One of the things I've really been slow to understand is the idea, first pointed out to me by Stuart Zechman, that people who call themselves "centrists" or "pragmatists" are not actually positioning themselves on the political spectrum. They are not "moderates' who fit somewhere between the marxists on the left and the authoritarians on the right.
Or, they are not somewhere in between an FDR liberal and a William Buckley conservative.
Instead they have an ideological commitment to, literally, a Third Way. They don't, like FDR, invite the bankers' hate. They embrace the banksters as fellow members of an meritocratic elite.
Likewise, they don't accept the either the movement conservative's belief that the government should play a role, like an American Taliban, incorporating evangelical Christian morality in the US legal system. Likewise, they don't accept the corporate right's rejection of the government's role in regulating industries for safety and efficacy.
Stuart summarizes:
Laissez-faire is bad, because markets and the state would still fight.
Liberalism is bad, because the state and markets would still fight.
Both sides' agendas are burdened by the intellectual chains of obsolete ideological dogma, while we Third Way, on the other hand, pragmatically recognize that history will inevitably occur in the exact manner as we predict.
Big government (increasingly global) must partner with big industry and finance (also increasingly global) to do what's best for everyone else. Capitalism can abide a reasonable limit; anybody who claims differently must be an old, suspicious Marxist.
For optimal productivity and growth, big government must first facilitate First World workers competing with Third World workers in a global labor market, or, rather, must facilitate big industry's unmitigated access to the cheapest labor on earth --wherever the most people are the most desperate for a buck, and their totalitarian or kleptocratic bureaucracies are willing to play along. It then must facilitate big industry's access to US consumer markets, which can be driven by big loads of individual debt on peoples' backs, which can be repackaged as securities, and sold by big finance to gullible sovereign wealth funds overseas and municipal workers' pension funds at home. As complex and breakable as that scheme sounds, the world's biggest insurer says this sort of system can go on forever, judging by the soundness of the financial products insured by institutional participants. Folks will increasingly work for less and less, mostly in health care services and advertising. It's for their own good. The workers', that is. Eventually. Once the Chinese and Indian populations have a stake in this gig, state war and violence will be obsolete. Huge military invasions and occupations will never happen again, while death and terror will be confined to sporadic fits of irrational, medieval Islamicist militancy, which will be crushed from twenty thousand feet in the air by legions of expensive, armed, flying robots. By the way, did you ever read "The World is Flat" by Tom Friedman? It's an amazingly prescient book; fascinating.
While you don't read much about this ideological view, it dominates the ruling elite of th Democratic party. This is largely because this attitude is shared by the media in the Village. In fact, as you watch the revolving door between the print/cable media and our elected officials and their staffs, you come to realize they are the same people.
And they are doing this in plain sight. In his post, Stuart links to one of their planning documents:
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