The third way
Dionne, E. J. Jr.
tal and physician reimbursements can be reduced, but that reduction, one way or the other, will be passed along in diminished patient care. We are left then with a slowing of the growth of...
...If you want to know how much has changed, consider these comments from Robert Hue, the national secretary of the once hard-line French Communist party...
...But Giddens--the director of the London School of Economics who is thought of as British Prime Minister Tony Blair's favorite social philosophertries to show that the third way is more than a marketing slogan...
...9 1999, Washington Post Writers Group J.J...
...It's worse news for Israel, which sorely needs healing rather than further fraying of its tense social fabric...
...Individualism and choice are supposed to stop abruptly at the boundaries of the family and national identity, where tradition must stand intact...
...The Communists have broken with the statist vision of things...
...But as the struggles of the new German government show, the road there is still under construction...
...Is there a way out...
...The social philosopher Anthony GidCommonweal 8 April 9, 1999dens explains this transformation in The Third Way, his important recent book...
...as prime minister he has managed to steer them into a ditch...
...As for the global economy, Giddens sees its expansion as removing more and more activity from the regulatory reach of individual nations...
...To lend a spurious credence to the cynical, supposedly "prolife" line, Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society, is now touting euthanasia and suicide as the best antidote for the Medicare problem...
...In the politics of democracies, interests and passions intervene...
...As the May 17 balloting approaches, however, the campaign unfolding in Israel does not resemble a foreign-policy referendum so much as a showdown in a long-simmering cultural war...
...They are, though, likely to get most of the present technologies, at least those that remain affordable, that is, are not expensively upgraded...
...If that word can get around, there would be far fewer worries about the future of--a necessarily stripped down--Medicare...
...We are left then with a slowing of the growth of benefits, which translates into a slowing of technological innovation, as the only serious and decisive option for the future...
...It's good news for Netanyahu, though...
...That was brought home in the recent battle between Germany's Social Democratic chancellor, the centrist Gerhard Schroeder, and his left-wing finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine...
...Rather, the vote will turn on the angry religious, ideological, and ethnic divisions that have strained Israel's body politic for decades...
...The Paris daily, Le Monde, noted archly that it was pure "coincidence" that at the moment Lafontaine quit, Anthony Giddens was visiting Bonn to unveil the German edition of The Third Way-of which Schroeder is a public fan...
...Center-left parties trying to calibrate market efficiencies against concerns for social justice are not working in some sanitized laboratory...
...By recasting the vote as a contest of ethnic and social resentments, though, he stands a very good chance of reelection...
...The strongest critique of the third way is that its careful balancing act sounds too good to be true...
...That is what most Americans seem to expect of Medicare...
...Netanyahu opposed the so-called Oslo accords at the time...
...More of the future elderly will go into old age in reasonably good health and have a greater life expectancy than any other generation in human history--regardless of the availability of medical care or acute-care medicine paid for by Medicare...
...They won't get it...
...Not at all...
...Utopias and searing critiques of the status quo are exciting...
...Not if one is looking for a way to keep Medicare services at their present level, or to keep Medicare payroll taxes low, or to pursue an unlimited technological progress to be limitlessly reimbursed, or to allow the elderly a full range of attractive choices at public expense to pay for their health care...
...Not only is this a mean-spirited response to a serious issue, it is simply a fallacy to claim that a perceived need to reduce Medicare benefits is equivalent to saying the elderly are a burden or of less worth than any other age group...
...But Giddens is alive to the need for certain social protections if what you desire is a risk-taking society...
...Few people make it to ninety by spending much time in hospitals having their lives saved...
...Giddens's welfare state would also cooperate extensively with community institutions that are independent of government...
...An election decided on issues of war and peace would almost certainly end Netanyahu's career...
...Unless they can pay for it out of their own pockets, they will surely be deprived of some expensive, and probably beneficial, modes of future medical progress...
...It's a tribute to Netanyahu's prodigious political skills, supporters and critics agree, that he's managed to change the subject so handily...
...Now if this were just an unpleasant reality that Americans would have to get used to, we could expect disagreements, evasions, and offsetting optimistic proposals...
...To encourage citizens to be "responsible risk-takers/' he writes, "people need protections when things go wrong" and "also the material and moral capabilities to move through major periods of transition in their lives...
...The upshot is we shouldn't dismantle the welfare state, but rather reconstruct it into a "social investment state" to provide "resources for risk-taking...
...But the view from Europe is that to win elections, parties of the left promising those protections have to prove they're comfortable with the market and accept its disciplines...
...A characteristic of politics in most of the well-off democracies is that we know far better what we don't want than what we do...
...That's the reason every party in every country is talking about education...
...These arguments are certainly significant," he continues, "but they fall short of the more fundamental disagreements of the past...
...Goldberg ISRAEL'S HOUDINI Netanyahu's likely triumph ~ hen Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dissolved parliament last January and called for early elections, he seemed to be setting the stage for what would amount to a decisive referendum on the future of the Middle East peace process...
...The "third way" is worth finding, and Giddens makes an honorable effort to draw us a map...
...Cut from the same wormwood, they will dance well together...
...This is bad news for America and the West, which have a strong interest in seeing the Middle East achieve some sort of stability...
...Electorates don't fully trust the global economy and want protection from its fluctuations...
...The trends in most democratic countries are toward moderate governments and away from pure free-market parties...
...No one any longer has any alternatives to capitalismmthe arguments that remain concern how far, and in what ways, capitalism should be governed and regulated...
...The core problem with contemporary conservatism, Giddens says, is an inconsistency at the heart of its creed...
...The election, it now appears, will not be decided on urgent questions of how to proceed in talks with the Palestinians, much less on the still-disputed principle of whether to continue the peace process at all...
...the usual, that is...
...Should we therefore feel sorry for the baby boomers as they begin retiring...
...q"he Communists are not adversaries of the market," he declared last week...
...Fair enough...
...Education and economic level, together with a lifetime of good health habits, matter most of all...
...That may explain some of the listlessness of contemporary politics...
...But some groups, such as the National Right to Life Committee and the International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force, are nastily treating any talk of cutbacks for the elderly as nothing less than the next logical--and predictable---step after euthanasia itself as a way to get rid of the burdensome...
...Commonweal 9 April 9, 1999...
...Figuring out what those are and whether they can be enforced across national boundaries is one of the central political problems of our time...
...Giddens is perceptive on the thorny question of risk versus security...
...No other age group gets such benefits at all...
...The standard account is that if government provides too much security, no one will want to take risks...
...Imagine: Karl Marx dining with Milton Friedman...
...In what he calls "depoliticized global space," there are no rules establishing "rights and obligations...
...The rest of us should look elsewhere...
...But nothing is more dissolving of tradition than the 'permanent revolution' of market forces...
...France's Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin caught the mood when he declared that he favored a "market economy" but opposed a "market society...
...Lafontaine resigned, protesting that "the heart isn't traded on the stock market yet...
...We want capitalism, but want it tempered by other values---equity, community and compassion, for starters...
...They will benefit, as their grandparents did not, from their already improved health status, mainly a function of public health improvements...
...Why...
...Three-fourths of Israelis support the peace accords with the Palestinians that were initialed in Oslo in 1993 by the government of the assassinated prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin...
...But where Lafontaine saw a socially minded heart beating, German business saw a statist cancer growing...
...But why should progressive parties pretend to have answers they don't, or attempt to build systems that can't work...
...Its "devotion to the free market on the one hand, and to the traditional family and nation on the other, is self-contradictory...
...The third way idea is seductive because it seems to represent realism with a heart...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 7
