And my fear regarding Lieberman wasn't Connecticuters with pitchforks, it was the stupidity of pushing somebody out of the party for ideological differences on one (albeit important, but hardly all-encompassing) issue -- of purity utterly dominating diversity, in other words. That seemed (and still seems), well, illiberal.
This is a very strong argument. It's not just that it’s bad strategy for Lieberman’s constituents to vote him out of office because of the war - with the seniority and experience Lieberman has gained from many years in the senate it would be relatively straightforward to argue that he was worth keeping despite not representing
If you accept that the primary process as a democratic expression of
The most obvious culprit for what could illegitimately sway the election is money. But Lieberman and Lamont both spent about the same amount (roughly $20,000,000). Lieberman got about 75% of his funding from out of state rich folk and PACs while Lamont took the John Edwards route of pouring his own cash into his senate campaign. Money just wasn’t decisive in the primary. Registered Democrats in
Update: Reworded for clarity.
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I won't comment on these ideas as if they were Aaron's, because clearly there's more context than this post offers.
But let's take the "illiberal" comment, pretend for argument's sake that Aaron really meant it, and springboard from that into a larger discussion about what it means to be liberal.
Where in the definition of a political liberal does it declare that social progressiveness has to be coupled with tolerance of stupid ideas? "Liberal" literally means easy-going, accepting, and open-minded. Political liberalness is totally different, and there's no reason that political liberals should be any less forgiving than political conservatives of individuals who defy that ideological group's stances.
Okay, so I'll respond with three points:
1. My complaint is not with Lamont, his campaign or the people who voted for him in the Connecticut primary. It's with those elements of the netroots that specifically tried to torpedo Lieberman over the Iraq issue, contributing money and publicity to his opponent. And truth be told, Lieberman isn't my favorite Democratic politician by a country mile. But I still think that their behavior is roughly equivalent to the NRA's attempts to sandbag politicians that it dislikes -- though, again, the NRA also doesn't claim to be speaking for the entire Republican party when it does this. In my view, this is a (completely legal) perversion of the way that the democratic process is supposed to operate (cf. Federalist 10) and I'm not going to shrink from my description of it as illiberal -- because it is.
2. Rebecca, I guess my question for you is: who controls the definition of "politically liberal"? The Democratic party didn't begin with Howard Dean and if we held everybody in the party to a strict ideological account by that rubric, where would that leave Clinton, FDR, LBJ, Kennedy, etc.?
3. Also, Tom, I'm curious, do you somehow see Lieberman's reelection by a very substantial margin, again even while being flanked by a legitimate Republican and (the absurdly rich, ergo self-financed) Lamont, as somehow less of an example of the democratic process than the primary? If so, why?
Ha, I just had Tom read that. Ideological rigidity does help to win elections in the short-term, but it also tends to break rather than bend on intellectual grounds and isolate political moderates rather than convert them on more practical grounds.
So just to be clear, Aaron, the problem with Tom's "sunk cost fallacy" argument is that it's too reductive in that it applies only to some insignificant minority of people, but your complaints about "elements of the netroots" is not too reductive?
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