In just six years, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman has gone from winning his party’s vice presidential nomination to facing a serious primary challenge. And although he may yet capture the Democratic slot on the ballot, the extent of Lieberman’s political trouble is apparent: Last week, he announced that he will seek the signatures necessary to run as an independent in November should he lose the August primary.
Those responsible for Lieberman’s dilemma are the Web-organized activists who congregate on such blogs as Markos Moulitsas’ Daily Kos and call themselves the “netroots.”
Driven by anger over Iraq, they claim to represent the progressive, Democratic base in a fight against the party establishment. But just like the anti-Vietnam organizers of a generation ago, today’s activists represent a minute slice of elite opinion. Should they succeed in forcing Lieberman out of the party, they will have empowered only themselves — at the expense of the majority of Connecticut voters who approve of Lieberman’s efforts in theSenate. And just like their anti-Vietnam predecessors, the netroots will have set the Democrats back on the road to decades of minority status.
For Democrats, 2006 is mirroring 1968. Then, as today, the party was riven by a costly war that critics charged was unwinnable and unending. At the disastrous Chicago convention in August, party bosses secured the nomination for establishment candidate Hubert Humphrey over anti-war candidates Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern.
Humphrey had a conflicted and unclear stance on Vietnam, and his selection enraged members of the party’s anti-war left. They felt that Humphrey, who had not competed in a single primary, did not represent the political will of the people. Their belief proved largely unfounded, of course — in the eventual three-way race with Richard Nixon and segregationist George Wallace, Humphrey lost by a mere 500,000 votes. But in an attempt to placate the party’s far left, the convention appointed a commission to study the rules governing party’s nomination process.
Chaired by McGovern himself, the commission was stacked with party reformers. They enacted rules to “democratize” the party — by empowering the antiwar left. The reformers instated a quota system that pushed out white working class voters and replaced them with youth groups, women and minorities. A more democratically representative Democratic Party was unquestionably a positive development. But McGovern’s commission produced a 1972 convention where delegates were less concerned with the views of the country as a whole than they had been at the supposedly “undemocratic” 1968 convention.
The newly enfranchised interest groups nominated a candidate who represented the politics of the educated elite — McGovern himself. And unlike Humphrey, who lost the popular vote by less than a single percentage point four years earlier, McGovern went on to lose in a 61-38 landslide. Not until the 1992 success of New DemocratBill Clinton did the party fully undo the damage.
Today’s netroots organizers are the heirs of those McGovern reformers and their interest-group allies. Like their predecessors, these activists claim they are wresting power away from an out-of-touch establishment that supports an unjust war.
But in both cases, the establishment actually has a better understanding of the electorate as a whole. Just as Humphrey was more popular across the country than McGovern, Lieberman is more popular across Connecticut than challenger Ned Lamont.
If the netroots capture the nomination for Lamont, they will ensure that a Democrat does not represent Connecticut in the Senate. And although Lieberman has vowed to caucus with Senate Democrats if he is elected as an independent, he would be a more reliable ally if he remains in the party.
Describing the race this past weekend, the Daily Kos’ Moulitsas employed the sort of rhetoric one might have heard outside the Democratic convention in 1968. “My biggest lesson I’ve taken from the Connecticut primary,” he wrote, “is how much the beltway elite hate democracy and the plebes who demand a say in it.”
What Kos and the rest of the netroots fail to understand is that they also represent an elite — the educated, anti-war elite. The difference is that the Beltway elite produces winners and they produce losers.
Alexander Dryer works for The New Yorker in Washington.
