Blogging about the DC Dems relationship to the Connecticut Senatorial primary fight, Jane Hamsher over at Firedoglake recalls an exchange she had at yKos with Senate Minority Leader Reid:
I told him we weren’t unsympathetic to his situation — we weren’t the Club for Growth going after Lincoln Chafee. I might not like Ben Nelson’s politics but we mostly leave him alone for a reason, taking him down would assuredly deliver the seat to a Republican.
When I read a passage like this, I immediately think, why aren’t you a Club for Growth of the left? And if you aren’t prepared to join one, why haven’t others put one together?
As y’all probably know, I’m a Green. And being a Green is, in some important senses, a pretty hopeless position to be in. Our national party often seems directionless. We have some terrific state parties. But in my state of Oklahoma, ballot access laws make it very difficult for us to get anywhere.
But, for better or for worse, my reasons for joining the Greens in the 1990s remain true today: the Democratic Party seems settled into a center-right position on issue after issues, and progressive Democrats (let alone so-called progressive Democrats) seem ok about that. Since I cannot imagine the Democratic Party doing the right thing on countless important issues (healtcare, law and order, war and peace, and so forth), and since there seems to be no pressure on it to change, even from those who might want it to, the enormous longshot that is third party politics still seems a better bet that going back to Tweedle-Dee ’cause they’re better than Tweedle-Dum.
Which brings me back to the subject of this diary. Why not a Club for Growth of the Left? Although movement conservatives has long worked within the Republican Party, they have also been more independent from that party than, say, the left of the blogosphere is from the Democratic Party. Back when there used to be actual moderate and liberal Republicans, the right frequently targetted them. Liberal Republican Senator Charles Percy from Illinois was defeated by Paul Simon (of the bowtie) in 1984 in part because conservative California entrepreneur Michael Goland spent a then record $1.1 million to defeat Percy. And Joe Lieberman himself defeated incumbent liberal Republican Lowell Weicker in 1988 with help from a political action committee founded by William F. Buckley. And make no mistake about it, Percy and Weicker’s crimes were not the lack of party loyalty, but their positions on the issues.
The Club for Growth thus is part of an old tradition of conservative activism within the Republican Party. And though they’ve often failed in their primary battles against moderate GOPers like Specter and Chafee, have they paid any price for their failures? I’d say even when they fail to win elections they’ve managed to reign in whatever indepedence such “moderate” Senators ever had.
But on the left the opposite is the case. While Republicans proclaim Reagan’s famous 11th Commandment (“Thou shall not speak ill of your fellow Republican”), they honor it in the breach. It was Reagan himself who mounted a primary challenge to a sitting Republican president in 1976, of course. Meanwhile, the so-called left of the blogosphere is slavishly attached to the Democrats. Sure the netroots gripe a lot. But at the end of the day, Lieberman is singled out as the only Democrat in the House or the Senate who deserves a primary challenge…and his sins are carefully described as questions of partisanship, not policy or ideology.
Moreover, the Democratic netroots are proud of this attachment to their party. Chris Bowers’ and Matt Stoller’s extremely thorough 2005 report on the left of the blogosphere, The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere, lists the lefts greater partisan attachment as one of its chief advantages over the right of the blogosphere, which they correctly note is less institutionally attached to the GOP. I couldn’t disagree more.
(Interestingly, when I tried to disagree over on dKos at the time the report came out I was yelled at for not appreciating all the fine work that Bowers and Stoller had put into the report. On the contrary, I appreciate their work tremendously. I think they have the facts entirely correct on this issue. I just disagree with their conclusions.)
So I guess, I’m left with the question with which I started: why are progressive bloggers so scared of working against conservative Democrats? Why do they trust a party that lets them down over and over again more than conservatives trust a party that, comparatively speaking, delivers the goods?
