the elusive Third Way

update: Heather Hurlburt, who has a place in my heart for “War Torn,” the brilliant piece she wrote in the Washington Monthly in the wake of Democratic losses in November 2002, has just posted a link to bloggingheads.tv webisode in which she has a conversation with Eli Lake about the differences between “neocons” and “Kosovo Democrats.” That’s the kind of Third Way for Democrats that I call for below. Good luck to all of us!]

I’ve written many times that I am not a politico, and it’s true—I’m uninterested in party politics. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about politics [which puts me in the minority, according to the economist Bryan Caplan]. It just means that I see an inevitable, and tragic, tension between politics and political philosophy.

The tragic component of this tension was recetly highlighted in a New York Sun review of Lesley Chamberlain’s Lenin’s Private War [which I also wrote about here]. Adam Kirsch writes:

Why focus on the deportation of a few dozen intellectuals, when the years before and after the voyage of the Philosophy Steamer witnessed so many deaths? Indeed, the men whom Lenin selected for expulsion — the expulsanty, as they were called — could even be considered lucky. If they had stayed in the Soviet Union, they would certainly have died in Stalin’s purges 15 years later. Even in 1922, Lenin’s decision to banish these potential threats to the state, rather than torture, imprison, or kill them, was unusually mild. …

What these thinkers and writers represented, [Chamberlain] argues, was a vital tradition of spiritual idealism, inherited from the 19th century, which could have sustained a moral opposition to communism. “Though they could never have identified themselves that way, the 1922 expellees were the first dissidents from Soviet totalitarianism,” Ms. Chamberlain writes.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with communism, by the way—it sounds lovely. Or it did to me, anyway, when I was young. (And to my father when he was young, and to my grandfather before him. But that’s a story for another day.) No. For Lenin, the threat came from those intellectuals who could—and did—poke holes in his One Explanation for Everything. So devoted was Vlad Lenin to this one explanation that the ideal of communism quickly devolved into totalitarianism ideology of Communism.

Kirsch continues:

What made the men of the Philosophy Steamer objects of suspicion to Lenin, Ms. Chamberlain argues, was that they represented a “third way” for Russia, between the obstinate old regime and the ruthless new one. She believes that religious idealists such as Berdyaev and Frank were the closest thing Russia could find to genuine liberals. The peculiarities of Russian history meant that the language of secular, rights-based liberalism could never find purchase there. The legacy of the Enlightenment was hijacked, instead, by revolutionary Marxists, whose atheism and materialism carried certain Western tendencies to a nihilistic extreme. This helps to explain why Lenin could appear, to Western sympathizers, like the heir to Voltaire and Madison: He, too, was out to emancipate his people from an obscurantist, priest-ridden, feudal regime. [e.a.]

It’s a sad story, and it keeps repeating itself. Those of us who know the story because we have participated in the play—know it in our bones, in our guts, in our hearts, in our collective memory, in our own bitter experiences—sit back and watch the train wreck. We know that the maximalist and absolutist approach in politics, whether it comes from the left or the right, is the death of the rest of us. Often enough, it’s the physical death of us. More likely, though, it’s the death of hope.

[Hitchens isn't] waging a war at all, he’s sitting at a desk writing magazine articles and Slate columns and drinking just like the rest of us.

Young Mr. Yglesias, gleefully trying to smear Hitchens, was dead wrong in this assessment. Christopher Hitchens most certainly is waging war—in the realm of ideas, in the realm of political philosophy. And so are some bloggers, such as Wretchard, of the Belmont Club, who notes today:

The biggest challenge of the campaign in Iraq is not reconciling the Sunnis with Shias; but reconciling the Blue and Red; in creating a consensus foreign policy between the Republicans and the Democrats. Iraq is like Vietnam in this. It is not about a war in a far-away country. It is also about a struggle in America.

I agree with all but one thing. There also needs to be a consensus foreign policy among the Democrats, not just between Republicans and Democrats—that’s the bleeding wound of the culture war: the intra-party way on the left.

I also note that Hill—ignoring the netroots’ continued calls for bitter partisanship—has just billed herself (get it? hardy har har) as the principled compromiser who works within the system:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York unveiled a new stump speech on Sunday, outlining the “four big goals” she would have as president and saying she was willing to “work within the system” and make “principled compromises” to achieve them.

Praising the leadership styles of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, Mrs. Clinton described herself as a pragmatist and an alliance-builder. …

“I want to work within the system,” Mrs. Clinton said. “You can’t pretend the system doesn’t exist.”

Is that a Third Way? I dunno, but it looks like she wants to go there. Is anyone surprised?