Archive [December 1998]

From the very beginning of his candidacy for President, Wilhelm von der Schlickmeister, propagated — among the avalanche of lies — a central political lie (no, not about sex). It’s the notion that there is some “middle ground” between free markets and socialism, between conservatism and liberalism, between government dependency and economic freedom.

Ronald Reagan sent communism — to use Reagan’s own prophetic words — to “the ash heap of history.” With socialist ideals hopelessly discredited, liberals like Bill and Hillary Clinton had to start pretending they weren’t liberals anymore. There was no other way to get elected. 

So they disguised their intentions. They didn’t really believe that government was the solution to all human problems, they said. Government and a vibrant market together are the combined answer, they said. We can have our free market and micromanage it, too.

It’s the great and magnificent — drum-roll, please — “Third Way.” Our Phone Sex President was touting this snake oil back during his first campaign for President. “I got into this, race for President because I was tired of Republican neglect and Democratic allegiance to programs that were outmoded,” the future Perjurer-in-Heat declared in 1992, “I thought we ought to have a Third Way.” And now it’s here! In his State of the Union address this year, Clinton declared: “We have found a Third Way.”

How typical for this era. Nothing can be black-and-white anymore; we can’t make judgements, we can’t declare any position right or wrong; we can’t make a strong case for anything — on morality, on politics, on economics … on perjury. That wouldn’t be tolerant. That wouldn’t be nice. That wouldn’t be moderate, and we’re all moderates, now.

The Third Way sounds so … so agreeable. We don’t need to be mean old capitalists anymore. So socialists everywhere — especially the European kind — are eager to join Bill Clinton under the Third Way banner.

It shouldn’t surprise a soul that this American incarnation of the Third Way has to do with one thing: Bill Clinton’s ambitions. In April 1989, Al From, director of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group founded to save the Democratic Party from self-destruction by pulling it toward the center, flew to Little Rock to meet the governor of Arkansas with a proposition. From: “I said to Clinton, ‘Have I got a deal for you. If you take the DLC Chairmanship, we will give you a national platform, and I think you will be President of the United States.” The DLC would provide Clinton with staff, access to campaign money, and a national platform.

Al From went on to establish the Progressive Policy Institute, so as to concoct the illusion of substance behind the Third Way. All you need to know about the PPI’s much-ballyhooed original Third Way manifesto can be found in two sentences from The New Republic: “[It] never truly engages liberalism on a philosophical level. Instead, it calls on Democrats to ‘recast the basic commitments of the Democratic Party in themes and programs that can bring support from a sustainable majority.’”

In other words, Democrats should keep on selling the same goods, but with a new packaging. The Third Way is all about public relations, about finding buzzwords that appeal to the Joe Q. Dimwits out there, making liberalism sound like something other than liberalism.

Clinton used Third Way rhetoric to lie his way into the White House, where he and his wife promptly tried to nationalize one-seventh of the U.S. economy under a government-controlled health care system. Some Third Way!

In other countries, struggling for decades to unchain economies from full-blown socialism, discredited Marxists have used the “Third Way” slogan to get back into power and reverse free-market reforms. In 13 of the 15 European Union countries, left-of-center parties now rule. We are going to expand government, they say, but don’t worry, because it isn’t really socialism. It’s only the Third Way.

The most celebrated of these is British Labor Party Prime Minister Tony Blair. Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics and one of Tony Blair’s gurus, defines the Third Way as “saving capitalism from itself by humanizing it.” (Never trust anyone who says capitalism has to be “saved.”) Blair has said: “The Third Way stands for a modernized social democracy, passionate in its commitment to social justice and the goals of the center-left, but flexible, innovative and forward-looking in the means to achieve them.” Blah, blah, blah. Typical liberal gobbledygook.

Blair contends that Margaret Thatcher “asserted the primacy of individual liberty the market economy” while Karl Marx “promoted social justice with the state as its main agent. There is no necessary conflict between the two,” Blair asserts, “accepting as we do that state power is one means to achieve our goals, but not the only one and emphatically not an end in itself.”

Of course! A pinch or Thatcher here. A handful of Marx there. No conflict between those two at all.

