. For state government isn’t a business; it is a social-service enterprise meant not to make a profit but to facilitate a healthy and prosperous society, an enterprise that long has been perverted for mere special-interest patronage, indifferent to results. State government is an enterprise necessarily run by democratic politics, argument, persuasion and a bit of theater, not the mere command of the board room.

Fortunately for Foley and the Republicans, state government is full of big and little outrages in plain view that have not yet been exploited as political issues. The plutocratic salaries of the Connecticut State University system, the $100,000-per-year pensions throughout state government, the exact correlation between welfare for childbearing outside marriage and societal disintegration, down to the state Agriculture Department’s having spent money the other day to run steroid tests on horses in wagon-pulling contests at local fairs while medical care for poor children is being reduced — all these things and more would make state government an absolute heaven for the politician as anecdotist, the sort of thing at which Ronald Reagan was so successful.

Already even the news media, despite their liberal bent, are full of alarm about government’s unpayable pension obligations to public employees and are wondering whether government ever again can be anything more than a pension and benefit society for its occupants.

Because of the composition of their party, Connecticut Democrats can’t discuss anything that really matters. If Republicans don’t start stoking outrage about what really matters and specifying the policy alternatives, they’ll be wasting their time and Connecticut’s, too.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.