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writing for godot

How Did We Get Here? Part V The Third Way

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Written by Carl Peterson   
Friday, 08 September 2017 03:18

 

It is not well known, but for two months in the summer of 1963 Newton Leroy Gingrich and William Jefferson Clinton hitchhiked and Greyhounded together through nine of the southern states, criss-crossing and back-looping willy-nilly.  Tonsured bald, dressed every day in heavy, rough white cotton robes.

Newt's funny-shaped, sun-burned head, ears exposed like dual coffee cup handles, made him the more striking, though less handsome of the two; Bill's blue eyes, relaxed mouth and prominent jaw seeming to lead the way, even as he walked a step behind his older Brother.  Together they had pledged their youthful devotion to loving their fellow human beings, to uplifting them, and together vowed that they would travel to the small towns of the South and wash the feet of the sick, the poor, the downcast.

And humbly they washed the feet of multitudes, joy warm in their hearts.  As clayey dust swam away in the ablutions, Newt and Bill felt their own souls clean...

Thirty years later, as the plutocrats were in the early decades of their subterranean, single-minded toils of dismantling the American democracy--and in the aftermath of the Reagan presidency--there arose a prominent appraisal of what Democrats needed to do:

Bill Clinton, who had wanted to be President of the United States since before he learned to play the saxophone, had calculated that the country's rightward move under the tutelage of Ronald Reagan was going to be permanent, or at least long-lasting.  If a Democrat wanted to be president this fact needed to be accepted, not resisted; Remember Mondale, remember Dukakis.  Resisting would only mean more losses, would only put the Party further behind, and, perhaps, make it irrelevant and permanently the weakling rival.  It was a time for stanching the blood loss, not for challenging the rightward move.  It was a time for reality and skillfully managing that reality to achieve gains where they were conceivable.  It was not a time for idealism--and this last part?  This part you wonder if Bill Clinton believed it because it was congenial to his own inability to hear the tune of idealism, and did he know that he could never lead in a battle of ideals?  He was a sensitive person, so of course he was aware of ideals, and that some people were animated by them, and he was fascinated by idealism as something he could never feel, but he saw others dancing to its tune, and, studying and observing carefully, he learned to imitate the basic steps so that he could do them when he had to.  Only if you could hear the music yourself did you know that he was dancing but did not hear the music.

Reagan, it is said, had floated the political center to the right, as if on magical wings, and, accepting this appraisal, Clinton picked up his things and moved rightward, bringing the Democratic party with him.  Clinton was said to be a New Democrat, a believer in The Third Way, a way that was not the way of the old Democratic Party, the self-proclaimed champion of regular people, nor did it claim to be the way of the Republican Party, the un-self-proclaimed champion of the wealthy, but it boasted of splitting the difference, of being an improvement on both of the First Two Ways because it would take the best ideas of each.

Triangulation

A conceptual diagram illustrating political triangulation. The candidate presents their own political ideology as being in the more moderate middle ground 'between' that of their more extreme left and right-wing opponents. Such an ideology is then promoted as rising 'above' (transcending) typical left versus right political arguments. The resulting triangle shape gives this term its name.

By Leigh Heydon (Lheydon) (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Some called it triangulation.  At the time it was good work if you could get it.  But you may notice that if your party had been to the left (that is, what passes for the left in America) and it triangulated, a process that included adopting certain ideas of the party on the right, it would have to give up some ideals that naturally belonged to itself, and those Americans who hoped for those ideals to be realized, or at least to be aimed at, would be left behind, abandoned, with no major party to champion their interests.  So, there was some cost to triangulation.  But, because Bill Clinton had a rare set of political skills, and he had learned from watching Reagan, and the American stock market happened to surge during his presidency, he did not personally bear the costs of triangulation even though he was its happiest beneficiary.  Nor did the party on the right bear the costs, since from their perspective The Third Way meant that things were going to go more Their Way, and they didn't have to fight the Democratic president to make it happen.  Implicit in Clinton's triangulation, if you accepted that the Democratic Party was supposed to represent certain ideals not just ideas, was surrender.  If, for example, your party's ideal is that all Americans--not just the ones with money--are important, then triangulation may mean that you surrender this ideal.

Triangulation by definition means that you are taking note of ideals not as goals but as end points on the left and right defining the length of the base of the triangle, the maximum range of significant political desire.  From there, theoretically, you only need determine the midpoint on the line between these ideals and there is where your policy will be.  Triangulating, policy is guided by ideals only in the negative sense; policy will sit in the middle, equally repelled by ideals on the left and right.  When Clinton embraced Republican ideas on welfare reform, criminal justice reform, bank deregulation, and certain other policies, he did not bring with him left Democrats and other Americans in the progressive region of the political spectrum, almost all of whom had not been part of the Reagan phenomenon of the 80s.  These people had been dismayed to find their country hypnotized by the old man, elected President of the United States when his mental acuity, never great, was probably already on the wane.  Most of the people who sat out Morning in America could not be persuaded that that their ideals were for not for realizing; they could not believe that their ideals were only for identifying where you need not even think about going with policy.  These people could point to the past, to their country's own dual parentage of idealism and realism, and to the role of ideals in achieving gains in the labor, civil rights, environmental and other movements that were important to non-wealthy Americans but did not appear on the agenda of the wealthy ruling class.  They saw the need for idealistic muscularity toward economic issues, necessary to overcome opposition whenever it seriously came from those whose own ideals would always be neatly symbolized by $.

