Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Third Way" in English language version.
Last modified:
The Hawke-Keating economic reforms should be more appropriately described as Australian Laborism, and nothing like the Third Way ideology embraced by some US Democrats and some in British Labour. We were first. And we did it our way, the Australian Labor way. We led the way, forcing the conservatives into policy retreat and to fight the battles on our turf.
Some even go so far as to say New Labour is a betrayal of everything the party's founders stood for and that, to all intents and purposes, is a different party merely using the same name. They often claim it represents Margaret Thatcher's greatest victory in wiping socialism off the British political map. Under New Labour, the demand for "the common ownership of the means of production" has been dumped and the free market warmly embraced. Trade unions, who helped found the party, are now held at arms length. ... Instead, New Labour looks determined to remain firmly in the centre of British politics - even though the centre moved decidedly to the right during the Thatcher years.
Obama resembles such Presidents as Nixon and Clinton in the following respect. They are what the political scientist Stephen Skowronek calls practitioners of "third way" politics (Tony Blair was another), who undermine the opposition by borrowing policies from it in an effort to seize the middle and with it to achieve political dominance. Think of Nixon's economic policies, which were a continuation of Johnson's "Great Society"; Clinton's welfare reform and support of capital punishment; and Obama's pragmatic centrism, reflected in his embrace, albeit very recent, of entitlements reform.
The Left's failure is, therefore, not so much that neoliberalism has failed, but that when it did there existed no alternative that could challenge its dominance. Keating, even now, proposes no solutions; he offers, simply, a critique.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)In a joint Guardian and Financial Times interview, Mr Blair said he believed some of Mr Sanders' and Mr Corbyn's success was due to the "loss of faith in that strong, centrist progressive position", which defined his own career. He said: "One of the strangest things about politics at the moment – and I really mean it when I say I'm not sure I fully understand politics right now, which is an odd thing to say, having spent my life in it – is when you put the question of electability as a factor in your decision to nominate a leader, it's how small the numbers are that this is the decisive factor. That sounds curious to me."
A great deal of what Tony Blair did in power was not neoliberal at all, or had neoliberal elements but was aimed in a quite different direction, or was better thought of as social democratic or even socialist. ... The creation of a national minimum wage and a tax credits system benefitting the low paid halted the remorseless march of inequality that had so scarred Britain in the 1980s. ... No government that rebuilt the public sphere, radically improved the state healthcare system, improved maintained schools and took on homelessness can possibly be painted only in those terms.
Socialism is stubborn. After decades of dormancy verging on death, it is rising again in the west. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn just led the Labour party to its largest increase in vote share since 1945 on the strength of its most radical manifesto in decades. In France, the leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon recently came within two percentage points of breaking into the second round of the presidential election. And in the US, the country's most famous socialist – Bernie Sanders – is now its most popular politician. ... For the resurgent left, an essential spark is social media. In fact, it's one of the most crucial and least understood catalysts of contemporary socialism. Since the networked uprisings of 2011 – the year of the Arab spring, Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish indignados – we've seen how social media can rapidly bring masses of people into the streets. But social media isn't just a tool for mobilizing people. It's also a tool for politicizing them.
The Hawke-Keating economic reforms should be more appropriately described as Australian Laborism, and nothing like the Third Way ideology embraced by some US Democrats and some in British Labour. We were first. And we did it our way, the Australian Labor way. We led the way, forcing the conservatives into policy retreat and to fight the battles on our turf.
The Left's failure is, therefore, not so much that neoliberalism has failed, but that when it did there existed no alternative that could challenge its dominance. Keating, even now, proposes no solutions; he offers, simply, a critique.
Some even go so far as to say New Labour is a betrayal of everything the party's founders stood for and that, to all intents and purposes, is a different party merely using the same name. They often claim it represents Margaret Thatcher's greatest victory in wiping socialism off the British political map. Under New Labour, the demand for "the common ownership of the means of production" has been dumped and the free market warmly embraced. Trade unions, who helped found the party, are now held at arms length. ... Instead, New Labour looks determined to remain firmly in the centre of British politics - even though the centre moved decidedly to the right during the Thatcher years.
A great deal of what Tony Blair did in power was not neoliberal at all, or had neoliberal elements but was aimed in a quite different direction, or was better thought of as social democratic or even socialist. ... The creation of a national minimum wage and a tax credits system benefitting the low paid halted the remorseless march of inequality that had so scarred Britain in the 1980s. ... No government that rebuilt the public sphere, radically improved the state healthcare system, improved maintained schools and took on homelessness can possibly be painted only in those terms.
In a joint Guardian and Financial Times interview, Mr Blair said he believed some of Mr Sanders' and Mr Corbyn's success was due to the "loss of faith in that strong, centrist progressive position", which defined his own career. He said: "One of the strangest things about politics at the moment – and I really mean it when I say I'm not sure I fully understand politics right now, which is an odd thing to say, having spent my life in it – is when you put the question of electability as a factor in your decision to nominate a leader, it's how small the numbers are that this is the decisive factor. That sounds curious to me."
Socialism is stubborn. After decades of dormancy verging on death, it is rising again in the west. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn just led the Labour party to its largest increase in vote share since 1945 on the strength of its most radical manifesto in decades. In France, the leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon recently came within two percentage points of breaking into the second round of the presidential election. And in the US, the country's most famous socialist – Bernie Sanders – is now its most popular politician. ... For the resurgent left, an essential spark is social media. In fact, it's one of the most crucial and least understood catalysts of contemporary socialism. Since the networked uprisings of 2011 – the year of the Arab spring, Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish indignados – we've seen how social media can rapidly bring masses of people into the streets. But social media isn't just a tool for mobilizing people. It's also a tool for politicizing them.