Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (13484)	5/28/2002 2:08:57 PM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

"Third Wavers are really neo-liberals." Sometimes labels are less than helpful. Much of modern Conservatism is Liberalism. The crux of Liberalism will always be the individual. The crux of Conservatism will always be authority. Both are essential to the American way of life. Personally, I am a composite of "liberal" and "conservative" values. Truly, I think that most of us are...

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (13484)	5/28/2002 7:05:19 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 21057

Third Wavers are really neo-liberals Reinventing The Third Way By E. J. Dionne Jr. Tuesday, May 28, 2002; Page A17 It wasn't surprising that David Miliband, a member of the British Parliament and a leading voice in the Labor Party, was wandering our shores last week. He is an idea monger. He wants to know how to get an old industrial corner of his nation -- as it happens, his own constituency of South Shields on the North Sea -- into the economic winner's circle. At 36, he has already served as the head of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Policy Unit, and he decided in last year's British election to start a political career of his own. He's determined to show that an abstract interest in policy can be of concrete help to his largely working-class constituents. Miliband was present at the creation of Blair's experiment in Third Way politics. It was called Third Way because it conspicuously rejected both the old left and the new right. And so it's significant that this architect of an idea with which he still identifies understands its limits and its need of renovation. "Third Way triangulation," he said in an interview last week, "is much better suited to insurgency than incumbency. 'Not-this, not-that' is a very good way of throwing out a right-wing government. But it's not a long-term prospectus for changing your country." Miliband's thoughts come at an interesting and not very happy time for the European left. Except for Miliband's own Labor Party in Britain -- and, it would appear from the polls, Sweden's Social Democrats -- a left that only a few years ago held the commanding heights of European politics is now on the run. The recent elections in France and Holland were disastrous for socialist and labor parties. Spain, Portugal and Italy have all tipped rightward. Germany's Social Democratic Prime Minister Gerhard Schroeder -- once part of a Third Way triumvirate with Blair and America's Bill Clinton -- faces trouble as he seeks reelection this September. Oh, yes, and after the 2000 elections, the United States is not a Third Way model anymore. For Miliband, the left can take heart in two things: first, that the voter rebellion in Europe is more anti-establishment than anti-left; and, second, that right-of-center parties face serious problems of their own. "This is not a simple right-left swing," he says. "It's a kickback against elite, no-change politics generally." "If the left is electorally weak," Miliband argues, "the right is ideologically weak. The right has no coherent ideology at all. It's divided among traditionalists, libertarians, nationalists, internationalists, populists and even neo-fascists." If you drop the neo-fascist part, it's an interesting analysis to apply to the twists and turns of the Bush administration -- clever or unprincipled, depending on your point of view -- as it tries to build a Republican majority. If Miliband is correct (and I think he is), Bush's balancing act is typical of the contemporary right. The administration endorses free trade -- except when it's backing steel quotas and farm subsidies in pursuit of votes in key states. It is alternatively unilateralist and multilateralist in foreign policy. It speaks a libertarian language on taxes and regulations. But for much of the Justice Department, libertarianism might as well be Greek or Serbo-Croatian. Miliband, however, doesn't view the right's problems as an alibi for the left. He argues that center-left governments get into trouble when they fail to maintain their commitment to reform, especially of the public services central to their own constituents: education and health care. This underscores Bush's shrewdness in trying to steal the education issue from the Democrats. But new issues are giving the European left nightmares and the non-populist right headaches -- immigration, European integration and economic globalism. In all three cases, voters feel their lives are being changed through decisions they had nothing to do with. "Too much of your life," Miliband says, "is altered by forces way beyond your control." That, in a way, explains this pilgrim's journey to visit Baltimore's mayor, Martin O'Malley, and other experts on how cities at the losing end of the world economy can take their fates into their own hands and try to bring themselves back. Miliband is impressed with the economic innovations sponsored by local governments here, and they fit into his formula for a revived left: a "commitment to social justice through collective action enriched by a commitment to individual freedom and local empowerment." Now that is a very Third Wayish idea. If Miliband can make it work in South Shields, perhaps he can make it one of his town's new export industries. © 2002 The Washington Post Company