From Third Way to No Way

During the golden age of the Third Way, politicians like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder based their pitch on the claim to possess “electability.” Their supporters had a simple message for left-wing critics: you might not like the compromises they insisted were necessary to win power, but the alternative was to remain trapped in opposition for an indefinite period of time. Media commentators delivered countless homilies about the need to choose between principle and pragmatism if you wanted to get things done.

Whatever you might say about their record of achievement in office, the Third Way figureheads certainly seemed to have sussed out the business of winning elections. Clinton became the first two-term Democratic president since the 1960s after more than a decade of Republican rule. His vice president, Al Gore, won the popular vote in 2000 and would have kept hold of the White House for the Democrats if not for shady maneuverings by Republican apparatchiks in Florida. Blair matched the achievement of Margaret Thatcher by winning three consecutive elections — the first Labour leader to do so in Britain. Schröder beat Germany’s Christian Democrats twice and only fell narrowly behind his party’s main electoral rival in a third contest.

That all seems very remote from the current political moment. Joe Biden was on course for a heavy defeat when he reluctantly bowed out of last year’s US presidential election; his hastily drafted replacement, Kamala Harris, promised joy but could only deliver the most comprehensive Democratic setback since 1988, losing the popular vote as well as the electoral college. Barely three years after Olaf Scholz became Germany’s first center-left chancellor since Schröder, his coalition government has collapsed, and the Social Democrats are expected to trail far behind the Christian Democrats in next month’s election; they may even fall below the far-right Alternative für Deutschland.

At first glance, Britain seems to be an exception to the rule. Last July, Keir Starmer led Labour to a parliamentary landslide on par with those of 1997 and 2001. But Labour’s vote share was almost 10 percent lower than it had been when Blair first came to power. It was the collapse in support for the Conservative Party that gave Starmer such a commanding position in the House of Commons.

After the 1997 general election, it was more than three years before Labour slipped behind the Conservatives in the polls, and that was a temporary blip before a comfortable victory in 2001. It had already happened to Starmer several times before his first Christmas in Downing Street, with Labour consistently polling below 30 percent. The British press has started publishing articles that ask how Starmer “fumbled his first months in power,” while the Reform UK party of Farage has the wind in its sails.

Freedom to Fail

What stands out is not merely the fact that center-left politicians are struggling to find a sustainable formula for winning elections against the Right. It is the patent lack of urgency they bring to the task of doing so. The Democratic Party in the United States allowed Biden to carry on as its candidate for 2024 when there was ample evidence that he simply wasn’t up to the job. It was only after a disastrous performance in his opening debate with Trump that the party elite started pressuring Biden to retire, after allowing him to inflict enormous damage on their prospects.

There was a brief surge of enthusiasm — or relief at any rate — when Harris took over. But it soon became clear that Harris and her team wanted to run a campaign anchored as far to the right as they could manage, while ditching economic policies from the Biden administration that were popular with voters but unpopular with rich donors.

Not only did they carry on with Biden’s line of uncritical support for Israel’s campaign of mass murder in Gaza, ignoring its deep unpopularity with Democratic voters. They even sent Ritchie Torres, a gormless ventriloquist’s dummy for the Israel lobby, to advocate for that line in Michigan, of all states. Just in case the message of absolute contempt for those horrified by the slaughter of Palestinian civilians had not cut through, Bill Clinton paid a visit to Michigan in the final days of the campaign to drive the point home on behalf of Team Harris.

A wise man once observed that you can’t polish a turd. Quite so, but it is not strictly necessary to rub the turd of a policy in people’s faces, either. As it turned out, Harris lost a whole batch of swing states and trailed far behind Trump in the Electoral College. But her campaign had every reason to believe Michigan votes might prove decisive when it dispatched Torres and Clinton to maliciously troll some of the would-be Democratic electorate.

The sheer light-mindedness of Biden, Harris, and their associates over the course of 2024 surely helps explain why their warnings that Trump was a fascist who posed a serious threat to democracy proved to be ineffectual. Someone who took those warnings seriously would not be approaching the task of defeating Trump with such a trivial and feckless mentality. If Biden and Harris did not really believe in what they were saying, why should they have expected anyone else to take it to heart?

Someone Else’s Problem

Unfortunately, this does not mean that there is no threat to democratic rights from Trump or his political allies in Europe, many of whom are either in government or knocking on the doors of power. The threat to civil liberties is real, but it is not one that high-ranking Democratic politicians will have to worry about, with the possible exception of a few figures on the left of the party whose erstwhile colleagues from the Democratic establishment openly despise them.

While the Republican leadership in Congress would no doubt be happy to imprison someone like Rashida Tlaib if only they could find an excuse for doing so, they would certainly have no reason to target mainstream Democrats with whom they could easily find common cause in the repression of the Palestine solidarity movement. After all, it was Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, who launched a malicious smear campaign against Tlaib, ably assisted by CNN news anchors, when she correctly identified the repressive assault on student protesters by Nessel’s office.

