Why the `Third Way' Is Winning
By Tod Lindberg
Another conservative government bites the dust, this time in Israel, shellacked at the polls by yet another politician presenting himself as a different kind of center-left party leader. Ehud Barak now joins Bill Clinton, Tony Blair of Britain, Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, Wim Kok of the Netherlands, Massimo d'Alema of Italy and others in the elite cadre of "Third Way" political winners. World-wide, conservative parties have lost their former knack for winning elections, and they seem especially tongue-tied and cross-footed when confronted with one of these Third Way political animals.
To be sure, the local circumstances of electoral success are very different in all these cases. Israelis are in the middle of life-and-death negotiations with the Palestinians. Chancellor Helmut Kohl had led Germany for 16 years, which is arguably long enough for anyone. John Major was no Margaret Thatcher. Bill Clinton is a political force of nature.
And of course the specifics of Third Wayism vary drastically from country to country. Mr. d'Alema is in no danger of boasting Clinton-style about a budget surplus any time soon. Nor will Mr. Schroeder be in a position to crow as Mr. Clinton has about low unemployment, given the chancellor's unwillingness to address the rigidity of the German labor market. Mr. Kok's environmentalism makes Al Gore look a rather pale green by comparison. In short, the Third Way as practiced in one country might seem left-wing in another and harshly conservative in a third.
It is also true that the idea of a "third way" in politics is nothing new. Earlier in this century, blood-and-soil types seized the term as a label for their fascist alternative to communism and capitalism. As recently as the 1970s, the Third Way was the term for the Swedish model -- unreconstructed socialism of a kind that would make Tony Blair blush pink today. Even now, a certain plasticity to the term is inevitable, given that the precise political location of the Third Way depends on where the first two ways are. Mr. Clinton campaigned in 1992 as a centrist "New Democrat." Most would say he moved left once he took office. Yet to this day, he himself considers Hillary Clinton's 1993 proposal for a vast new health-care bureaucracy a Third Way approach, because it rejected that socialist favorite, a single-payer system.
Much of the Third Way is clear only to the eyes of its promoters. Yet by now it is ridiculous to maintain that nothing of transnational consequence is going on. And those who are consistently getting beaten by candidates acting in the name of the Third Way probably ought to take it seriously.
The chief theorists of the Third Way in the U.S. are the folks at the Progressive Policy Institute and the Democratic Leadership Council, with which Mr. Clinton has a long association. At an April conference that featured Messrs. Clinton, Blair, Schroeder, Kok and d'Alema, DLC President Al From characterized their common Third Way point of view: "Its first principle and enduring purpose is equal opportunity for all, special privilege for none. Its public ethic is mutual responsibility. Its core value is community. Its outlook is global, and its modern means are fostering private-sector economic growth -- today's prerequisite for opportunity for all -- and promoting and empowering government that equips citizens with the tools they need to get ahead."
Mr. Clinton, kicking off the panel, voiced the view that it was no "blind coincidence" that politicians like him were winning. It was a product of popular dissatisfaction with older, liberal "social arrangements," coupled with public realization that the parties of the right had no solutions of their own. Mr. Clinton went on to organize the discussion around three questions that form, for better or worse, the touchstones of the Third Way: "How do you make the most of the economic possibilities of the global information economy and still preserve the social contract?" "What is the nature of the social contract now, and how is it different from what it used to be?" "What do we mean by the concept of `community'?"
This may sound rather gaseous, and indeed it may be rather gaseous. But it is also the language of people who take seriously not just the getting and keeping of political power, but also the art and craft of governance. In fact, Third Way adherents believe that taking governance seriously, in the modern democratic context, is what will enable them to obtain and keep power. They view their conservative opposition as fundamentally antigovernment, and they think that their program for a government that "works" for people will have a better claim on the electorate's affections than a conservative claim based on a critique of "big government."
The main lines of the conservative response to the Third Way have been as unserious as they have been ineffectual. The first criticism is that Democrats, Social Democrats and other sundry Third Way pilgrims have merely appropriated popular conservative ideas as their own in order to get credit for them with voters. A second and potentially contradictory proposition is that today's so-called center-left is flying a false flag and remains at heart no different from the adherents of old-school liberalism. The Third Way is in this sense merely an electoral strategy for obtaining power by deceiving the electorate about one's true intentions.
The synthesis of these two lines of attack boils down to this: They are who they are, and while they may make tactical concessions to political reality, they will never change. So you run television ads accusing them of being "liberal," "too liberal," even "embarrassingly liberal." Unfortunately for the conservative parties, this approach does not seem to have that old black magic it did back when Michael Dukakis was running for president.
The fact is that the political concessions (if that's what they are) of Third Way governance have the effect of altering political reality. Democrats in the U.S. are no longer offering proposals for nationalizing health care or radically expanding government. Labor in Britain is not using its huge parliamentary majority to nationalize heavy industry. Everybody loves the bond market and long-term price stability. A former socialist finance minister, Wim Duisenberg, is now the hard-headed chief of the European Central Bank. We are none of us Keynesians now. At a minimum, the political territory Mr. Clinton et al. have led us into is not the left, traditionally construed, but the land to the right of the left.
This movement on the part of the world's center-left parties is the most important political development of the decade. They have decided to bury large enough swaths of their old ideology to obtain power and govern. It is true that they have been aided in this by the success of their predecessors' conservative policies in unleashing private-sector economic growth. It is also true that they benefit from the collective outbreak of global wisdom on such matters as fiscal policy. And the end of the Soviet Union has mooted questions about whether they are fit to fight the Cold War. Most of all, these government have not been tested by a major international crisis or even, in the case of the U.S., so much as a mild recession.
Maybe there are tasks the Third Way isn't up to accomplishing. Kosovo, the first Third Way war, is not exactly reassuring. Yet it is surely bad form for conservative parties to hope for worsening conditions, say recession and battlefield defeat, so that their opponents can be seen as faltering. It is also a product of desperation, the inability of conservative parties to engage the Third Way politicians seriously, at least so far.
The truth is that Third Way politicians are perfectly happy to have cast conservatives as an anti-government menace whose message for people who fall down is "Get up." The conservatives are even useful, in their way: Their political salience makes it possible (in fact, necessary) for Third Way politicians to shackle their taste for activist government to market principles, thus reinvigorating governments ossified by old-style liberalism.
If conservatives don't like the role Third Way politicians have assigned them, they are going to have to articulate a different one. It's probably going to have to include a sense of what government is for, a question to which conservative parties don't really have an answer now. The Third Way politicians do, and that's why they're winning.
Todd Lindberg is editor of Policy Review.