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The Third Way

Left parties are in trouble in the Anglosphere. Here in America, Democrats are doing worse in the polls than at any time in the last 50 years. In Britain, the Labor Party is on the brink of finishing third, behind both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, in the election next Thursday. All of which raises the […]

Left parties are in trouble in the Anglosphere. Here in America, Democrats are doing worse in the polls than at any time in the last 50 years. In Britain, the Labor Party is on the brink of finishing third, behind both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, in the election next Thursday.

All of which raises the question: What happened to the “third way” center-left movement that once seemed to sweep all before it? ~Michael Barone

Barone says it is “undeniable” that the Democrats today have pursued more “statist” policies than they did twelve years ago, but that is misleading. Twelve years ago, Clinton was in the final years of his second term using the Republican majority as a foil to help boost his own popularity during a period of economic expansion. Going back to 1998 allows Barone to talk about New Democrats and New Labour together, but it necessarily ignores how much more “centrist” this administration has been so far than the first two years of the Clinton administration, to the extent that we can compare the two. The health care legislation passed this year is considerably less statist than the 1993 plan, and it is partly this relatively watered-down quality that has generated so much dissatisfaction on the left. By this point in Clinton’s first term, income tax rates had already been raised. Until the 2001 tax cuts expire, income tax rates will remain lower under Obama than they were during Clinton’s tenure. If we judge by what has been signed into law, unified Democratic government in 2009-10 has been more “centrist” and more successful in passing major legislation than unified Democratic government in 1993-94.

It is also important to distinguish between the fates of Labour and the Democrats. New Labour has been in power uninterruptedly for thirteen years. The Democrats have only been in the majority in Congress for three years, and have had unified control of government for a little more than a year. Brown’s government is responsible or is being held solely responsible for Britain’s fiscal and financial woes, to which Brown contributed as Chancellor under Blair, and Labour cannot pin any of this on its political opponents. Labour could have called and then likely won a general election after Brown assumed the leadership in 2007. Had he done so then, Brown would not be in his current predicament. This is first and foremost evidence of the failure of Brown’s political leadership. What Barone cannot really show is that Labour is suffering politically today because of a lack of “third way” political positioning or a lack of “centrism.” Were Blair still leading his party into another general election this year, there could be no question that the electorate was rejecting a relatively “centrist” Labour government.

What Barone does not address is the depth of disgust in Britain with the political establishment as such and the extent of Labour’s perceived failure as a governing party. Ideology aside, the perception of gross incompetence on the part of a Prime Minister who was supposed to be a technocratic wizard has been killing Labour for years. The rise of the Liberal Democrats as anything like a serious contender in the election receives only passing mention, as if the Lib Dem surge has no meaning for understanding the political preferences of the British electorate.

What is remarkable in Barone’s argument is how he can casually refer to the rise of the left-liberal Liberal Democrats and their possible eclipsing of Labour as the second biggest vote-winners, and then nonetheless proceed with his argument that the “third way” still represents political salvation for parties of the left. In some respects, the Liberal Democrats are not as statist as Labour, especially when it concerns civil liberties, but on the whole they clearly identify and position themselves as more progressive and internationalist, which are hardly defining features of “third way” parties. If the British left were not divided into two right now, would anyone be talking about the possibility of a Cameron ministry beginning later this week? Does Barone really think that the British election is the best advertisement for third-way “centrism” when it will probably result in the humiliation of one of its flagship parties?

Economically populist Democratic candidates fared well in 2006, and even relatively socially conservative Democratic candidates in the South and Midwest campaigned on an agenda of economic populism, and that was before the financial crisis and the recession. One could argue that both parties have harmed themselves significantly to the extent that they pursued “third way” policies that identified them closely with financial interests and neoliberal trade dogma. At least in the U.S., it is the perception of closeness to Wall Street and the belief that the government is doing too much to help financial institutions that have been dragging the majority party down. Arguably one of the smartest things the administration has done in the first two years has been to avoid pushing new free trade agreements that would alienate and dispirit core Democratic constituencies. Obama has not made Clinton’s NAFTA mistake, which was very harmful to Democratic turnout in 1994 and which Barone would naturally regard as one of Clinton’s great triumphs. Had the administration followed the “third way” playbook and pushed for additional free trade agreements, it might have won praise from Barone, but it would probably have doomed many more Democratic House members to defeat.

Missing from Barone’s analysis is any consideration of how the electorates have changed over the past two decades. If the British and American electorates have moved left in the last 16 years, the “third way” has had its moment, achieved whatever it was going to achieve and has since become largely outdated and irrelevant. Democrats and Labour benefited politically for a time from this style of politics, and both parties have to some extent internalized its lessons, but circumstances and electorates are obviously not what they were in the ’90s. An important difference is that Democrats spent most of the last decade adapting to changed circumstances, while Labour was the party in power in Britain that saw no need to do this. Despite Barone’s best efforts to claim that the two parties are headed for similar fates, the Democrats now are where Labour was ten years ago, and the GOP strongly resembles the Conservatives that Blair easily and repeatedly defeated at the polls.

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