Triangulation might not have been as bad if it had come at a different time, that is, when there was not so far to go, but triangulating, splitting the difference, when there was so much remaining to be done--to the people we are talking about, this looked like surrender.  Many began to feel that they no longer had a party.  They had fallen off the fantail, and, abandoned in the ocean, they watched the Democratic party chug on into the night, heading toward an attempted rendezvous with a Republican party that was also heading to the right.

When Bill Clinton accepted without struggle the apparent rightward shift of the American electorate under Reagan, he validated it.  The cement for the foundations of the new political center hardened and set under the Clinton presidency.  From that moment of acceptance, political ideals of the left wing of the Democratic party were no longer even part of the triangulation of where the middle ground was.  Note for example, that in pursuing healthcare reform President Obama did not look to his own party for ideas, but began with a plan similar to the one signed by the Republican governor of Massachusetts in 2006.  "Romneycare" was not as progressive as Richard Nixon's proposals for healthcare reform more than 30 years earlier.

According to the theory of triangulation, neither left nor right wing ideals would be embodied in policy, but what Clinton did not notice, or perhaps did not care about, was that in accepting the new right-shifted political center, he allowed his entire triangle to move rightward, which meant that Clinton's preferred policy objectives according to triangulation were now well to the right of where the middle had been prior to Reagan.  In the 90s Clinton claimed victory in achieving goals that would have pleased moderate Republicans of the 70s.  Odd, seen from a certain perspective--Clinton sought and achieved what would have been policy defeat for 70s Democrats, but treated it like achievement, while on the other hand, Republicans accepted policy victory handed to them by Clinton, but did not much acknowledge success, both because they did not want to give Clinton credit, which would run contrary to their vilification of him, and because they wanted to maintain their impetus toward further rightward movement.

Bill Clinton had been correct in seeing The Third Way as good politics for himself.  Despised by professional Republicans, but popular with a broad swath of the electorate, though predictably not loved at either end of the American political spectrum, Clinton's approval ratings were above 50% for most of his presidency.  Despite pseudo-scandals and a bona-fide scandal, obsessively stoked by professional Republicans, Clinton ended his second term with a 65% approval rating, the highest approval rating for a departing president since Harry Truman.

But, for his wife's future political ambitions, Bill Clinton's strategy for achieving popularity may have been short-sighted.  As First Lady, Hillary imbibed The Third Way and internalized it, or at least that part of the strategy that entailed avoiding idealism regarding economic issues.  Never productively introspective, Hillary Clinton carried her version of triangulation to the prospect of her possible future presidency.  It was a comfortable fit for Hillary, but she did not consider that her husband's electoral success with The Third Way in the 90s, could not be duplicated by her in the new millennium, and one of the reasons for this was rooted in The Third Way itself.

Deprived of progressive policy achievement by 15 years of triangulated mentality, the Democratic party in 2008 fed on the feeling of idealism briefly provided by Barack Obama's candidacy and campaign.  Hillary Clinton's association with triangulation and the economic establishment came at a bad time for Democratic primary voters who seemed to suddenly understand what had been happening since Reagan:  There had been no one to fight for them.  A Democratic presidential candidate long associated with a Democratic party that had been tepid at least since 1980 would not be able to benefit from that energy of idealism.  That was Hillary Clinton's misfortune.  She ran for president at a time when many Democrats--among them those who had felt abandoned by Bill Clinton's presidency--were looking for much more than The Third Way.

Running as an idealist, Obama proved to be a triangulator for most of his administration, although this was lost on Republicans, especially those--both professional and non-professional Republicans--who were mesmerized by, and objected to, his complexion.  Non-professional Republicans were particularly susceptible to outlandish, plutocrat-funded propaganda portraying Obama as The Other, or as the Monster-Who-Would-Destroy-America.

The Affordable Care Act, almost a case study in triangulation, was relentlessly propagandized by Republicans and their wealthy masters as socialism, as evil, as the abomination produced by the most radical president in American history.  But this is what the Democratic party got for surrendering its ideals in the 90s.  To the opposition, triangulation only showed weakness, which encouraged them to take more.  But, ironically, the weakened institution of the Democratic party led to the weakened institution of the Republican party, which no longer could strengthen itself by pushing up against a worthy adversary.  So, in the 90s, professional Republicans ceased to believe in anything but their prejudices, oh, and one other thing--tax cuts for the wealthy.

If you wonder why American infrastructure looks more like the Third World every year, or why our president seems more like a wannabe Third World tin-pot dictator than any president in our history, one reason is that our two major political parties are very, very unwell, and that the Republican party in particular is no longer serving any interests of the country it purports to love.  In turn, you can trace this fine kettle of fish back to around the time of Bill Clinton's surrender of Democratic party ideals, also known as The Third Way.

 

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