A commenter (BruceW07) responding to the Mark Schmitt piece on single-issue myopia and the CT-Sen race I linked below makes this
fascinating comment:
It is not just about checklist liberalism. It is about the emergence of a New Democratic Right.
To become the party-in-power, the Democrats have to get 5-10% of the electorate to migrate from the Republicans to the Democrats. Since they are Republicans now, that portion of the electorate is more conservative than most Democrats.
This migration is possible now, because the Republican Party has become repulsive to decency and rationality and secularism. Republicans stand for torture, national bankruptcy, corrupt crony capitalism unbound, and authoritarianism.
The existing right-wing of the Democratic Party, however, has been accomodationist. There's no more prominent example of a Vichy Democrat that Joe. Joe, representing the old Democratic Right, loves Republicanism; the New Democratic Right will consist of former Republican, who are conservative, but HATE Republicanism. Joe was right there defending the fantasy foreign policy in Iraq and Terry Schiavo and so on.
It is not just that Joe's dessicated liberalism is no longer compatible with the emergence of a liberal vision of a just society, it is that he is not the kind of conservative, who will attract the conservatives, who find themselves repulsed by the current Republican Party.
The old Democratic Right consisted of the remnant of conservatives, who, though repulsed by the liberal excesses of the 1960's and 1970's, stuck with the Party. When Reagan built a Republican majority out of tacit racism and libertarian resentment, most of those people migrated toward the Republicans, and the DLC devised strategies to draw them back. The key to the old Democratic Right was resenting liberalism as arrogant and foolish and morally superior in their own minds only. Which is why the DLC made a fetish of attacking Democrats.
Webb in Virginia, Tester in Montana, Lamont in Connecticut -- Kos of DailyKos fame, Howard Dean, represent a New Democratic Right. (Or Center, if you prefer). They are not pissed off at the excesses of the 60's. They are pissed off about Bush and the excesses of Republicans, now. They are a magnet for people being expelled from the Republican Party by those excesses.
It is Lieberman's way of being a conservative Democrat, which is no longer wanted. It is standing in the way of the long-term project of building a Democratic majority.
I've made the argument before (including in Crashing the Gate) that the generational divide in our party, between the old guard and the new progressive movement, is based on our political birth. Those of us who became political sentient more recently (whether after the 2000 election theft or even during the Clinton years) don't have the baggage of McGovern, which still seems to obsess and inform the old guard.
It's true, I was a Republican until I left the Army and became disgusted with the "me, me, me" ethos of the Republican Party. I voted for Bush in 1992, and never voted Republican again.
And sure, balanced budgets were (and still are) a big part of the reason I made the switch. But I also switched because of the rising influence of the Christian Coalition, because of the GOP's tendencies to meddle in people's private lives, because of its irresponsible management of our nation's finances, its hostility toward good government programs, and for its penchant for ideology over reality.
I don't consider myself the Democratic Right, or even center. Definitely not the party's left flank. (That left-right scale will never go away, however incapable it is of capturing the nuances of a person's political leanings.) I consider myself a Libertarian Democrat. But I was once a Libertarian Republican and was pushed out of that party because of its excesses.
1968 is irrelevant to me. While historically fascinating, 1968 is an artifact of a bygone era, when the political, media, and activist landscapes were dramatically different.
Republicans win because they are not irrationally wedded to the past. They evolve with the times, always living on the cutting edge. Democrats can't get over the fact that 1968 happened nearly 40 years ago. (That's CTG's thesis, in a nutshell.)
And whether you want to quibble with the nomenclature or not, this notion of Old Democratic Right versus New Democratic Right is quite intriguing.