As is often the case, Digby has
already eloquently expressed much of what I wanted to say about the Lamont-Lieberman race:
Apparently, challenging someone in Senate primary is comparable to people sitting out an election as a protest. I'm not sure why that is. If there is a move afoot to sit out the election, I haven't seen any sign of it. But hey, it's always 1968 in the DC establishment's mind so let's get groovy and smoke a doobie. ...
This isn't about a 60's style liberal "anti-war movement," which was a massive youth movement built around the draft coupled with huge social and cultural upheaval. This is just people trying to elect representatives to national office who represent their views.
Despite all this blather about "congenial bipartisanship" the Republican Party went so far right they went off the cliff -- people are doing the predictable (and responsible) thing and pushing back. Many of them care passionately about their country and are frightened of the direction in which it's going. They are trying to do something about it. Is that really so scary?
This is just plain old politics, nothing unusual about it except we organize and talk over the internets. America hasn't heard much from liberals in a while but we've been out here the whole time -- and our policies have remained popular in spite of all the vilification we've endured because of the pathological fear of hippies that permeates the Democratic establishment.
It seems as if many baby boomers among the D.C. media and Democrats are stuck in an endless psychodrama, attempting to rewrite the political history of their own youth. These pols and pundits view everything that happens in the Democratic party as a struggle between responsible, mature centrists (= themselves and their friends) and legions of shrieking, bra-burning, tie-dye-clad hippies.
In the D.C. establishment's one-dimensional model, the new netroots is the radical left, and ergo the same mob of raging fanatics who supposedly stampeded the party over a cliff almost four decades ago. Myths about the present are layered upon myths about the past.
And all of this obscures what's actually happening within the party right now: a populist (see: Paul Hackett, Jack Murtha, Jim Webb, Bryan Schweitzer, etc.) -- rather than radical -- uprising, led by ordinary citizens, using new models of networking, and supporting Dems at many points on the political spectrum, as long as they're willing to stand up and fight.
When will they grok the new reality? It may be that the defeat of Joe Lieberman, patron saint of the centrists, is exactly the shock needed to snap these folks out of their 1968 daydream / nightmare. For some, of course, it will just intensify their irrational fear and loathing of the "new new Democrats." But others may finally be compelled to look at what's happening more closely -- and to move beyond the fairy tales in their heads that have enthralled them for far too long.
More commentary at SubIntSoc