Nonetheless, Newman's post speaks to the fundamental misunderstanding of today's politics in the Democratic Party, among progressive activists, pundits and the Media. Democratic politicians can read polls, progressive activists know the mechanics of defending their ideology in Congress, pundits can parrot the conventional wisdom of who's up and who's down (when's the last time you read a pundit, with exception of Paul Krugman and some others - Dionne, who actually provided an interesting analysis of politics? ) But they simply do not understand the primacy of partisanship in today's politics. And in my view, this misunderstanding is the biggest obstacle to Democratic electoral success, which means it is also the biggest obstacle to the liberal/progressive ideology.

A quick aside before discussing the real issues raised by Nathan and Ed. This discussion, taken up by Mark Schmitt in a brilliant piece, began with a piece by Scott Winship that was so wrong headed and ridiculously flawed, that the discussion has basically ignored the thesis of the piece.Sterling Newberry explains Winship's mistake:

The implicit assumption by Winship is that "moderates" are not ideological. This is incorrect, and it is observably incorrect. The people who Winship calls "moderate" are more ideological, not less, than the internet they oppose, and this can be seen by their actions.

By the way, there is nothing wrong with being ideological. What is wrong is not understanding that the only way to forward your ideology in today's political world is through partisanship. I'll explain why I think so on the flip.

Why Lieberman? In his piece Newman questions why the Left blogs describe their opposition to Lieberman as based primarily on partisanship, or rather Lieberman's lack of it, instead of Lieberman's stand on the issues:

[The] new Democratic partisanship of the liberal blog world is welcome. But as Ed [Kilgore] emphasizes (from the other side of the trench from those earlier internal battles) -- the Lamont-Lieberman fight is hardly unprecedented. Some in the blogs argue that the Lamont campaign is not about "ideology" (shudder at the thought) but about Lieberman being insufficiently partisan.

Yet why partisanship is needed is unclear unless you have a clear understanding of the values and ideology that define the differences of progressives from the rightwing. The activists who supported the Jackson and Paul Wellstone counter-establishment campaigns were clear about those ideological differences-- and were unashamed to stand up for those values. Of course, most in the blogs express progressive values much of the time, so it's just odd that they are so shy of admitting it matters in places like the Lamont race.

Progressives sometimes argue they are building an infrastructure to counter the rightwing, but it's worth remembering that the Right didn't build a strong Republican Party, then add a program to help it win elections. It was the other way around. Organizations with clear ideology built a range of organizations-- the Free Congress Foundation, Young Americans for Freedom, the Christian Coalition, the Federalist Society -- then used programs and ideas from those organizations to define what the modern GOP program would be. Folks like Newt Gingrich who engineered the GOP takeover of Congress in the early 1990s were partisans around ideas and ideology-- and unapologetic about it.

(Emphasis supplied.) It amazes me that Newman does not know why partisanship now. Why does the Left blogosphere insist the battle in Connecticut is one of partisanship more than ideology? For the simple fact that it is. To couch the anger at Lieberman as one of ideology principally is to not understand it. There are many Democratic Senators who are to the right of Lieberman ideologically. Ben Nelson of course, but also people like Kent Conrad and Bill Nelson. And what of Bob Casey, the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate? No, the principal objection to Joe Lieberman is based on partisanship, or to put it another way, a complete absence of party loyalty and discipline in Lieberman.

Of course Iraq is central to the Lieberman disloyalty to the Democratic Party. And not, as e would insist, his vote for war in 2002, though that rankled. 22 other current Senate Democrats and/or potential Presidential candidates, including Clinton, Feinstein, Edwards and Warner, either voted for the Iraq War resolution in 2002 or supported the war. It has been Lieberman's consistent and galling support for every Bush position on the war coupled with his prominent attacks on anyone who disagreed with him and Bush on the war. Lieberman has simply never really cared about the Democratic Party.

