One hundred and forty-one years ago, J.A. Farrer wrote in The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, “Nothing is perhaps more characteristic of the wide difference between savagery and civilization than the fact that the one chooses the past and the other the future as the playground for its dreams of a happier condition of humanity.”

In 2021, with political battlelines drawn both in the state and nationally, that sentiment has become translated into the tribalistic labeling that has paralyzed meaningful civic debate.  At a town hall in Fair Lawn last week, Jack Ciattarelli summed it up in simple, albeit still partisan, terms.  “In Phil Murphy’s world when he disagrees with you, you’re not just wrong, you’re bad.”  The candidate accused the governor of inciting an “us versus them” mentality, but that is not exclusive to the left in any reality.

The savage would drag us back into everything wrong—or already has and must be undone.  The civilized would bring us to something better in the days ahead.  There is no room for compromise—so you better vote for “us”.  No one, after all, would self-identify as a savage: even that guy with the buffalo hat roaring in the senate chamber back in January.

The purpose of political parties is, ostensibly, to mobilize and harness the collective power of individuals with common political interests, be it economic, philosophical, or some combination thereof, and implement coherent policies to advance those interests—theoretically the public good.  But the nation’s first president warned against this.  George Washington received all the electoral votes, running unopposed in the election of 1788-89 (11% turn out) and 1792 (6% turn out).  In that sense, it was expedient for him to be critical of the emerging but not-yet-formalized American political parties—then Federalists and Anti-Federalists—as he occupied a unique and un-repeatable place in American political history.  In Washington’s wisdom, however, he saw the danger of political parties’ interests being placed above the interests of the people.

Nowadays, the public is so cynical—with good cause—that that is just a given.  But, dutifully, they turn out to vote just the same, although to varying degrees depending on interest factors.  Better to be ruled by “us” than by “them”.  The question becomes, ever increasingly, whether “us” really is representative of “us” after all.  To Farrer’s point, one either represents the future, where betterment will be found, or one looks to what once was—either as a repeal of bad policies or an attempt to recapture a kind of nostalgic concept of a better way.

The latter brings with it the additional danger of delusion.  In the 1998 film “Pleasantville” as David sits in a jail cell, his father George visits.  In the course of their conversation, George laments that everything has become “cockeyed” and nothing makes sense.  “What went wrong?” George asks.  “Nothing went wrong,” David replies, “people change.”  “Can they change back?” George asks.  With a smile, his son replies, “I don’t know.  I think it’s harder.”

In New Jersey politics, change comes, but it never comes easily.  The state which deifies home rule, where a state of 8,723 square miles plays host to 565 municipalities and vaguely defined pseudo-towns, never transitions to anything new too quickly, speaking to the proud, unpragmatic idiosyncrasies of America’s most derided state.  But change does come.  Politically, New Jerseyans saw change within the leadership of the two parties.

For the Democrats, the new electoral season opened with LeRoy Jones inheriting the crown of state party chairmanship, shifting the weight of party power from Passaic County and staunch Murphy ally John Currie to the Essex County powerhouse where Baraka is king.  The party cockpit, however, remained in the north, setting the stage for renewed Norcross-Sweeney feuding with Murphyland once the election is over—this, assuming Ciattarelli doesn’t win.

For the Republicans, after Doug Steinhardt’s own aborted bid for governor, Bob Hugin—an executive millionaire who failed to dislodge Bob Menendez despite the latter being embroiled in federal investigations—has taken the state chairmanship.  He has the unenviable task of trying to rebuild the party in the post-Trump era and reasserting the appeal of the Republican base in a state becoming increasingly more diverse ethnically, religiously, and culturally.

Senator Loretta Weinberg (D) in a recent interview with Insider NJ said “in New Jersey, generally, we have a moderate voting public.”  But as Murphy’s lead over Republican Jack Ciattarelli began to dwindle in the polls, the governor brought in former President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, and—bizarrely—Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist, to help beef up his prospects.

Running against the most moderate of the three Republican primary candidates, Phil Murphy did not try to take new ground and expand his credibility with the center.  Instead, he decided to deepen and fortify the trenches that had already been dug, looking to build an unassailable defense on the left side of a 1918-style political No Man’s Land.

