The humanity of Jack Ciattarelli vs. Phil Murphy’s Wall Street ego.
/By Rubashov
The grumblings on the ground, amongst the hundreds of grassroots doers who make up what could be the activist base of the Republican Party in New Jersey, are not filtering up, not making it to the ears of the Establishment media in this state. Apart from the astute Paul Mulshine, who ever calls them?
For most of the Establishment media, such people are simply examples of Hilary Clinton’s deplorables, unworthy of consideration. How stripping people of their common humanity – a humanity the Establishment media insists be granted to child rapists and serial killers – became a species of so-called “liberalism”, we cannot know. It is a feature of the new class war described by Michael Lind in a book by the same name (The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite), published last year.
Lind argues that Western democracies must incorporate working-class majorities of all races, ethnicities, and creeds into decision-making in politics, the economy, and culture. Only this class compromise can avert a never-ending cycle of clashes between oligarchs and populists and save democracy.” Now, before anyone goes assuming that Lind is some “right-wing extremist”, recall that he has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and is a Professor at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. An author of more than a dozen books, Professor Lind was an editor or staff writer at the New Yorker, Harper’s, The New Republic, and The National Interest. Professor Lind also writes some very good poetry.
With regards to the gubernatorial race between the incumbent Democrat, Phil Murphy, and the Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, the usually hostile Establishment media is full of “well-meaning” advice for the challenger. This advice goes from “give-up, Murphy’s got this” to “there should be no clear-blue water between the GOP and the Democrats, all those issues are settled, your policies should mimic those of the Democrats.”
But the grumblings continue – fueled by those “settled policies” pushed on them or imposed directly by Governor Murphy and his ideological allies (many of whom he has made taxpayer-paid vendors to his administration). As the Establishment media doesn’t talk to people like this, they find ways to talk to each other – so a new, contained, kind of media is created in the hundreds of social media and internet-based groups, formal and informal, that have filled the void left by Establishment media.
This vibrant new media serves much the same purpose as the phenomenon of “little magazines” did during the last century – when political, cultural, and literary movements (pushed aside or ignored by the Establishment) created their own media to communicate through. The question is: Will the NJGOP and its candidates acknowledge and promote this new media? Will they harness its possibilities?
So far, New Jersey Republicans have been slow to recognize the opportunities offered by this new media, slow to adapt and engage. Most have remained hard-wired to the Establishment media who (a) are not their friends, and who (b) no longer talk to or engage with the voters who are their friends. We see evidence of this in every fresh missive from official party sources. The party recognizes and promotes the same sources as it has done for decades – only the newspapers are now on life-support and instead of PoliticsNJ it is now called New Jersey Globe.
The most notable departure from this has been the Republican nominee himself, Jack Ciattarelli. Whoever he was four or more years ago, informed by his background as a small business owner and an accountant, he has grown through engaging with people and listening to them.
Jack Ciattarelli is among the best listeners in politics we’ve come across. And it doesn’t matter who he’s talking with – a kid in Newark wondering about his future, a restaurant owner trying to stay in business, a single-mom facing foreclosure, or parents sick and tired of government butting-in between them and their children – Jack listens. He listens, he thinks about it, he takes what he has heard into his heart – and he changes and makes it part of his platform.
You cannot ask for more from anyone running for public office. It doesn’t get any better than a genuine, honest listener – open to learning from the people he wants to represent. And isn’t that what representative democracy is all about?
Jack’s opponent is Phil Murphy, the incumbent Governor, and one-time boss at Wall Street’s Goldman-Sachs. A self-proclaimed “Master-of-the-Universe”. They do not listen. They know.
They know what is best for you. And they know that it is better for everyone when the silly proles know their place and leave the world to be run by people like them. People who don’t let ideas like freedom or democracy get in the way of profit. Masters-of-the-Universe who know that you can’t get all sentimental and worry about young Asian girls being worked like slaves in unsafe environments for pennies an hour. Especially when an “ideal” like profit is at stake.
These people send their children to private boarding schools that cost as much as a working person earns in a year. They turn their kids over to an institution that daily takes their place. Institutions that act as Nanny to inculcate an Establishment ethos into their charges.
It is their choice to do so. But they do not extend to others the same choice when they try to impose an ideological curriculum on their children. Phil and Tammy Murphy (herself an alumnus and board member of one of these private boarding schools) want to place their ideas about how your children should be raised between you and your own kids! And its not just the curriculum that they are messing with. Murphy’s Democrats wanted to make it a crime for the police to tell parents when the cops caught their kids using drugs.
Phil Murphy doesn’t respect the family. He doesn’t care about that special space that joins parents and children. He wants to break it all to pieces – just so he can hand a fat plum to his political allies at Garden State Equality. They want something. They need money. Mandating a new curriculum delivers on that. His allies get theirs. They endorse Murphy. Murphy profits – just like in the old days.
There is no doubt that the grumblings of the nascent new media will continue – even as it grows, knits itself together, and builds a following of people looking to read something by someone who doesn’t call them names. There are millions upon millions of such people – and they grow every time someone tells them that skin color marks some people as “bad” or that their country is something to be ashamed of.
And while the NJGOP and its allied organizations throughout the state may not get it, some do and, most importantly, Jack does. Jack Ciattarelli is a listener who has listened and who has taken crap from the Establishment media because he has listened… and he did not back down.
If there is to be a reckoning within the GOP, now is not the moment. All people – Republican, Democrat, Undeclared, Independent – who value individual liberty and personal freedom, who value the family and the small community, have in Jack Ciattarelli a champion who will listen. And that’s how it begins – with listening. How refreshingly different from the “shut up and know your place… or I’ll call you a bad word” of Phil Murphy and his unctuous crew.
Jack is listening. He needs your help. Focus your energies between now and November 2nd accordingly.
“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.”
Robert Heinlein
