MB Civic

By SAM TANENHAUS

JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN’S DEFEAT in the Senate Democratic primary in Connecticut is a reminder that intramural contests are often the most bruising in our two-party system, and can leave the party involved vulnerable to attacks from the opposition.

Indeed, those who feared that Senator Lieberman’s defeat would be exploited by Republicans eager to portray his opponent, Ned Lamont, as a stand-in for an entire party “soft” on terrorism, were vindicated, almost instantly, in the days following the vote.

More tellingly, the campaign offers an intriguing twist in the history of insurgency that has shaped the identities of both parties over the last several decades. Some commentators have portrayed the bloggers who led the charge against Senator Lieberman as the ideological descendants of the left-wing Democrats who nearly brought the party to its knees in the 1960’s and 70’s. But in strategic terms they resemble more closely the “movement conservatives” who transformed the Republican Party from 1955 to 1980, when it rose to dominate American politics.

Like the current Democratic insurgency, the conservative movement was driven by activists who combined journalism with partisanship. Just as today’s insurgents often post their analyses and self-described “rants” on Web sites like Daily Kos, so the conservative rebels of an earlier day poured forth their opinions in the National Review, the biweekly magazine founded in 1955 by the 29-year-old William F. Buckley Jr.

Today, of course, National Review is widely read as a journal of the Republican establishment. But in its infancy it was regarded as extreme — far more radical than the bloggers most influential in the Lieberman defeat. (This wasn’t surprising since Mr. Buckley and another editor, L. Brent Bozell, were co-authors of a book that championed Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the pair had orchestrated a hard-hitting advertising campaign in, as it happened, Connecticut against the Democratic senator, William Benton, whom the pair accused of obstructing the government’s investigation of Communists.)

But National Review’s biggest targets were the moderates in their party, in this case East Coast Republicans who had tapped the non-ideological war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, for the Republican nomination in 1952 over the conservative Senator Robert Taft.

Once in office, Eisenhower declined to roll back Communism abroad and the welfare state at home. To conservatives, this was a “me-too” echo of his Democratic predecessors. In fact, when recruiting backers for the magazine, Mr. Buckley vowed “to read Dwight Eisenhower out of the conservative movement.”

The magazine’s message resonated with at least two readers, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, who sprang to prominence as tribunes of a broader heartland rebellion against the party’s eastern wing. The new right also attracted a new generation of conservatives who joined campus chapters of the Young Americans for Freedom and campaigned ardently for Goldwater when he ran for president in 1964. Even as mainstream Republicans inveighed against the damage these activists might inflict, the new breed became a force in party politics, seizing control, for example, of the California Republican Assembly, which helped choose candidates for statewide elections.

When Richard Nixon, denounced his party’s fringe elements during his bid to be elected governor of California in 1962, he lost the race. He did penance by stumping for Goldwater in 1964 and was rewarded with the presidential nomination in 1968.

The more ideological Ronald Reagan avoided Nixon’s mistake, positioning himself as an insurgent in both his early political career in the 1960’s (going so far as to endorse a representative who was member of the far-right John Birch Society) and in 1976 when he challenged the incumbent, Gerald R. Ford, for the Republican nomination, and nearly unseated him. Eventually, Reagan moved toward the center and governed pragmatically, but he continued to heed the conservatives and consistently courted them while in office.

The contrast with what is happening today in the Democratic Party are instructive. The challenge now comes from an insurgency in the Lamont campaign that is in no way as ideological as the new right was in its heyday.

And yet Democrats seem anxious. Why? Probably because they face a more complicated reality. The party is divided over the Iraq war and this inevitably stirs memories of a time when antiwar insurgents backed the candidacies of Senator Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972.

Moreover, those rebellions coincided — and were blurred in the public mind — with militant left-wing protests, occurring on campuses and in some cities. When demonstrators clashed with Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the party seemed on the brink of anarchy.

The memory of those years seems to haunt today’s Democrats, who fear that uprisings like the one in Connecticut leave the party open to charges, already voiced by Vice President Dick Cheney, that its opposition to the Iraq war means it is soft on terrorism and “anti-American.”

But the post-9/11 world may defy such easy formulations. Many Americans have qualms about Iraq. This does not make them hardened ideologues. So, too, with the today’s liberal insurgents, who in most cases equally reject the neo-conservative vision of the Bush administration and the worldviews of 60’s radicals. Most identify instead with the Democratic Party and accept its traditional values of activist government and strong international alliances.

Mr. Lamont, a multimillionaire businessman from Greenwich, is by no means a radical. Neither is an insurgent blogger like Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the founder of Daily Kos. In “Crashing the Gate,” the book he wrote with Jerome Armstrong, Mr. Zúniga says his goal is to advance the cause of the Democratic Party and “rebuild our institutions of power.” Few Democrats differ with him. What does set the insurgents apart is their belief in partisanship. This is the basis of their attack on Senator Lieberman, who, in their view, has failed to be a team player as evidenced by his long history of siding with Republicans and his persistent defense of President Bush.

To borrow a term once used by the new right, Senator Lieberman’s opponents see him as a “me-too” Democrat all too eager to align himself with the opposition party, whereas Mr. Lamont offers “a choice not an echo,” as Goldwaterites often said during the 1964 campaign.

Before the Connecticut primary, the insurgents had achieved no significant victories. But like the conservative activists of an earlier time, today’s liberal insurgents seem undeterred by setbacks. After Goldwater’s devastating loss in 1964 to President Johnson, movement conservatives instantly regrouped, forming new organizations (like the American Conservative Union) and rallying around a new leader, Reagan, who attained national prominence when he delivered an eloquent televised speech in the waning days of the Goldwater campaign, and then made a successful run for the California governorship in 1966.

The new wave of activist liberals have also tasted defeat. Many were active in the insurgent presidential bid of Howard Dean in 2004. Like the Goldwater crusade in 1964, this failed campaign seemed to create a legacy. Mr. Dean’s ingenious use of the Web, for instance, resurfaced in the Internet-driven campaign that defeated Senator Lieberman. The advocacy group Democracy for America, which helped drive the Lamont campaign, is the latest incarnation of the organization that had brought millions into Mr. Dean’s candidacy.

All this has gone forward with little help from the Democratic establishment, which for years has played down ideology in its mission to recapture the elusive center of American politics. The party’s reigning figure is Bill Clinton, whose genius for splitting the differences between left and right, has proved so fleeting a philosophy that few other politicians have been able to duplicate it.

Meanwhile, Republicans continue to draw inspiration from Goldwater and Reagan, with their boldly stated views and unclouded vision. A similar clarity informs the new liberal insurgents, who seem to understand, as demonstrated in the Connecticut primary, that insurgency begins at home.