Ned Lamont’s victory over Joseph Lieberman in the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut has shaken U.S. politics, reflecting the massive anger at the war in Iraq and the Bush administration as well as the frustration at the Democratic Party leadership’s feeble resistance to Bush.

As the British Guardian put it, “What this race has really exposed is not a rift between [Lieberman] and the Democratic establishment … but between the establishment and both its base and the nation at large.”

Lieberman, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 2000, became only the fourth incumbent Senator to lose his party’s nomination since 1980 (Democracy Now!, 8/9/06). He was defeated by Lamont, a political unknown whose criticisms of the war in Iraq tapped into the vast anger at the war.

Sixty percent of Americans now oppose the war (CNN poll, 8/2-8/3/06). Among rank-and-file Democrats, opposition is even higher, with 80% opposed to the war and 75% supporting the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq immediately or within a year (Quinnipiac poll, 6/20/06). Still, not a single Senate Democrat supports an immediate withdrawal.

But it was not just the war that Connecticut voters were voting against; it was also Lieberman’s right-wing record. Lieberman has been a major supporter of free trade pacts like NAFTA and CAFTA, and opposed a filibuster against extreme conservative Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court despite Alito’s record of trying to restrict abortion rights, civil liberties, environmental protections, and workers’ rights.

Lieberman is a major symbol of the “Bush-lite” politics advocated by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the corporate-backed organization that argues that Democrats must embrace an even more hawkish, pro-big business agenda to win elections, and that has produced numerous prominent Democrats, from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Al Gore and John Kerry.

Lamont’s victory is a confirmation of how out of touch the Democratic Party leadership is. The fact is that a majority of Americans oppose the Bush agenda and the war and would respond favorably to a serious opposition to these policies.

Yet it is no accident that the Democratic Party has failed to strongly oppose Bush. While the party relies on working people and social movements for electoral support, it is funded by and beholden to corporate interests and dominated by a rich elite.

“In his three terms as senator, Lieberman never deviated from servility to Connecticut’s arms and pharmaceutical manufacturers, insurance companies, and financial sector overall. He did the heavy lifting on the Bankruptcy bill so eagerly sought by the banks and credit card companies.” (Counterpunch, 8/9/06)

Can the Democratic Party be Transformed?
Lamont’s win is being hailed as a victory for antiwar activists and progressives in what The Nation referred to as the “battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.” Some on the left argue that it shows that the Democratic Party can pursue a progressive agenda, and that activists should direct their energy this fall toward getting progressive Democrats elected and working to transform the Party by building a left wing within the Democrats to challenge the DLC.

However, any sober assessment of the situation reveals that this is simply not a viable strategy. First, Lamont is far from the radical challenger he is made out to be. He is a telecommunications executive from one of the richest families in the country. His great-grandfather was the partner of J.P. Morgan. He and his wife, a venture capitalist, along with their children are worth between $90 and $332 million (Hartford Courant, 8/3/06).

Lamont’s personal fortune was a crucial asset in his primary campaign. While he began the race as a political unknown, he was able to run ads and gain more access to the media by spending $4 million of his own money (Wall Street Journal, 8/15/06).

Although he is portrayed as a progressive, Lamont actually shares the pro-big business politics of the Democratic Party leadership on most issues. In a Wall Street Journal editorial titled “The Democrats Mean Business,” he reassured Wall Street that he was a friend of Corporate America and proclaimed himself a “fiscal conservative.” (8/16/06)

Even on Iraq, while Lamont stood out for his criticism of the war, he is opposed to it not on principle but because he sees it as weakening the interests of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Like the rest of the Democrats, Lamont supported Israel’s assault on Lebanon, and he continues to support the war in Afghanistan.

If Lamont was really consistent in his opposition to the war in Iraq, he would use his campaign to mobilize for mass demonstrations against the war, oppose Hillary Clinton and other pro-war Democrats running for Congress, and support antiwar candidates like Jonathan Tasini, who is challenging Clinton in the primary in New York. But Lamont has shown no indication that he is prepared to take such a stand.

Lessons from the 2004 Elections
In fact, the experience of the 2004 elections shows that even Democrats with stronger left-wing credentials than Lamont will rally behind the pro-war, pro-corporate party leadership. During the Democratic presidential primaries in 2004, Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich both sharply criticized the war in Iraq and the corporate domination of U.S. politics. But when their campaigns were undemocratically crushed by the big business interests that control the Democratic Party, they steered their supporters behind John Kerry, despite his support for the war and his pro-corporate policies, rather than breaking with the Democrats and running independently or supporting Ralph Nader’s antiwar, anti-corporate campaign.

The support for Kerry by the main leaders of the antiwar movement led to a demobilization of the movement and a fall-off in mass protests at a critical time, when opposition to the war was growing owing to the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib. Instead of boldly mobilizing and putting forward a clear antiwar stance, which could have qualitatively strengthened the movement, movement leaders pursued a policy of limiting their public criticisms and mobilizations against the war in order not to embarrass Kerry.

A clear antiwar candidate for president could have also used the election as a platform to reach wide layers of people and popularize the antiwar case. However, the Democratic Party and unfortunately even some leaders in the antiwar movement who supported Kerry did their best to stop Nader’s antiwar campaign from being heard by the American people by campaigning to shut him out of the debates and to exclude him from the ballot in various states.

This experience of the 2004 elections shows that the Democratic Party is a total dead end for the antiwar movement and working people. Left-wing campaigns like Kucinich’s draw activists into the Democrats (and off of the streets), but are totally incapable of changing the Democratic Party. They only serve to create illusions that the Democrats can be a “party of the people,” while in practice the party continues to carry out policies in the interests of big business and the rich.