In his defense of Lieberman, Peter Beinart says as much. I won't get into Beinart's specifics as to whether what Lieberman did in the 90s was good or bad, but rather accept the point that Lieberman has never been a loyal, partisan Democrat. But Beinart does ask the essential question that does not even occur to Nathan Newman:

Does this matter? In a way, that's the question at the heart of Lieberman's reelection struggle. In the '90s, Lieberman proved a crucial check against his party's worst instincts. In the Bush era, by contrast, he has proved a poor check against the GOP's. While, in the Clinton era, he was often prophetic in recognizing the threat to liberal values posed by enemies overseas, in the Bush era he has been slow in recognizing the threat to liberal values posed by adversaries at home.
For Lieberman's activist opponents, his failure to challenge Republicans aggressively--especially on Iraq and torture--is all that matters. The idea that he might deserve reelection because in the past he usefully challenged Democrats seems downright perverse at a time when Democrats have no power. The best argument against Lieberman is that, by acting the same way in the radically conservative Bush era as he did in the moderately liberal Clinton one, his liberal iconoclasm has morphed from a strength into a weakness. The best argument for him is that, with Bush's power on the wane, and Democrats resurgent, that iconoclasm may soon become necessary again--to keep liberals from learning so much from Iraq that they forget Bosnia and from becoming so defined by their opposition to Bush's politics that they forget Clinton's.

(Emphasis supplied.) That's it in a nutshell isn't it? What may have worked in the 90s, and frankly, I think it did not in many key respects, is obviously not the solution after 12 years of Republican rule. Joe did not adapt. Joe will not adapt. Joe must go precisely because he will never ever be partisan. Joe is harmful to the Democratic Party.

Why? Because what has been most lacking in the Democratic Party is partisanship. How many "Dems in Disarray" articles by Adam Nagourney quoting Lieberman and Obama do you have to read before you understand that? And we need partisanship from Democrats because that is all the Republicans ever offer and all they ever do. When only one of two political parties is partisan, which one do you think will win elections?

And those progressive activists who focus only on issues an ideology need to ask themselves where on the ballot are voters voting for "issues" or ideology? No where directly. But one place indirectly - when they vote for D or the R. Elections in our country don't pick liberals or conservatives. Elections in our country choose Democrats or Republicans. For a particular ideology to triumph, it must triumph FIRST in either the Democratic or Republican Party. Bipartisanship in the sense of both parties agreeing on policies simply does not exist. Has it ever existed? I am no historian but I would say mostly no. The one prominent exception was the consensus Cold War foreign policy in the post World War II period until Vietnam shattered that consensus. And of course Vietnam, with the Civil Rights movement, were the two shattering events that relegated the Democratic Party to out status in terms of Presidential politics and in the Congress (once the last of the Yellow Dog Democrats of the South were coopted and defeated in 1994.) But the events themselves are not the whole story.

It's funny that both Newman and Kilgore focus on the war between the DLC and progress of the 80s and 90s in the Democratic Party. Because that was the period when Republicans continued their extreme partisanship and Democrats just about abandoned partisanship. Bill Clinton, the best politician of his generation, triumphed in a three way election in 1992 for many reasons. Some argue it was because he presented himself a New Democrat. The famous Third Way.

And the Republican? Did they embrace a bipartisan Third Way? Did they abandon partisanship in the face of Clinton's victory? I don't think so. The Republicans not only did not abandon partisanship, the took it to new extreme heights. The paranoid style, which became synonymous with the Republican Party from the 1960s till the present day, was unleashed in ways never before seen. And through it, the Republicans have been the majority party for 12 years.

The Partisan Republican Paranoid Style. In my piece What Obama Needs To Learn, I cite Digby's insights on tribalism politics:

Lincoln had a keen understanding of the problem and he logically framed it in moral terms regarding the subject at hand, slavery. As it turns out this was not simply about slavery. It was about a deep and abiding tribal divide in the country that was originally defined by slavery but metastasized into something far beyond it, even then. Southern 'exceptionalism' was always justified by its culture, which was assumed to be unique and unprecedented.

You can apply Lincoln's arguments to any number of current issues and come out the same. There is an incoherence of principle that we see in every section of the Republican party, the willingness to call to States Rights (their old rallying cry) when it suits them and a complete abdication of the principle once they hold federal power --- while still insisting that they believe in limited government! They blatantly misconstrue the plain meaning of long standing constitutional principles and federal policies (such as Brit Hume's abject intellectual whorishness in the matter of FDR's beliefs about social security privatization) and show irrational, rabid anger at any disagreement. They see Democrats as 'traitors' fighting for the other side, just as the Southerners of the 1850's accused the 'Black Republicans' of fomenting slave revolts. They brook no compromise and instead repay those who would reach out to them with furious perfidy unless they show absolute fealty to every facet of the program. It is loyalty to "the cause", however it is defined and however it changes in principle from day to day, that matters.

