The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

On the eve of the millennium, the Third Way leaders, among them Clinton and Blair, Germany’s Gerhard Schröder, France’s Lionel Jospin and Italy’s Massimo D’Alema, met at a grand conference in Florence – a fitting Tuscan setting for such a celebratory gathering. Across the Western world, the new left had ushered in the dawn of the classless society. People talked of a post-ideological age. The Third Way had remade politics. Lip service was still paid to the blue-collar worker. But the new left’s chosen politics was a form of anti-politics in which ‘whatever works’ had apparently replaced ideology. Beneath them was the void. ‘I was never really in politics,’ Blair told the BBC in 2000. ‘I never grew up as a politician. I don’t feel myself a politician even now.’ All of which would have been fine if the blue-collar classes had disappeared. Many of their old jobs certainly did. But when the economic tide went out in 2008, it suddenly became clear how many people had been swimming naked.