Barone on the Democrats

You can read too much into a single election. But you can read too little too.

Michael Barone reckons that the primary election that Joe Lieberman lost last week pretty well tells us where the Democratic Party in in 2006.

In Stamford, where Joe Lieberman grew up the son of a liquor-store owner, and where there are still sizeable blue-collar and black communities, Mr. Lieberman won with 55% of the vote. In next-door Greenwich, where Ned Lamont... grew up as the scion of an investment banker family, and where the housing values are now among the highest in the nation, Mr. Lamont won with 68% of the vote.

The Democratic Party is still the party of working-class America, but only just. It is therefore a party split down the middle, between voters who vote their interest as recipients of government programs and between “professional class Democrats” who vote

their ideology and, living a life in which they are insulated from adversity, feel free to imagine that America cannot be threatened by implacable enemies. They can vote to validate their lifestyle choices and their transnational attitudes.

That is the big split across America. Should we work to build a transnational world, as professional-class Democrats want, or should we keep the nation state model.

This is an important question. We know how the nation state works, with a balance of power between political power, economic power, and cultural power.

But what is the transnational model all about? It seems suspiciously feudal and oppressive in nature. The progressive class gets to decide everything and ordinary mortals had better fall into line or face the consequences.

Or am I missing something?