PPI: Third Way Will Rise Again by Will Marshall

PPIOnlineThird Way Will Rise Again by Will Marshall

Conservative parties have been on an electoral roll lately, toppling center-left governments from Washington to Rome, Paris to Amsterdam. But let's not toss the Third Way -- the movement to modernize progressive politics -- into history's dustbin just yet. For one thing, the Third Way pulse beats strongly in Britain, where Tony Blair's New Labour party has thoroughly marginalized its Tory opponents. For another, the right's gains don't add up to a Fourth Way -- a compelling narrative of political change to rival the story of center-left rejuvenation. In fact, the new center-right governments apparently have come not to bury the Third Way, but to imitate it. Witness George Bush's attempts to cast himself as a centrist, "compassionate conservative" and his brazen filching of New Democrat ideas on education, welfare, and national service.

More fundamentally, though, there are two reasons to think that the Third Way will rise again. First, most progressive parties in the transatlantic world know they can't go back to the old left dogma of class conflict, welfare paternalism, and big, bureaucratic government. They must modernize or die. Second, center-right parties have shown little imagination in responding to globalization's discontents or the rise in Europe of a new populism centered on the combustible issues of crime, immigration, and national identity.