It's Not the Lefties' 1980

EJ Dionne compares the primary fight facing Joe Lieberman to the purge of liberals from the Republican Party back around 1980.

There's an important difference that Dionne ignores, however, when he writes:

But Lieberman's troubles are, even more, about a new aggressiveness in the Democratic Party called forth by disgust with the Bush presidency -- an energy comparable to the vigor that a loathing for liberalism brought to the Republican right in the 1970s and '80s.

Get it? The parallelism isn't quite right. Republicans reacted to "liberalism" . . . Democrats are reacting to the "Bush presidency" -- which is a polite way of saying to the President.

That's the difference. Republicans in 1980 were reacting to an ideology -- liberalism -- and seeking to replace it with conservatism. Democrats today aren't reacting to an ideology; they're motivated almost completely by personal hatred of George W. Bush, and offering precious little by way of policy alternatives.

That's why, although Bush hatred may yield short-term political dividends for lefties, what's happening now can't really be compared to what happened at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution.