A few years back, someone wrote to me a great turn of phrase: “ageing out of the zeitgeist” and I thought “yes, that is me”. As surely as my hair turns grey with the passage of time, the recognisability of pop culture and its icons has faded also. I no longer recognise, let alone know the name of those who are paid handsomely to spruik various consumer products to me as I traverse the internet. The swirling allure, glittering snap and surly snarl of youth culture has truly left me behind and I am completely comfortable with that. I don’t mind not being young.
What is more startling of late has been the realisation that I have become old enough to start seeing and reading historical analysis of my formative years. More specifically, historians are beginning to be able to look with some degree of distance at the ideology and the political culture of the socio-political phenomenon that defined my high school and university years: the Third Way. It’s fascinating but also somewhat jarring to witness the ideas of my youth passing into history.
What inspired this post was recently reading an article in The Nation by Lily Geismer analysing the much vaunted but also heavily criticised Third Way politics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. I will link the article here: How the Third Way Made Neoliberal Politics Seem Inevitable. I was a child of the Third Way. I believed in it and it fueled my idealism and interest in politics as a youth. Standing in the far flung and little visited political science wing of my high school where my politics and law classes were held, I saw my future in politics and my youthful heart was captured by the idea of making a better world through building consensus and harnessing the profits of capitalism to help to create fairer and more prosperous communities. Generally speaking, these were the ideals of the Third Way and I passionately wanted to be part of the cohort taking us into what appeared to be a bright and hopeful future.
I became an ardent advocate of the type of consensus politics the Third Way promoted as the elixir to class division and I rallied behind its call for the shedding of the old parochial left and right divide. B was one the first people I met in my social circle who did not admire the Third Way. He said unprintable things about Tony Blair at a time when Blair was riding waves of unimaginable popularity as ‘cool Britannia’ dominated the zeitgeist. I was shocked and shook my head sadly at the crusty, old dinosaur politics he seemed so enthused about as a member of a socialist party. Touting my Tony Blair and Bill Clinton biographies alongside my political science textbooks, I proudly and loudly occupied what I thought was the political centre.
Third Way politics can be broadly described as this:
The Third Way is a centrist political position that attempts to reconcile right-wing and left-wing politics by advocating a varying synthesis of centre-right economic policies with centre-left social policies (“Third Way”, 2023).
A central plank of the Third Way was the idea of consensus politics. Consensus politics is not something the Third Way thought of but it certainly reinvigorated it during the late twentieth century. Prior to the Third Way, it could be said that there existed a strong sense of consensus politics during the postwar period between 1945 and 1970 in many developed, Western democracies when governments on both sides of the political spectrum endorsed public policies that protected social safety nets, advocated for government intervention in the economy, promoted government ownership of national industries and called for full employment (tutor2u, 2021). It is generally thought that the consensus politics of the postwar era started to fray in the 1970s as the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 took hold and economies stagnated with inflation skyrocketing leading to stagflation in many developed economies (tutor2u, 2021; “1970s Energy Crisis,” 2023). As the socio-political fallout from stagnating economies reverberated at the political level, consensus politics began to break down with the advent of Thatcherism and Reaganomics effectively ending it. Some have even characterised Thatcherism as the outright repudiation of the consensus politics of the postwar period (“Thatcherism,” 2023).
Into this political landscape stepped the Third Way. From the outset the Third Way had its critics with many commenters disturbed by its ambiguity and apparent lack of substance (Geismer, 2022). The Third Way shimmered like a political chameleon, flashing reassuringly to the right with its neoliberal economic policies and making soothing noises to the left with its social rhetoric. In truth, the appeal of the Third Way most likely rested in it doing exactly this. I think that many who advocated for it wished for the continuation of capitalism as an engine for wealth creation for our societies but wanted the cruelties and excesses of capitalism to be curtailed by strong public policy legislated from democratic and representative parliaments. Without doubt, some of the faith in the Third Way more than likely rested on a certain naivety in regards to fully grasping the nature of neo-liberal capitalism and how it would interact with our political systems. I suspect very few centrists thought that neoliberal capitalism would capture our socio-political systems so ruthlessly and with such levels of totality.
In theory at least, Third Way politics is predicated on having a healthy and strong social democratic system in place which is renewed and supported by an informed and engaged citizen base. But as Geismer discusses, the real life enactment of Third Way politics and policies in its effort to dominate and determine what the centre is actually helped to erode social democracy by inhibiting the development of progressive, movement based politics:
The third way also proved instrumental to another key post–Cold War undertaking: discrediting and marginalizing movement-based coalitions on the left, stigmatizing them as holdovers from the recently resolved—in capitalism’s favor—postwar clash of ideologies. In many ways, the most lasting legacy of the third way may well be its determination to consign the political left to the dustbin of history, setting the stage for the new millennial age of reaction and crisis (Geismer, 2022).
Despite the extensive damage Third Way politics and ideology would do to the left, some of which is still reverberating through the centre left today, Geiser correctly identifies why the Third Way seemed so appealing at the time it appeared:
… it would be a mistake to dismiss the third way as just another errant fad in a fickle decade. For all its imprecision and shallowness, the third way represented a genuine shift in thinking about the role of government and ideology. It emerged from the efforts of political thinkers and leaders across the West to move beyond the divisions of the Cold War and face the new challenges of globalization and the information age (Geismer, 2022).
My belief in Third Way consensus politics more or less held until I began to recognise that we had entered late stage capitalism. Perhaps moving into a new century helps to facilitate an analysis of the previous century though in historical terms, not that much time has passed as yet. However, the slow hollowing out of our democracies as capitalism’s grip on our political representatives became more blatant and obvious, the profits that flowed out from multinational behemoths in the face of dwindling social safety nets, stagnating wages, modest homes becoming unaffordable for a substantive number of salaried people and witnessing how things like medical care and even the purchasing of fresh fruit and vegetables have become unaffordable for some has forced me to recognise something deeply uncomfortable. The consensus politics of the Third Way seems to have yielded a pathway for the realisation and near domination of neoliberal capitalism.
As Geismer observes in their article, Third Way politics did not find a way for capitalism and social democracy to co-exist. If anything it helped to blunt the potency of social democratic politics and policies as the Third Way co-opted and then hollowed out the meaning of the ideas behind progressive, socially democratic public policy. Geismer writes:
By describing the third way as “progressive,” the New Democrats ensured that the left lacked a key term to define its own politics. It meant that groups on the left had little room to create meaningful dissent from the third way or the agenda it represented. Robert Reich, who was freer to speak his mind after resigning as Clinton’s labor secretary, observed in an interview with The Nation’s David Corn that if the third way did not gain more substance, it would “leave the progressive left in tatters and do little to rectify the social injustices experienced by modern capitalism” (Geismer, 2022).
Why did Third Way politics seemingly help to realise Margaret Thatcher’s slogan “there is no alternative” in regards to society embracing the tenets of neoliberal capitalism? Chiefly, it can be argued that at the heart of Third Way public policy were the same goals and assumptions that drove neoliberal capitalism. That is, privatisation through private and public economic relationships and the deregulation of markets combined with a weak vision, if not lack of real commitment, to the social protections that would be needed to buffer the community against the socio-economic consequences of having achieving the economic agenda of the Third Way (Geismer, 2022). For all intents and purposes, the goals and policy objectives advocated by neoliberal capitalism were achieved through the centre left via the Third Way. There is no easy way to write that and it’s hard to swallow but how can one argue with history? Was there another way for the Third Way? Possibly if there had been a greater commitment to a more interventionist manifestation of it which would have sought to reinforce social safety nets alongside genuinely pushing for progressive politics but it’s also very hard to say because the economic agenda of Third Way was so driven in ideological terms by neoliberal ideals. Its economic agenda stood in conflict with its social aims.
It could be said that the Third Way has somewhat tarnished consensus politics. The politics and ideas of the Third Way certainly have emptied of much meaning what the centre left stands for and pushed the centre overall further to the right, normalising ideas that have been strongly influenced by neoliberalism. If the Third Way has shown me anything, it’s to be more critical in analysing whose favour the consensus is for. Furthermore, in assessing the Third Way it’s difficult to argue against B’s assertion that it made democracy safe for capitalism.
But more worryingly, consensus politics itself could be something of a fallacy because it assumes that the left and right can converge in a type of post-ideological political landscape. But for this to truly occur, politics has to become de-politicised and when this is done, it is usually because there exists an active and powerful hegemony and hegemonic power in place because behind the enactment of hegemony is power and what drives power is ideology of some description. But not all hegemony is necessarily bad, if it rests on principles of fairness, equality and justice then perhaps it will be benign if not beneficial to humanity. Our job I guess as citizens is to recognise and witness hegemony and possibly attempt to break it if it threatens to destroy our ability to survive long term as a species or when it no longer is representative of what the majority of us advocate for as a society. Hegemony and ideology have become deeply present aspects again of our society and our political landscape, both domestically and internationally. Multiple crisis beckon in the new century and the need for informed and engaged citizens has never been greater as democracy stands on a new precipice and with reason as some people ask this question: why should they invest in a system that doesn't invest in them?
References:
1970s Energy Crisis. (27 April, 2023). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_energy_crisis
Geismer. L. (13 December, 2022). How the Third Way Made Neoliberal Politics Seem Inevitable. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/third-way-dlc-bill-clinton-tony-blair-1990s-politics/
Thatcherism. (27 April, 2023). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatcherism
Third Way. (27 April, 2023). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way
tutor2u (22 March, 2021). Study Notes: Consensus Politics. https://www.tutor2u.net/politics/reference/consensus-politics Retrieved 27 April, 2023