Given the low media interest and unremarkable turn-out (astonishingly, for two presidents), Ciattarelli found sport with the gesture, painting Murphy out as further out-of-touch with the typical New Jerseyan.  The demonstration of Biden’s visit itself was further compounded with ignominy given that New Jersey—at the moment rock-solid blue in its congressional delegation—is the home of Josh Gottheimer, one of the congressmen who has effectively pumped the brakes on Biden’s case-making agenda: namely the budget reconciliation and infrastructure bill.

A Democratic governor with a competitive albeit shrinking lead on a Republican contender with low name recognition brings in a Democratic president struggling to convince a Democratic Congress to fully support his agenda and deliver it in a timely manner.  If this was to speak to power and appeal, then the message fell flat.

Bernie Sanders barely took 15% of the NJ Democratic Primary in 2020, the object of derision for most of the established Democrat bosses.  If Murphy was looking to score points with people who are already going to vote for him, then he missed an opportunity for trying to slow his polling decline and shore up his prospects.  Those would be won with the people left out: the unaffiliated, the independent, the folks who have very real and visceral struggles to contend with than to fret about whether a Goldman Sachs executive was right to find a solution to a problem that didn’t exist, changing the name of “freeholders” to “commissioners”, or if a businessman from Somerset they haven’t heard of wants the MVC to waive the fee for volunteer firemens’ license plates.

The reality was summed up by Weinberg last week: public health and the economy.  These are what matter most to the citizens, trapped in the Garden State while a barbarian horde on one side believes it can spend its way out of problems, finding a governmental solution to every societal ailment, while the raging mob on the other side tries to wrestle itself for an image.  Will it be a suit-and-tie mantra of jobs-and-taxes policy or a red-hatted credo of blood-and-soil first principally imported into the state by a New Yorker six years ago?

Nevertheless, New Jersey has its share of progressive as well as reactionary organizations and political leanings, but it is not so red or so blue as to be worthy of national references to ideology like California for the left or Texas or Florida for the right.  Pathetically, New Jersey in the national consciousness remains the land of taxes, traffic, and crooked deals.  Nothing so glamorous for the poli-sci cynic.  Move to bullying Big Bro New York for that but keep a few extra bucks on hand for the Congestion Fee.

All of this underscores a disconnect between the NJ political elite, endlessly patting themselves on the back at cocktail parties, while they lead a moribund electorate where two-thirds say they would rather live somewhere else if they could.  During the pandemic in 2020, with the White House essentially leaving COVID strategies up to the state and initially letting them compete like gladiators for a go at the federal teat, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania had established their own regional communications apparatus to deal with the pandemic.  From this informal union, former Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York positioned himself as the de facto leader, with Phil Murphy—and all the others—as a junior partner.  With the fall of Cuomo, it would stand that Murphy should emerge as the senior leading figure of the regional alliance, but he has not communicated New Jersey’s leadership in that sense.  Perhaps it would not be possible for any New Jersey governor—captaining a state ranking #3 of the 4 states in population and which, historically, sent only one native son to the White House, Grover Cleveland, and one former governor, Woodrow Wilson.

So where does New Jersey stand?  Presently and perpetually in the shadows of the Empire State’s skyscrapers, where an incumbent governor’s approach to victory is to rely on the advantage of registered Democrats rather than broaden the base.  On the other side, a flailing, wounded NJ GOP sees its party membership shrunken and rank and file undergoing a Yeltsin-style shock therapy, transitioning or reconciling as best it can the nationalized MAGA brand and the Ciattarelli New Jersey “common sense conservativism” brand.

Meanwhile, the weather is changing and folks at home are worried about rising utility bills, whether or not their kids going to school will be safe from the coronavirus, and for almost all of New Jersey small business owners, how they will ever recover from the damage of the previous year and a half.  New Jerseyans on November 2 will and must give their mandate to their future leadership.  For as much as the wheel squeaks as it turns—with New Jersey residents wearily running inside it and wondering when they will get to that better place promised by Team Red or Team Blue—the wheel must turn, notwithstanding.