Third Way History's End

In 1990 Francis Fukayama wrote an influential article in The Atlantic proclaiming the 'end of history.'* With the end of the Cold War, Fukayama said the great issues of man were over and politics would be about tax rates, benefits, open borders - the Third Wayism of Clinton, Blair, Bush, Schroeder, the global elits.

Younger reader(s), the 1990s were like that.

History came roaring back on 9/11/01.

Fukayama was wrong.

Clinton Confidant Bill Galson writes:

A class of educated professionals with non-traditional views on gender, culture, the environment and much else was emerging. Old expectations about job security were giving way to new realities of constant change. If the centre-Left failed to respond to the new economic and class structures, it risked irrelevance.

This class, which thought it knew everything, thought it knew history:

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.

Islam has no use for Third Wayism instead viewing Third Way Europe as fertile ground for Islamic colonization.

China used Third Way 'end of history' notions to push it's way onto the world scene via the World Trade Organization. Now cheap Chinese goods have flooded Western markets.

The Third Wayers thought the WTO and the Olympic Games would force China to liberalize. The elites thought the same carrots would motivate Vladimir Putin to embrace his inner democrat.

The elites even believed they could talk Yasser Arafat out of his thirst for Jewish blood and concern himself with the business of fast-tracking government benefits and affordable housing.

Human nature never changes. Bad men run rough governments. As the Romans worried about the German Barbarians, and the British about French Revolutionaries, so we today must need worry about external threats.

Only our failed global-elites could think otherwise.

*We read it back then