Death of a renegade

It hasn’t got much attention in the Australian media, so it’s worth taking a moment to note the passing of Joe Lieberman, former vice-presidential candidate and four-term senator for Connecticut, who died last week at the age of 82.

Lieberman had a long political career – he had already spent a decade in the Connecticut state legislature and another six years as the state’s attorney general when he was first elected to the Senate, as a Democrat, in 1988. He won the seat narrowly in an upset, defeating three-term incumbent Lowell Weicker, a liberal Republican who had alienated his party’s conservatives.

Lieberman was re-elected in a landslide in 1994, and in his first two terms made a name for himself as a leading light of his party’s right wing. In 2000, when then-vice-president Al Gore won the Democrat nomination to succeed Bill Clinton as president, he chose Lieberman as his running mate, making him the first Jewish candidate on a major party presidential ticket.

With hindsight, it was not a good choice. The two candidates were too different to look effective as a team, but not different enough for Lieberman to bring in a substantial extra base of support. His conservatism helped to reinforce the messages of their Republican opponent, George W Bush, and he seconded Gore’s decision to distance himself from Clinton, which cost them dearly. They won the election, but it was so close – down to a handful of votes in Florida – that the Supreme Court was able to award Bush the presidency.

So Lieberman stayed in the Senate, and soon alienated his party by his strong support of Bush’s foreign policy, especially the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He briefly sought the Democrat presidential nomination in 2004, but withdrew after failing to make an impact in the early primaries. In 2006 he ran for a fourth term in the Senate, but Democrat voters had lost patience and he was defeated in the primary by an anti-war candidate, Ned Lamont.

Lieberman proceeded to turn his back on the party and run as an independent. He got the best of both worlds: some Democrats continued to support him, and the party leadership agreed that he would maintain his seniority if he won, while the Republicans ran dead and conservatives endorsed Lieberman (although his old foe Weicker supported Lamont). He duly beat Lamont in the general election, 49.7% to 39.7%.

That was Lieberman’s last term; he continued to caucus with the Democrats, and continued to antagonise them as well. In 2008 he endorsed Republican John McCain for the presidency, and in 2012 he stayed neutral as between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. But Donald Trump was a bridge too far, even for him: he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, although more recently he has led the effort to find an alternative third-party candidate for this year.

Lieberman was beloved by much of the Washington pundit class, who called him a “centrist” and praised his willingness to cross party boundaries and pursue consensus. But in an environment in which one party has taken leave of its collective senses, to proceed as if everything was normal and maintain a narrative of “faults on both sides” is to betray democracy.

By now most people have forgotten (if they ever knew) the original meaning of “neoconservative”; it’s become just “conservative” with an intensifier. But Lieberman fits that original sense. He started out as a fairly typical American liberal, but his support for an imperialist and authoritarian foreign policy drove him steadily to the right.

Centrism and consensus are fine things, but war at all costs is not a “centrist” position, and a pro-war consensus has done far too much damage to both America and the world.