But the substance of Blair’s platform is simply spend, spend, spend. Just listen to his speech to the Labor Party conference in September. (He actually began it by quoting Mario Cuomo.)

“Forty billion pounds extra going into our [government] schools and [socialized] hospitals — a figure every one of you should never tire of repeating,” Blair told his Laborite comrades. “With it will come 15,000 more nurses, 6,000 more nursing trainees, 7,000 more doctors. The £8-billion program to build and renovate hospitals, modernize surgeries and get patients treated more quickly. Every school being wired up to the Internet.” (Where have you heard that before?)

“Why shouldn’t they earn sixty or seventy thousand pounds a year?” Blair asks, referring to teachers. That’s six figures — over $100,000 — in U.S. dollars. For a public school teacher? Maybe some of those National Education Association union bosses ought to cultivate an English accent.

“I did not come into politics to dismantle the welfare state. I believe in it,” Blair trumpeted. “The center-left may have lost the battle of ideas in the 80s. But we are winning now … The crude individualism of the 80s is the mood no longer. The spirit of the times is community.”

Yeah. Next he’s going to start talking about “The Village.” As British Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary John Redwood, a Conservative, observes: “They have just found a new language for their old way, the way of high taxes and state control.”

It’s the same in other countries where repackaged socialists have gained power. Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi is supposed to be another Third Way-er; under pressure from Italy’s Communist party he has pledged to reduce the workweek to only 35 hours. French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s Socialist Party also supports a 35-hour work week.

Gerhard Schroeder, Germany’s new Social Democrat chancellor and the newest Third Way poster child, rose to prominence in the Young Socialists of the 1960s. He resisted the re-arming of NATO in the early 1980s and fought against the deployment of American missiles on German soil.

Mr. Schroeder calls his version of the Third Way, “Die Neue Mittel,” the New Middle. His finance minister is “Red Oskar” LaFontaine, who calls for typical socialist redistribution of wealth. “Our German model, which combines a productive economy with an integrated and peaceful society, can maintain its superiority over other systems,” Schroeder insists.

Fat chance. In Germany, more than 4 million citizens — nearly 11 percent of the labor force — are unemployed. Maybe because Germany offers, as Investor’s Business Daily puts it, “one of the world’s most generous unemployment benefits schemes.” The unemployed get two-thirds of their salaries for 30 months. After that, they get 57 percent. Forever.

This “superior system” gives its citizens a top income tax rate of 53 percent — beginning in the $53,000 tax bracket. In addition, consumers are hit with a 15 percent value-added tax. The corporate income tax rate is 45 percent. Can you say, “Recipe for disaster?”

As Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Klaus has quipped, “The Third Way leads to the Third World.” After communism fell in his country, Klaus opted for capitalism.

His philosophical allies used to be leaders in the U.S. and Britain. Now Clinton and Blair are instead working “to craft and define center-left philosophy for the world of today,” Blair told the British newspaper The Guardian while in Washington for talks with Clinton. “I want to start with the ideology that links Labor and the Democrats. Then I want to bring together the Anglo-Saxon definitions of these ideas and these policies with the European ones,” Blair said.

Clinton and Blair have held three powwows so far on how to further the Third Way, with other figures of the left, like Italy’s Prodi and Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in attendance.

Meanwhile, their playbook continues to be written by Bill Clinton. “We’ve tried to make sure that our ideas were driven by our values, and our politics was driven by our policies — not the other way around,” Der Schlickmeister told the DLC’s “National Conversation” in June. (In the same speech he lied that he had achieved “the smallest government in 35 years.”) Three months later, in September, Blair said: “I believe that a critical dimension of the Third Way is that policies flow from values, not vice versa.”

Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton aide and grand jury witness, is the Third Way point man in the White House. He told the World Policy Institute in May that Clinton and Blair were singing the same song, and that “the emergence of trans-Atlantic, one-nation politics of a new Third Way makes it increasingly clear that far more than personality is at stake.”

I, for one, am not ready to become “trans-Atlantic.”

My friends, it is always dangerous and naive to think that government — rather than free people — can combat society’s ills. There will never be a “Third Way.” For that matter, there will never be a second way. There is only one way men can live in peace and plenty, and that’s the way of freedom. Here we call it the American Way.