In the waning years of his administration, Bill Clinton seized on the idea of the third way to frame his achievements in office, anxious to be remembered for something other than scandal. The notion of a third way a policy and politics threaded between the market and old style social democracy is inherently ambiguous. But in the United States, which never embraced many of the main tenets of postwar social democracy, charting a third way is especially murky. Some versions of the third way envision a more ambitious role for government than that of the American federal government even in the heyday of postwar liberalism; others propose that government do considerably less.
Part of Clinton’s political genius–his election in an era when Democrats appeared doomed to lose presidential contests and his against-all-odds reelection and impeachment survivallay in his ability to be many things to many people. His initial electoral rhetoric excited the hopes of both traditional Democrats and the selfproclaimed new Democrats. In the end, however, Clinton presided over the implementation of very constricted version of the third way whose short-term political and market successes mask the limits of its institutionalized policy achievements.
With the exception of the expanded earned income tax credit and the increased minimum wage, the administration did little to address the sharp inequality that has become the hallmark of the American road to prosperity. Despite much talk about job training, it failed to create elements of the “intelligent and active” welfare state described by Frank Vandenbroucke in this volume. Indeed, it is striking how much the administration ultimately drew on only two policy tools tax expenditures and minor regulation for all its initiatives after the health care debacle.
Likewise, Clinton’s longer term political accomplishments coalitional as well as ideological remained sharply circumscribed. Clinton’s greatest political contribution was to block the Republican right’s bid for power. But he did not press forward with a new inclusive social agenda. By moving to the right on welfare, crime, and urban issues, he helped inoculate Democrats from attack around these racially-driven wedge issues but this rightward movement came with significant costs to racial minorities and the poor. Nor was Clinton successful at revitalizing a new public philosophy. After twelve years of Republican attack on government; at best, the portrayal of government as menace has been replaced by the sense that government is largely irrelevant.
This article assesses the Clinton administration in light of third way approaches toward a new progressive politics. I begin by defending the claim that such progressive aspirations can be discerned amidst the inchoate but often deliberately hybrid approach to politics and policy embodied in the administration’s early initiatives. I then examine how basic features of American politics and institutional organization made progressive strategies so difficult to pursue and made a tepid centrism such an attractive alternative. I conclude by identifying the strategic approach that progressive politics now needs to pursue and I consider some steps that move in that direction.
Clinton's campaign rhetoric and early policy proposals can be read in two ways: one is a centrist approach designed primarily to inoculate Democrats against criticism on issues of values and "big government." But a more ambitious and transformative strategy can also be discerned, one that embraced activist government but sought to establish new premises for public action and to create new mechanisms to achieve its goals.
1) To counter distrust of the federal government, policy would work through market mechanisms or the states and it would "reinvent" government;
2.) To counter raciallycharged "wedge" issues, such as crime and welfare, policy would set clear expectations for individual responsibility and impose sanctions on bad behavior. It would, however, provide resources to assist people if they lived up to their part of this bargain. The President encapsulated this bargain in the aphorism, "If you work, you shouldn't be poor."
3.) To counter arguments that social spending was too expensive, policy would highlight the long-term benefits of "investing" in people so that they could be productive workers and citizens.
This approach to policy can be distinguished from two Democratic alternatives. It most visibly departed from "old Democratic" policy orientations in its forthright embrace of responsibility and expectations for individual behavior as conditions for beneficiaries. But it also envisioned a different relationship between government and the market than traditional New Deal policies. “Old Democratic" policies had combined a social strategy of strengthening labor plus providing compensation (such as unemployment insurance) for market losers.
Growing difficulties with these policies, their inability to improve the lot of most workers, and their failure to reconnect workers to the labor market lay behind Clinton's alternative. Clinton adopted an aggressive market-oriented internationalism, evidenced in his support for the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA). And instead of passive compensation, Clinton championed policies that would actively assist individuals in making the transitions that markets made necessary.
This approach also differed from the centrist "new Democratic" orientation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Formed by a group of moderate southerners in the mid-1980s as an alternative to the "big government" of northern liberal Democrats, the DLC embraced themes of individual responsibility and advocated using market mechanisms rather than government wherever possible.iii But its agenda did not emphasize public investment or the need to increase benefits along with responsibility. The DLC was concerned with repositioning the Democrats on the existing political and policy spectrum, not with changing existing conceptions of "left and right."
The expansive version of Clinton’s strategy aimed to reinvigorate the Democratic coalition by shifting the axes of debate to overcome the recurring divisions over race and values that had blocked major Democratic social policy initiatives since the 1960s and to revamp government programs to address widespread public concern about new economic and social conditions. The broad social programs would promote a commonality of interests among the poor and the middle class while the emphasis on values would remove a crucial wedge issue dividing them. This underlying political aim is evident in the central priority given to health reform, which was designed as a popular security-oriented program that would benefit both the poor and the middle class and secure an ongoing role for government.
With the failure of health reform and the election of the Republican Congress in 1994, Clinton effectively dropped the transformative agenda, while retaining much of the rhetoric. Under the guidance of his new advisor Dick Morris, the administration instead pursued a centrist “triangulation strategy” to paint himself as a reasonable middle between the extremes of congressional Democrats and Republicans. Politically, this meant appealing to the middle class on terms that limited the government role. It essentially ignored the inclusive aspect of the earlier approach, eliminating the less well-off and bothersome questions about inequality from the political equation.
In policy, this switch was evident in such crudely transparent ploys as the “Middle Class Bill of Rights” announced soon after the 1994 election tax credits designed to assist the middle class in sending their children to college. Clinton’s second term was far more noted for what his Labor Secretary Robert Reich called “tiny symbolic gestures” (TSGs), such as backing school uniforms, than for new third way initiatives.
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