Joe Lieberman on Biden, Trump and centrism: ‘It’s a strategy for

A friend once joked to Joe Lieberman, former senator and vice-presidential nominee, that the Democratic party was like his appendix: it was there but not doing much for him.

“It’s a funny line,” he says by phone from his law office in New York, “but the truth is that it’s more than that because I feel good physically when the Democrats do well – in my terms – and I do get pain when they go off and do things that I don’t agree with.”

Lieberman may be in for a world of pain now. The other Joe – also 79, also a Democratic ex-senator – was expected to share his centrist convictions as US president. Instead Joe Biden as president has surprised friends and foes alike with the scale, scope and audacity of his multi-trillion-dollar agenda.

The Democratic party itself has moved left over the past decade, making it an increasingly awkward fit for Lieberman, who voted for George W Bush’s Iraq war, endorsed Republican John McCain over Barack Obama for president and is still close friends with South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, the quintessential Republican apologist for Donald Trump.

So it was that in a recent appearance on C-Span to promote his new book, The Centrist Solution, Lieberman was assailed by a caller from Oregon over his “archaic” views and policies that “have done nothing for the poor and the working class”. Another, from Connecticut, upbraided him for the prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the deregulation of Wall Street and a crime bill that “put so many Black and Brown people in this country in jail”.

Yet he remains unbowed and undeterred by political currents. Lieberman, co-chair of No Labels, a group focused on bipartisanship, continues to preach a deeply unfashionable gospel of compromise working across the aisle in a country that seems paralysed by a cold civil war.

When he joined the Senate in 1989, he recalls, a typical vote would see around 40 conservatives on one side, 40 liberal on the other, and 20 that were an unpredictable mix. By the time he left in 2013, there was no Democrat with a more conservative voting record than any Republican, and no Republican with a more liberal voting record than any Democrat.

He attributes the polarisation to the gerrymandering of congressional districts, which makes incumbents risk averse, the increasing influence of money in politics – “they expect you to do ideologically what they want you to do” – and the partisanship of both cable news and social media, which encourages politicians to play to their echo chambers.

Lieberman recounts from his Senate experience: “We would want to be able to go home at election time and say, ‘My friends, here’s what I got done for us’. But now people tend to want to go home and say, ‘Oh, here’s what I tried to do except for those bastards in the other party’. That’s a really vicious cycle that takes the country…