History has shown again and again that the only way to defeat corporate attacks and make progressive change is not by supporting Democrats, but by building mass movements from below that can mount real pressure on the ruling class. The civil rights movement, when African-Americans refused to wait for desegregation to be legislated and instead built a powerful movement of sit-ins, boycotts, marches, and mass demonstrations to achieve it, is an important example.

But the very role the Democratic Party plays for its ruling class masters is precisely to co-opt, demobilize, and destroy mass movements. It has without fail sought to divert mass anger into safe channels. A consistent fight against Corporate America and its wars is not possible within the framework of the big business-dominated Democratic Party; it can only be organized independently of the two-party system.

Break With the Two Parties of War and Big Business
There is growing support for an alternative to the pro-corporate politics of the Democrats and Republicans. A record number of voters (25%) today are registered as independents (Washington Post, 6/27/04). Ralph Nader won three million votes running for President in 2000, the highest vote for an independent left-wing candidate in over 50 years. In 2004, Nader was polling as high as 7% in the run-up to the elections.

This was despite the vicious, undemocratic campaign waged by the Democratic Party to make sure that Nader’s antiwar, anti-corporate message was shut out of the corporate media and excluded from the presidential debates. It is extremely ironic that Joseph Lieberman, who as the Democratic candidate for vice president in 2000 constantly attacked the Nader campaign with the mantra “A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush,” is now himself running independently (not to mention that he is a major supporter of Bush’s war and many of Bush’s policies!).

Millions of Americans are disgusted by the lies of Republican and Democratic politicians. Nearly half of Americans do not even bother to vote. An independent, antiwar, pro-worker alternative could get a major hearing in U.S. society among the millions disenchanted with the two-party system and looking for an alternative.

For instance, what if Cindy Sheehan, the most high-profile figure in the antiwar movement, had run a serious independent, antiwar campaign in California against pro-war Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, as had been widely rumored? Such a campaign would have drawn national attention and could have exposed the Democrats’ pro-war politics, including their support for Israel’s assault on Lebanon. Sheehan could have reached millions with the argument that the only way to end the war is to build a mass movement, rather than relying on the false promises of Democratic and Republican politicians who say one thing during election season and do the opposite the rest of the time.

By denouncing the Democrats’ pro-corporate policies and raising other working-class issues like healthcare, living wages, and opposition to corporate globalization, the campaign could have earned the support of workers in California and across the country. This would have had an important impact of strengthening the understanding of the need to build a new political party to challenge the twin parties of Corporate America.

Such a new party would need to be fundamentally different from the Democrats and Republicans. It would need to base itself on the interests of the working class and the oppressed, and be democratically run by its members rather than controlled by the rich.

It would accept no corporate money, but could be built through the donations and sacrifice of ordinary people as well as the massive resources of the labor movement (which is spending $40 million and mobilizing 40,000 volunteers this fall to get Democrats elected). It would not just be another electoral machine, but would lead community campaigns for living wages, affordable housing, and against police brutality, as well as mobilizing against war and racism.

The failure of the Democrats to mount a serious opposition to the Bush agenda, despite the massive anger in U.S. society, further shows that the building of such a party is long overdue. It is the task of all those who recognize this to utilize the heightened political discussion and debate created by the 2006 elections to help prepare the ground for this much-needed development.

Antiwar challenge to Hillary Clinton in New York

In New York State, Jonathan Tasini is also running on an antiwar platform, challenging Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Senate primary. Tasini’s platform is considerably more left-wing than Lamont’s, as he calls for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, opposes Israel’s war on Lebanon, and supports universal, single-payer healthcare.

However, Tasini lacks Lamont’s personal fortune. Thus far, his campaign has raised $200,000 from grassroots supporters, while Clinton (whose politics are very similar to Lieberman’s) has raised $44 million from the super-rich and her corporate backers (NY Times, 8/23/06).

Despite polling at 13%, Tasini is being excluded from the primary debates because he has not reached the $500,000 fundraising threshold necessary for inclusion – a number that was arbitrarily set by corporate media giant Time Warner, a major contributor to Clinton’s campaign. This policy clearly favors the candidates of the rich over grassroots candidates like Tasini, and allows politicians like Clinton to hide their pro-war, pro-corporate views from the public.

This is important, since only 9% of New York Democrats said they would vote for a pro-war candidate while 64% said they would vote for an antiwar candidate (AP, 8/25/06). Here is yet another example of the extremely undemocratic policies of the Democratic Party, which are meant to assure that only candidates who are safe from the perspective of big business get elected. Meanwhile, although Clinton continues to support the war in Iraq, she is the frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Because of these undemocratic hurdles, a natural part of a corporate-dominated party like the Democrats, it is clear Tasini will lose the primary. If he is serious about his opposition to the war and to the corporate politics of the Democratic Party, he should break with the Democrats and run as an independent in the general election rather than accept the results of the totally undemocratic Democratic primary.

This would help provide the maximum left-wing voice in the general election to reach the people of New York State with an antiwar and pro-worker alternative to Clinton. To refuse to run in the general election is to censor that alternative at the time when it could reach a far wider audience. If Lieberman is willing to defy the results of his primary and run as an independent, why shouldn’t Tasini?

However, since Tasini has made clear that he will not run as an independent, Socialist Alternative is supporting the campaign of Howie Hawkins of the Green Party. Hawkins is a rank-and-file union activist who is running on a platform of ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ending U.S. military funding of Israel, ending the war on drugs, universal healthcare, and living-wage jobs for all. Supporting his campaign in NY is the best way to strike a blow against Clinton and the two parties of war and big business, and to register support for a left-wing alternative.