The Third Way triangulation in which the old center-left made its peace with extreme inequalities of wealth was summed up in 1998 by one of its architects, Tony Blair’s strategist Peter Mandelson (recently fired as British ambassador to the US because of the revelation of his cloying relationship with Jeffrey Epstein), as a state of being “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes.” What happened, rather, is that the beneficiaries of this tolerance for gross economic inequality used their political influence to avoid taxation—and instead of being intensely relaxing, the consequence of the rise and rise of the filthy rich has been a political upheaval that is tearing most democracies apart.
Just saw an article refer to Third Way (aka the "let's compromise more with the Nazis" caucus) as "center left," and rolled my eyes so hard I saw the back of my own skull lmao
Third way never ever seems to go away after each time Democrats lose an election. Exact how many elections loses does it really take for them to disappear into extinction?
Third way exist to propped up failing corrupt democrats in a election ensuring that the fascist GOP almost always wins
Two new polls suggest that moderate Democrats too want higher taxes on the rich and some measure of economic populism. Moderate isn’t what i
Perry Bacon Jr. at The New Republic:
The center-left group Third Way held a conference last week where moderate Democratic strategists and politicians blasted progressive ideas and the party’s left wing. Third Way and other centrist Democratic groups espouse positions such as opposing Medicare for All and wealth taxes. In Washington, the idea that these groups speak for moderates across the country is never questioned. But now, some evidence is emerging that suggests Democratic voters who describe themselves as moderate are in a different place. They want Democrats to push harder to increase taxes on the wealthy and corporations and don’t think the party is overly liberal on issues such as abortion and transgender rights.
This distinction between moderate Democratic voters and the party’s moderate elites is critical to understand. Moderate Democratic voters are not centrists clamoring for a return to the Clinton era or rebukes of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders. So progressive groups and politicians can probably push rank-and-file Democratic voters to the left on a wide range of issues. And more center-left Democratic politicians must (and increasingly do) adopt more progressive positions to remain viable in a party where even the people who call themselves moderate have fairly liberal views.
I’m basing this analysis in part on a recent poll of some 2,400 prime Democratic voters (those who vote regularly in primaries) conducted in January on behalf of The New Republic by Embold Research. Respondents were given five choices to describe their ideology: conservative, moderate, moderate-to-liberal, liberal, and progressive. Only 12 percent said they identify as moderate, while another 21 percent called themselves moderate-to-liberal. And the interesting thing is that even among those two groups, their beliefs are pretty liberal.
Around 70 percent of moderates (combining the moderate and moderate-to-liberal respondents) said Democrats are “too timid” in taxing the rich, taxing corporations, and cracking down on companies that break the law. A clear majority of moderates said the party is too timid in regulating Big Tech companies. Fewer than 5 percent of moderates said Democrats are “too aggressive” in their dealings with the rich, corporations, and Big Tech.
On other issues, from government spending to fighting climate change to LGBTQ rights, the overwhelming majority of moderate respondents said that Democrats’ positions are “about right.”
Overall, about 70 percent of moderate Democrats think the party’s economic policy positions are about right, compared to around 15 percent who think those stances are too liberal and another 15 percent who think they are too conservative. On social issues, about 65 percent of moderate Democrats are aligned with the party’s stances, while about 25 percent think the party’s positions are too liberal and 10 percent think they are too conservative.
[...]
To be sure, there are differences within the party. Liberals and progressives are (of course) even more left-wing on all of these issues. In the TNR survey, a whopping 63 percent of progressives think Democrats are too conservative on economic issues. (Only about 15 percent of moderates think that.) Ninety-three percent of progressives think Democrats are too timid about taking on the rich.
There are also demographic differences. The party’s moderate bloc has more African Americans, people without college degrees, people age 50–65, and people with family incomes below $50,000 than the party overall. The progressives are younger, whiter, richer, and more educated than the broader party.
And none of these surveys asked respondents about defunding police departments, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, canceling education debt, and other firmly left-wing positions that might have shown a bigger gap between progressives and moderates and more outright opposition from moderates.
But the overall picture is one where even the most moderate Democrats aren’t clamoring for a more aggressively centrist or conservative Democratic Party.
