A New Third Way: The Third Liberalism

Karl Muth suggests a way out of the polarised gridlock that has come to define Occidental liberal democracy.

When I was a teenager – during the Blair government and the Clinton administration – there was much talk of a “third way.” The times were not so different from now, with gridlocked partisanship in both Washington and Westminster. I argue today the way out is not a “third way” between the two major parties in either country, but a way around both of them – by uniting the most extreme factions of each. I call this new third way the Third Liberalism, a new kind of neoclassical liberalism beyond “neoliberalism” and the doctrines and narratives with which it has become entangled.

There was much debate about budget shortfalls, particularly at the municipal level (arguably not as serious, however, as today’s financial crises in England’s second-tier cities and American municipalities like Detroit), and people worried the parties were squabbling ideologically whilst representing few, if any, voters’ interests. Like today, it was a time of prosperity, with a recovering stock market but stagnant wages – something that led to class warfare similar to what we see today, albeit with less rejoicing from the media.

I still believe in a third way. I do think there will be a third pole, and perhaps even a third party, and that it will be borne not from compromise between the two parties but from the extremes of each side. I am to the left of most of my “leftist” friends and to the right of most of my “conservative” friends. And there is a political loom being built here, on the periphery, to weave the fringe together into a fabric of formidable strength. The shuttle of that loom is the rhetoric of the neoliberal establishment at places like the glass-walled thinktanks, the University of Chicago, and RAND Corporation. But this, too, is changing.

When one holds this fabric up to a strong enough light, one sees there is a new breed of liberalism peeking through. An insurgency, if you will. I’m talking about a group of young people who are fed up with the level of government participation, intervention, surveillance, and tampering. I’m talking about people who have seen what the nanny state in Britain does, which is to successfully nanny only about as often as it drops babies on their heads. I’m talking about a generation in South London, North Philadelphia, the South Side of Chicago, and East Harlem that placed its faith in government and got nothing in return.

These are the new liberals. They are to the left of the Democrats in America but right of the Republicans, too, and simultaneously. They have the jigsaw pieces that coalitions are made of.

• The more left ones are in favour of abortion rights because they support a woman’s right to choose; the more right ones are in favour of abortion rights because they support getting the government out of the overregulation-of-healthcare business.

• The more left ones support Second Amendment rights to have firearms because they distrust the police and believe the only check on the police is an armed populace (particularly in African-American neighbourhoods in American cities); the more right ones are in favour of Second Amendment rights because they feel the government has overstepped the mark and regulated a fundamental right in ways that other fundamental rights (such as speech or association) could never be regulated.

• The more left ones are in favour of drugs legalisation, particularly marijuana but possibly also cocaine, because they see drug control legislation as a systematic way to incarcerate enormous numbers of nonviolent offenders of colour at staggering cost; the more right ones are in favour of drugs legalisation because they see the war on drugs as a second prohibition and realise that drugs gangs can be crushed by legalisation and the employment of market forces (there is no drugs cartel in the world that could compete with Marlboro marijuana or Coca-Cola cocaine or drugs delivered by Amazon Prime).

• The more left ones are in favour of dezoning or unzoning cities because they see zoning as a system for enforcement of the stratification and gentrification that has doomed areas of certain cities to be permanent ghettos; the more right ones are in favour of dezoning cities because they feel zoning is an unnecessary type of master planning and a barrier to investment in new projects due to the bureaucratic uncertainty it typically creates.

• The more left ones are in favour of open borders because they believe it is necessary to value rather than prosecute the contributions of immigrants in our societies; the more right ones are in favour of open borders because they see their own businesses and businesses they invest in struggling to find talented labour and observe that labour flourishing and prospering overseas because it is often too difficult to obtain a visa to the US or UK (this is particularly true in the case of high-skilled workers coming to the US for high-technology jobs or to the UK for finance jobs).

• Both tend to support smaller government and lower taxes. Those on the left resent paying a substantial portion of their tax money to pay for drone missions and overseas bases and government that spies on its own people; those on the right resent paying a substantial portion of their tax money to pay for social welfare programmes and government that spies on its own people.

• The more left ones are in favour of decreased surveillance as a matter of civil liberties and the right to do as one pleases in an open, liberal society without being watched at all times; the more right ones are in favour of decreased surveillance as a methodology for shrinking the intelligence-industrial complex, as an expression of the broader doctrine that a person should be able to behave lawfully in public or in private without government observation, and as part of the principle that no taxpayer should be asked to finance the invasion of his or her own privacy.

I could continue (the list of social issues on which the far-right and far-left agree is enormous and includes hot topics like equal marriage, which those on the left see as a civil rights issue while those on the right see defining marraige as being a government overreach). In fact, in a quick list I sketched whilst on a stroll this morning, I noted about forty points of policy agreement among my farthest-left and farthest-right friends. The reasons for these policy alignments may vary, but the policy outcomes each advocates for are strikingly similar.

I posit the reason this new “third way” has not yet evolved is there is no pipeline of credible candidates able to appeal to both extremes and illustrate that these once-extreme views are actually a new mainstream, a Third Liberalism (beyond neoliberalism), that must be claimed by its subscribers and broadcast to those drifting toward the edges – of which there are millions.

The time is now and the candidates are out there, somewhere, perhaps not even aware of the adventures ahead.