COMING SOON: THE FOURTH WAY
Mark Steyn says American conservatives
must lighten up a little if they want to succeed
New Hampshire TONY Blair's 'Third Way' club met in Berlin the other day. Except it's no longer the 'Third Way' club, but the 'Conference on Progressive Governance for the 21st Century'. And it's no longer Tony Blair's. According to the official explanation, Tony decided to skip the event to spend quality time bonding with baby Leo. A conference on 'Progressive Governance' can't provide crèche facilities?
Anyway, having thrown out Tony's baby, the conference was left slopping around in a lot of tepid, murky Blairy bathwater starting with that name. Maybe it looks bet- ter in the original German. Bill Clinton pro- fessed himself disappointed by the new label. 'I like the Third Way because it's sort of easy to remember,' he said. Canada's Jean Chretien had his own suggestion: 'I am da radical centre!' he said, beaming. 'Da Third Way is, in reality, da Canadian Way,' he added, borrowing from a column of mine in these pages a few months back in which I argued that that lunatic Blair was turning Britain into Canada. Still, if you were to hold a conference on the 'Canadian Way', my bet is that Clinton, Schroder, Jospin and the rest would be pleading that they were needed round at the Blairs to help Tony with the nappy cream. Indeed, Canada was initially considered so irrele- vant to the Third Way that Chretien was left off the list of participants and had to beg Clinton to wangle him an invite. That meant that various others had to be admit- ted, such as the New Zealand Labour Prime Minister, Helen Clark, which in turn meant those excluded from even the expanded guest list were even more miffed, such as the widely admired Norwegian Social Democratic Prime Minister, Mr or, indeed, Ms . . . well, come on, you name him, or her, if you're so up on these things: I got the name of the New Zealand gal, which is more than Dubya could manage. My point is that, without the cheesy glam- our of Blair, and with Clinton not entirely at ease among a bunch of Monsieurs and Senors he'd never heard of, it was even harder to see what the Third Way is all about. There were unreconstructed social- ists from France, economic illiterates from South Africa, ambivalent social democrats from Germany and an American President who's now taken up with gusto the Reagan `Star Wars' system that the Left spent the Eighties sneering at as a right-wing mad- man's fantasy. The only thing this constella- tion of parties of the Left had in common was that they weren't parties of the Right. On the other hand, that seemed to be their principal selling-point to the electorate.
So what does it take to get the conserva- tive movement back in the driving seat? In the New Yorker, Fareed Zakaria has been offering some suggestions. I've met Mr Zakaria, a dapper young conservative intel- lectual, just the once — at a conference appropriately enough on the future of con- servatism. As befits the managing editor of a heavyweight journal like Foreign Affairs, he gave a sober analysis of postwar geopo- litical trends. 'Isn't he wonderful?' whis- pered Mrs Thatcher to me afterwards. When it came to my turn, I did 15 minutes of knockabout. If Mrs Thatcher thought I was wonderful, she kept it to herself. So it comes as something of a surprise that Mr Zakaria's new advice to American conservatives is: lighten up. Conservatives, he says, are too sour, too strident, to° Sodom-and-Gomorrah obsessing to see that in America things have never been better. The economy's booming, the commies went belly up, crime's down, unemployment's at an all-time low, even the abortion rate s falling. And all conservatives like the for- mer education secretary Bill Bennett want to do is talk about how we're all spiralling further down into a pit of depravity.
Hmm. Zakaria has evidently found pro- longed exposure to America's social conser- vatives somewhat wearing. There are no teal British equivalents to someone like plan Keyes, the African-American fulminator still hanging on in the Republican primary eon- test against Dubya. Keyes bounds on stage, warms the crowd up with a little light apoca- lyptic banter — 'My friends, America stands today on the brink of the abyss' — and gets gloomier from there. To be honest, rin brink-of-the-abyss man myself. But Zakaria right: moaning on about it is no way to get elected. When 'the brink of the abyss' runs up against 'America's best tomorrows are still ahead of us', it's no contest. Zakaria's thesis is that the GOP should write off the Gingrich Congress as a disaster and learn from the 31 states, comprising 70 Per cent of the population, which live under Republican governors. Fair enough. My only quarrel is the governors he chooses to admire. He advocates a conservatism that is accommodating on abortion and homosex- uality' and 'willing to re-examine conserva- tive orthodoxy and cast aside debris from another era, as George Pataki, of New York, did recently when he proposed tough gun-control laws'. Governor Pataki, like the New Jersey governor, Christie Whitman, is Zalcaria's kind of Republican: a fiscal con- servative who's not hung up on abortion, gays and guns. But the trouble with fiscal conservatives who disavow social conser- vatism is that they usually wind up disavow- ing fiscal conservatism, too. Since fulfilling her first campaign pledge to cut taxes, Mrs Whitman has drifted aimlessly. So, too, have Pataki and Massachusetts' 'moderate' Republican governors, Bill Weld and his successor Paul Cellucci.
And what does it mean to be 'accommo- dating' on abortion and homosexuality? On the latter point, most of us are relatively relaxed, at least when compared with, say, Uganda's Yoweri Museveni. Since his demand that all homosexuals be arrested Went down badly with the US state depart- ment, Mr Museveni has moderated his posi- ,d°11 and called for a return to the good old uaYs when 'these few individuals were either ignored or speared and killed by their par- ents'. By contrast, most Republicans would be willing to go along with the fax I received 'tom the White House the other day: 'Now, therefore, I, William J. Clinton, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitu- tion and laws of the United States, do here- by proclaim June 2000 as Gay and Lesbian elide Month.' God almighty, not a whole in„ th, I sighed, but quickly put aside the `nought as 'mean-spirited'. encourage all Americans,' continued the rresident, 'to observe this month with appro- priateiate programs, ceremonies and activities that celebrate our diversity and recognise the vied arid lesbian Americans whose many and :lied contributions have enriched our toatienal life.' I called Patty, my town clerk, see what 'programs, ceremonies and activ- :Li ;, es' she'd lined up for the month but she wd they'd got nothing planned. Still, if it merely a question of putting up with a pie of parades and the odd come-as- Ju"s`u-ravourite-Village-Person party, most of be„..W°uld string along just for a quiet life. But nieulg 'accommodating' on homosexuality entity signing on for gay marriage, gay par- and all gay education in elementary schools, all the rest. Likewise, 'accommodation' ab°rtion means the 'moderate' Vermont even can senator, Jim Jeffords, supporting some Partial-birth abortion', which strikes 8e of us as Partial-birth infanticide. Besides, Zakaria's attack on the pessimist Gocip seems curiously ill-timed when the s just turned up the sunniest Republi- can since Reagan. The overwhelming impression of Dubya is of a man at ease with himself. And a man that affable can get away with an awful lot: one of his bona fide legislative accomplishments as governor is a law permitting Texans to carry concealed weapons to church. A few weeks back, Al Gore was trying to make something of it: `Pistols have no place in pews' — which is tricky if you say it quickly, but fortunately Gore drones at a consistent three words per minute. Anyway, it didn't work: he just sounded like a hysterical pill. So here's my prediction: in five years' time, Dubya will be hosting international gatherings of the `Fourth Way', the new progressive conser- vatism, combining the saccharine rhetoric of Clinton with the concealed-weapons policies of Jesse Helms.
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