Lamont's astonishing victory over the incumbent Lieberman has set the stage for a historic confrontation both within the Democratic Party and throughout the body politic as a whole.
Lamont's astonishing victory over the incumbent Lieberman has set the stage for a historic confrontation both within the Democratic Party and throughout the body politic as a whole.
The central fact of our current politics is that the aparatchiks of both parties, as well as the corporate interests who fund them, neither believe in, nor have any use for authentic democracy.
This has been clear at least since the shameful debacle of Florida 2000, wherein insisting on a full accounting of votes cast was viewed as being a poor loser and not playing the game. The "game" being of more significance than the fact that the majority of the popular vote had repudiated the annointed winner.
In this regard, our ruling political elites and their sponsors resemble no one so much as the Imperial Romans, who faithfully observed the ancient forms of their Republic with ceremonies and burnt offerings even as they privately mocked the credulity of the mob and gutted political liberty in favor of the despotism of the Caesars.
We must face the harsh reality that both the Democratic and Republican establishments hold our present day political process to be an empty ritual, valuable only to the degree that it provides a spurious legitimacy to their actions, while obscuring from the population at large the actual mechanics of power and privilege.
Recognize this and you have put your finger on the taproot which feeds the puditocracy's paranoid screeds about McGovernism rising from the grave and Lamont vs Lieberman being the redux of 1968.
The spectre haunting the power elites isn't simply that of 1968 but of the Sixties in toto and with good reason. That decade, and the succession of mass popular movements it birthed, was the last occasion when democracy, in all it's messy vitality, shook the death grip that the ruling elites held on the public agenda. The lesson drawn by the aparatchiki was never to let such a state of affairs occur again.
Once this is understood, the otherwise looney bleatings about anti-war democrats being a threat to their own party and the insistance that history is repeating itself began to make a sort grotesque, if irrational, sense.
Their hysteria is born of the belief, eminently justified, that Lamont's campaign encapsulates what they hate and fear most from the experience of the 1960's. An authentic, nearly spontaneous, popular upsurge from the grassroots. They fear losing control of the public discourse and consequently, losing control of the governing agenda. That's why, when push comes to shove, they prefer to lose elections rather than embrace a popular electoral insurgency that actually challenges the reactionary paradigm of the past two decades.
In this context, Lieberman has been valuable as a figleaf. Not only has he provided bi-partisan cover to the open peddlers of reaction in the GOP, more importantly, he has provided cover for the conciliators of reaction within the Democratic Party aparatus. So long as Lieberman remained in the Senate he could act as a successful poster boy for the inside the beltway cadre, whose only real complaint about the ruling party is that they are too clumsy in applying the methods of exploitation and empire.
Much has been made of the Strausian doctrine of rule by deceit as practiced by the Neo-Cons in and around the GOP. What's often forgotten is that the Neo-Cons have always been dedicated to infusing both parties with their brand of ideological poison. Nothing illustrates the success of such retreaded machiavellianism better than the last 6 years of Democratic capitulation and ineptitude.
The Kerry campaign, with it's attempt to celebrate the candidate's war record while studiously ignoring his service in the trenches of the anti-war movement, is a prime example. It seems impossible that anyone with a modicum of political sense wouldn't have understood that this was a recipe for disaster. By failing to identify the values that led him into combat service as being the same values that motivated his antiwar activism, Kerry created a perceptual dichotomy that was quickly expoited by the GOP. Kerry could either be Rambo or he could be Jane Fonda's boyfriend. He could not be both.
People tend to put this colosal blunder down to the personal failings of the candidate. There's truth in this but it isn't the whole truth.
The main reason for this failure lies in the fact that Kerry could not draw such connections without reviving the critique of the reactionary imperial ambitions which underlay them. Of course, the unrestrained use of military force in pursuit of such ambitions is the raison d'etre of the Neo-Con theology. Raising a critique of so fundamental an aspect of the Neo-Con project in the context of a Presidential Campaign was something the aparatchiks were loath to sign off on.
That's why there is a very real possibility that things are about to get a great deal uglier in Connecticut. The focus on Lamont's victory as a triumph for the anti-war movement threatens to move the bloody fiasco in Iraq to the center of the national political debate. Such a debate would be pregnant with possibility of starkly posing the following question. Do the citizens of the US wish to jettison the Republic and its liberties in favor of an Imperium that would degrade America to the status of enforcer for global corporatism? This is a possibility from which all the power elites recoil.
We may be about to discover who within the Governing class retains a committment to active democracy and who does not. By bolting and betraying the Democrats, Lieberman may inadvertently draw a bright line between those committed to democracy only as an empty mummery and those dedicated to the proposition that "...government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.".