This data has important implications. Politicians associated with the party’s center-left wing, such as new governors Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, often take populist and progressive actions. That’s probably because that’s where their voters are. Sherrill and Spanberger are cracking down on ICE’s conduct in their states because that’s what even moderate Democrats want. Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, who has also positioned himself as a moderate and is considering a 2028 presidential run, is warning corporations currently collaborating with the Trump administration that Democrats will break them up if they get back into power. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico is also courting moderates by attacking the wealthy.
The party’s growing liberalism doesn’t mean that Ocasio-Cortez will cruise to the 2028 nomination. What it means is that taking some progressive stands, particularly on economic issues, is probably a necessity for even 2028 candidates, such as Governors Andy Beshear and Josh Shapiro, who are trying to appeal to moderate voters. And more progressive hopefuls, such as Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Ro Khanna, have a real chance to win the nomination if they can convince moderate voters that they could win a general election.
A moderate Democrat in 2026 is different from the moderate Democrats of the Clinton or Obama eras.
the edexcel a level politics examiner is gonna be sooooo confused when i begin my socialism essay with 'A spectre is haunting Third Way Socialism—the spectre of homosexuality.'
Why does the mainstream media keep depicting lunatic-right Republicans and normal Democrats as equidistant from the center?
With the final passage of the debt ceiling deal, Democrats got off easier than one might have expected, given that it was a deal between a mainstream Democratic president and a Republican House in thrall to the lunatic far right. In drastic contrast to the scorched-earth budget bill initially passed by the Republican-controlled House, the cuts were about par for the course in a divided government; and they spare the country a repeat of this debt-hostage ordeal for two years.
However, much of the media played the agreement as a compromise between two equal extremes. The New York Times story about the House passage of the deal included this astonishing sentence: "With both far-right and hard-left lawmakers in revolt over the deal, it fell to a bipartisan coalition powered by Democrats to push the bill over the finish line, throwing their support behind the compromise in an effort to break the fiscal stalemate that had gripped Washington for weeks."
Think about that for a moment. There is no doubt that Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar et al. are far-right by any definition, as white supremacists, Christian nationalists, election deniers, and nihilists on fiscal policy.
But no Democrats in the House can fairly be described as hard left. Those who voted against the deal included moderate liberals such as Joaquin Castro, mainstream progressives like Rosa DeLauro and Jan Schakowsky, as well as self-described democratic socialists including Cori Bush and AOC. But none of them are "hard left," which suggests anti-democratic, any more than Franklin Roosevelt was hard left.
The Times coverage reinforces a narrative of false equivalence that the media keeps repeating, with lazy catchphrases like "partisan bickering." It also plays into the hands of corrupt No Labels and Third Way types, who promote the idea that the best course for the republic is to split the difference between neofascists and a normal mainstream Democratic Party and president.
Big media, obsessed as it is with the appearance of fair and balanced coverage, took years to give itself permission to accurately describe Donald Trump with the impolite word "liar." But its treatment of the two parties as in any sense symmetrical is far more insidious than using euphemisms to characterize Trump’s lies.
Our friend Peter Dreier, whose observations inspired this post, points out that by any reasonable definition, "even the most left-oriented Democrats (AOC, Bush, Bowman, Raskin, Jayapal) are not extremists. They are shades of social democrats. They are pro-union, pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-LGBT equality, pro-Green New Deal, pro-progressive taxation. But the most right-wing Republicans are extremists and reactionaries."
You know the consequences of leprosy. It’s a slow, horrible death sentence. With no cure.
Because it’s so contagious, society demands that you separate yourself from everyone else. So you don’t spread it. With other lepers as your only company. It seems like an easy road to despair. Or worse.
Which means there’s a strong temptation to cover up the signs of leprosy. To ignore the danger. So you can be with other people. Friends and family. Try to have a normal life. Even though it means risking their lives.
It’s an “either/or” trap. It traps us into thinking that if we don’t do one thing, then we have to do the other.
Which makes the actions of the leper so remarkable.
The leper ignores both options of the “either/or” that he’s stuck in. And chooses a third way. The best possible third way. Going to God.
If this dynamic – of an “either/or” trap that pushes us into thinking that if we don’t do one thing, then we have to do the other – seems familiar to us? It should.
Social media provides us with some of the most obvious examples, but our lives are loaded with it.
Why? Because it’s one of the Enemy’s most over-used sucker plays.
And we fall for it. All. The Time. C.S. Lewis explains,
“The devil always sends errors into the world in pairs – pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worst.
You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.
But do not let us be fooled.
We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.”
Something to keep in mind. Whenever we’re loading up to go off on “those people.”
