The passing this last week of Joe Lieberman, a long-time Connecticut Senator and former vice-presidential candidate, stands as reminder of how far the Democrats have moved from the kind of centrist politics that he so epitomised.
Lieberman was an older type of Democrat, someone who embraced the party’s defense of the working and middle classes, while also rallying to the cause of American patriotism. The Democratic Party under the unsure and ever-wavering hand of President Joe Biden is none of these things.
Its base is increasingly found in the highly educated white middle and upper classes, the tech oligarchs and Wall Street. In terms of the world, it is largely either isolationist or timid in the face of terrorist threats, and in the case of Hamas even seems ready to embrace them.
Starting in the 60s and 70s, largely due to the Vietnam War, the party adopted an agenda largely congruent with that of the European Left – obsessed with climate, gender, and race issues and deeply hostile to basic notions underpinning American civilisation. These are positions that centrists like Lieberman nor his closest allies in the Clinton Administration could accept.
The contrast between Lieberman and his old Senate colleague, Joe Biden, could not be greater. Lieberman stuck to his views on defense and social issues, some of which reflected his embrace of orthodox Judaism. In contrast Biden, once regarded as a centrist, has morphed into a progressive ideologue. He has systematically weakened our defense posture, super-charged the debt credit card, and adopted identitarian politics to an almost absurd level.
This abandonment of basic centrist principles was institutionalised under Barack Obama. The former president, unlike Biden, could express himself with great eloquence and, with great care, shifted the party away from the centrist Clinton model to one more in line with the activist base. By the time he left office these policies generated enough resentment among the working class to help elect Donald Trump in 2016.
Read the rest of this piece at Telegraph.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Joe Lieberman speaks at NL New Hampshire Governor's Forum via, Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.
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