For US Democrats, the past six years have been a maddening time. They lost the presidency in 2000, despite winning a plurality of the popular vote. Then in 2002, George Bush gained seats in the Senate and House. By 2004, Democrats had come to hate George W. Bush more than they had hated any president since Richard Nixon--and he beat them again, this time more decisively than ever.

Resident Fellow David Frum

Since the election things have gone ill for the Bush administration: Hurricane Katrina, troubles in Iraq, the abortive Harriet Miers nomination. Now the administration has provoked a party mutiny over the president’s plan to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.

But the difficulties faced by the administration are mild compared to those the Democrats are inflicting on themselves. Empowered by the Internet, activist Democrats are pushing the party away from the election-winning center out to the unelectable fringes of American politics. Perhaps the most dramatic instance: the party rebellion against Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000.

Lieberman has served as Connecticut’s senator since 1988. Connecticut, the wealthiest state in the country, is an ideologically centrist place, and Lieberman tailored his politics to his place. He won re-election in 1994 by 67% of the vote. In 2000, Connecticut changed its law to allow him to run for senator and vice president at the same time: despite unhappiness in the state over the rule-bending, he nonetheless was re-elected with 63%.

Now it’s local Democrats who are unhappy. Lieberman voted in 2002 to authorize war in Iraq and continues to support the US military effort. Antiwar Democrats have organized a challenge to Lieberman in the state’s primary election on August 8.

The challenger, Ned Lamont, is often described as more “liberal” (in the American sense of the term) than Lieberman, but that is not exactly accurate. On the bread-and-butter issues that have traditionally defined liberalism--jobs, social benefits--Lieberman and Lamont take barely distinguishable positions, just very slightly to the left of center.

Where Lamont veers to Lieberman’s left is on the cultural, civil liberties, and foreign affairs issues that excite upmarket Democrats. Lamont favors immediate withdrawal from Iraq, curtailment of anti- terrorist surveillance, absolute support for abortion rights, stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage as a fundamental human liberty.

This is the liberalism of Hollywood and Harvard: rich people’s liberalism.

And why should this surprise? That is Lamont’s world. His great-grandfather, Thomas Lamont, was chairman of the Morgan bank, as was his grandfather, the second Thomas Lamont. (The undergraduate library at Harvard is named after his family.) Ned Lamont had a successful career of his own as well and now estimates his earned and inherited fortune as between $90 million and $300 million. Lieberman’s father, by contrast, was raised in an orphanage and drove a bakery truck, until he saved enough money to start his own small liquor store.

Over the past three decades, the two parties, Republican and Democrat, have traded voters. The white working class has ended up in the Republican party; the highly educated and the wealthy, with the Democrats. If Lamont were to win his race, he would become the fourth richest man in the US Senate--after Sen. John Kerry (D. Mass.), Sen.Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.), and Sen. Herbert Kohl (D. Wisc.), and just ahead of Sen. Diane Feinstein (D., Cal.). He would replace the previous fourth richest, Jon Corzine (D. N.J)

Lamont probably will lose to Lieberman. But the race has already sent a powerful message to Democrats (and voters) nationwide: The party of Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson offers less and less room to those who share those president’s centrist policies and humble biographies. If you want to understand why Democrats so often lose national elections--there’s the reason.

David Frum is a resident scholar at AEI.