Third Way Down

Clinton Confidant Bill Galston has written a great piece on the failure of Third Way politics.

For younger reader(s) the Third Way was supposed to be a post Cold War middle ground between left and right. America had two Third Way presidents, Clinton and then Bush.  Tony Blair was the Third Way's undisputed master and the article's accompanying picture is....hilarious.

The Third Way started on the left in the late 80's after the Dems in America and Labour in Britain took several electoral shellackings at the hands of Reagan and Thatcher. The hard leftism of the 60's and 70's were jettisoned in favor of a pragmatic center-left politics focused on the middleclass.

Galston perfectly describes the flaw in Third Way thinking:

In retrospect, it is clear that the Third Way rested on optimistic assumptions about the new world we had entered. We assumed that the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union represented that triumph of democracy, which had become (as the cliché ran) “the only game in town”. We assumed that unipolar American power would spread a protective canopy over a global order of free governments and free markets.

Galston most insightfully and devastatingly writes:

The economic and cultural gap between highly educated, densely populated metropolitan areas and the more homogeneous, less educated hinterlands of small towns and rural areas widened, with fateful consequences for politics throughout the democratic West. The ideal of equal opportunity curdled into a new meritocracy that threatened to become self-perpetuating. And citizens went into open revolt against the free flow of peoples across borders embraced by the European Union and US progressives.

We took for granted the “Washington consensus” that prudent fiscal policies, deregulation, and markets open to trade and capital flows would accelerate the entrance of developing countries into this order. And we believed that China could be peacefully integrated into a system of rules that the United States and other market democracies had created.

The West came to be run by an elite class of hyper-educated urban dwellers with trendy glasses and flat-fronted pants who enjoyed boutique dining and exotic travel locales. The Elites insisted on imposing their values on the Normals, gun-control, immigration, same sex marriage, transgendered bathrooms - globalism. These issues were beyond discussion.

Henceforth the massive backlash in the west. Trump in America, Brexit in Britain, AfD in Germany, Lega and Five Star in Italy, Le Pen in France. The Normals strike back.