India broke with the pattern of centrist lethargy in the face of a hard-right challenge last year, as the Indian National Congress put together a serious electoral alliance and campaigned hard to prevent Narendra Modi from winning a supermajority in parliament. It is surely no coincidence that the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi actually has personal experience of Modi’s clampdown on political dissent, having been the target of a vexatious prosecution that initially resulted in a prison sentence.

In Europe and the United States, on the other hand, self-styled guardians of the center ground only display real energy and determination when it comes to shutting out influence from the Left. Emmanuel Macron based his two presidential victories in 2017 and 2022 on the nature of the French electoral system, which meant that left-wing voters would have nobody else to vote for in the second round if they wanted to stop Le Pen. Last summer, however, Macron made it absolutely clear that he sees the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire alliance as a bigger threat than a government formed by Le Pen’s party. For Macron, raising the retirement age for French workers is far more important than stopping the heirs of Vichy from coming to power.

The whole idea of a center ground under siege from “extremists” of left and right breaks down when we look at what the traditional conservative parties have been doing. In some cases, like the British Tories, they have adopted the ideas of their hard-right rivals lock, stock, and barrel. In others, like Italy and the Netherlands, they have formed governing alliances with them, even if that means the far right will be the dominant partner. Having secured a second term as European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen has extended the hand of friendship to the ultranationalist bloc in the European Parliament.

No Enemies on the Right

The reelection of Trump, once seen as a hostile insurgent within the Republican Party but now its unquestioned master, sums up the collapse of the boundary fence that once separated the mainstream right from politicians like Le Pen or Farage. If the political mainstream on both sides of the Atlantic has proved far more accommodating to the far right than the radical left — even when the latter forces have been calling for reforms that were the standard fare of social democracy a few decades ago — there is a simple reason for that.

It is relatively easy to satisfy the far right by targeting a vulnerable minority, from immigrants to trans people. Taking up even a fairly modest left-wing policy proposal, on the other hand, will soon bring you into conflict with powerful corporate interests and lobbies. That is why it is now Donald Trump’s Republican Party, but not the Democratic Party of Bernie Sanders. It is also why governments dominated by Giorgia Meloni and Geert Wilders can hold power in two of the European Union’s founding states, while parties of the radical left have been marginalized or subordinated.

Writing about Labour’s polling decline since last year’s election, the academic Robert Ford suggested that Starmer could

take inspiration from the only recent prime minister to rebound quickly from a sharp early slump: Margaret Thatcher. She staked her 1979 majority on a programme of radical reform, then held firm through a severe recession to reap the rewards of recovery. Thatcher inherited a struggling economy and a restive electorate. But she didn’t see these as reasons for caution. Instead, she bet big, putting all her chips on change. Caution hasn’t worked for Labour. Maybe it is time to start rolling the dice.

In the current British context, “radical reform” could only mean a decisive shift away from the decaying economic model put in place by Thatcher during the 1980s. The entire purpose of Starmer’s leadership was to stamp out a movement within the Labour Party that wanted to lead the country away from the legacy of Thatcherism. There is not the slightest chance that he will now start putting all (or indeed any) of his chips on change, even if his political survival depends on it.

We can find a better indication of what to expect from the rest of Labour’s parliamentary term in an article by Tim Shipman, chief peddler of Westminster gossip for the Sunday Times. Shipman quoted a Labour politician speaking about the party’s first months in office:

The only minister who really knows how to work the system and get officials delivering what he wants is Ed Miliband, who has been there before. And Ed is the one minister we don’t want to be a success if we want to win the next election.

Naturally, this poisonous aside came from behind a cloak of anonymity. The idea that success for Miliband as a minister would harm Labour’s chances of winning the next election is, of course, a decorous falsehood to conceal the real agenda at work. Although Miliband has thoroughly debased himself to remain part of Starmer’s cabinet team, he is still associated with Labour’s vestigial commitment to a progressive climate agenda, which the Labour insiders who brief journalists like Shipman badly want to fail. This is the world-historic level of pettiness that Starmer’s team are bringing to the task of government as they already face an onslaught from Elon Musk and his local minions, promoting undiluted neofascist conspiracy theories.

There have been moments in history when it was difficult to establish the precise relationship between political and economic elites. Such analysis required hard, painstaking work. The current situation is far more straightforward: a quick glance at the list of donors for the Harris campaign or Starmer’s Labour Party will tell you much of what you need to know about how those political forces draw up their agendas for government. The appointment of Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington is exactly what we should expect from a government stuffed with individuals who greatly admire Mandelson’s voracious moneygrubbing and see him as a model to emulate.

With the “center” in “center-right” fast becoming a quaint anachronism, the self-aggrandizing cliques that form around politicians like Harris and Starmer are now the ones tasked with holding the line against an increasingly confident and bellicose hard-right bloc. It is hardly surprising that the job is being done so badly. Things will not improve until it is taken out of their hands.