. . . The civil war and Jim Crow deepened it and the Lost Cause mythology romanticized it. The civil rights movement crystallized it. A two hundred year old resentment has created a permanent cultural divide.

Wherever resentment resides in the human character it can find a home in the Republican Party. This anger and frustration stems from a long nurtured sense of cultural besiegement, which they are finding can never be dealt with through the attainment of power alone. They seek approval. . . .

They seek approval. And it is here where Digby has aptly applied the lessons of Richard Hofstadter and where Senator Barack Obama has not. And it also holds the key to what Nathan Newman misunderstands.

The Paranoid Style is in ascendance in the United States. The Republican Party has so poisoned political discourse, it has so corrupted the Media, it has so bankrupted basic honesty (2+2 no longer equals 4, ask Paul Krugman), that the very idea of bipartisanship is a joke. In the political climate created by the Republican Party of Newt Gingrich in 1994, a political party that is not partisan is road kill.

But what connection does this need for partisanship have with ideology? As I quoted earlier, Nathan Newman wrote:

Yet why partisanship is needed is unclear unless you have a clear understanding of the values and ideology that define the differences of progressives from the rightwing. The activists who supported the Jackson and Paul Wellstone counter-establishment campaigns were clear about those ideological differences-- and were unashamed to stand up for those values. Of course, most in the blogs express progressive values much of the time, so it's just odd that they are so shy of admitting it matters in places like the Lamont race. Progressives sometimes argue they are building an infrastructure to counter the rightwing, but it's worth remembering that the Right didn't build a strong Republican Party, then add a program to help it win elections. It was the other way around. Organizations with clear ideology built a range of organizations-- the Free Congress Foundation, Young Americans for Freedom, the Christian Coalition, the Federalist Society -- then used programs and ideas from those organizations to define what the modern GOP program would be. Folks like Newt Gingrich who engineered the GOP takeover of Congress in the early 1990s were partisans around ideas and ideology-- and unapologetic about it.

And so they remain to this day. But Newman seems to not grasp the real point he is making. Ideology without partisanship in today's political world is, to be perfectly frank, a waste of time. Without a party to effectuate ideology, you have nothing. Newman then slips into quasi-Naderism, saying:

Mark Schmitt says hopefully that the blog world really represents the end of "checklist liberalism", implicitly a vision of a just world, which I think has truth but is encased in a movement that pretends to eschew ideology. But it's actually easier to hold such nascent ideology in opposition-- with any degree of power, the corporate "friends" of the Democrats will reappear quickly and try to drown that vision in a bathtub. So whether blogish unity around "strong partisanship" can survive victory seems uncertain.

In essence, Newman argues that Democrats in power are basically Republicans. I can not believe he really believes that. It is a sentiment expressed by Billmon and others and I find it so fundamentally stupid, so naïve, that I do not believe Nathan really believes it. As for whether blogish unity survives a Democratic victory, gosh I hope not. It's funny that Beinart presents that possibility is a rationale for not booting Lieberman and Newman suggest it is cause for worry. But it is Newman who is right. Governing always put great strains on ideology. Always has. Always will. This is neither new nor bad. But it begs the question - so what? And I ask what Newman's point is with this? Does Newman suggest we should avoid winning so we can remain united ideologically?

It is certainly true we can often best define ourselves by what we are not. The Era of Bush has demonstrated that in a manner seldom seen. But it is better to think of it this way -- it reminds of what we agree on and how important that agreement is to us. As compared to those thing that divide us. I doubt that any true Democrat is uncertain on the basic values that made s choose to be Democrats. It did not happen by chance. What did happen though was that Democrats allowed themselves to be defined by a hyper-partisan, paranoid Republican Party, ceding the partisan field to them. And this failure to remember the importance of Party loyalty and then the failure to respond to the paranoid Republican style led to our political descent.

And the pillars of that descent were the civil rights movement and Vietnam. But Democrats now have a chance to rewrite those chapters. And we must. But not by focusing on specific issue ideology and our disagreements, but by remembering AND reestablishing with the majority of Americans why we are Democrats and why they should be too.

And that require pride in who we are and loyalty to what we stand for. That is what partisanship means to me. It is lacking in Democrats. It is nonexistent in Joe Lieberman. It is why he must go - his lack of partisanship.