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Has the Left Stalled Out?
With the French voters giving their Center Right its biggest victory in three decades,
the talk among the trend-watchers in Washington is Europe's shift to its right. No longer associated with Tony
Blair and his buddy Bill, the Third Way has lost its momentum. Once again, the Left is clearly seen by European
citizens as weak and feuding incompetents who advocate endless meddling by the state in the lives of the law-abiding
while crime rises unchecked. Plenty of traditionally Socialist French voters rejected every variant of the Left
- Socialist, Communist or Green - that they were offered.
Columnist Rosemary Righter summarizes the current mood this way: Third Way Socialism is no longer a brand that
sells. French voters positively want lower taxes, more realism, less street crime, a reduction in political correctness
and a stop to bureaucratic interference in their lives. They are sick to death of Left wing sermons. They want
a government that works - and that listens to what they want rather than telling them what they ought to want.
Across the Continent, voters are looking for politicians who do not pretend to fix everything; for those ready
to unfix things that the State should never have fixed in the first place and for reforms that create jobs and
growth.
Just how important the trend might become is illustrated by the June 20th meeting in Madrid of Europe's finance
ministers. To highlight the impossible situation being inherited from the French Center Left by the new regime,
the ministers agreed to exempt France from meeting their target of a balanced budget by 2004.
When the pact was created a few years ago, at the height of the Third Way palaver, it was sold by France and Germany
as a means to control the traditionally spendthrift governments such as Italy so that fiscally responsible countries
such as Germany would not have to bail out the imprudent. Originally criticized for its lack of flexibility, the
pact has now been subjected by the ministers to "intelligent interpretation." That is code, says The
Economist, for "let's relax the rules." As has been so amply proven in the past, papering over EU differences
slides by today at the expense of increasingly bitter arguments tomorrow. France has already called for just a
year or two more to get things in order.
As the finance ministers met, the stock markets around the world remained volatile and the dollar continued to
lose ground against the Euro. Investors seemed to have little confidence in American corporate performance or in
the American consumer. Retail sales figures continued to be unexciting as are the prospects for corporate profits.
The belief still is that a mild recession would only produce a modest recovery but a steady upward direction would
help spark initial growth in other economies. The world is telling the United States "don't fizzle now."
They key question for the dollar, says The Financial Times of London, is whether the dollar is now in a medium
downtrend or whether it is merely in another pause for breath in a longer term rally. Michael Lewis, senior economist
for Deutche Bank points out a paradox. Growth expectations for 2002 are now higher than they were prior to September
11th but both the dollar and U.S. equities are falling. The reason is that growth is seen to be of low quality.
"The growth," he says, "has been dependent on inventory adjustments and government spending rather
than capital investment and rising domestic demand. There is a sense that the recovery will be short on profits."
Part of what the market awaits is clarity on the war. Three simple but brutal facts control the situations. As
defined by columnist David Horowitz, they are "Our enemy is able to penetrate our borders and strike us in
our homes; he can strike us with weapons of mass destruction; and he has made clear his intention is not to change
our policies or to force our withdrawal, but to obliterate and destroy our civilization." Destruction of the
heretic hegemon America, Horowitz concludes, is the shared goal of the international radical Left and the radical
portion of Islam. For both, our capitalist and modern civilization is Dar Al-Harb, the world of darkness.
What will we do, not what will we say? That is the unanswered issue that suppresses confidence and clouds any assessment
of the future. There have been voter judgments taken in Austria, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, The Netherlands, Ireland
and now France. The German vote comes this fall. The movement so far has been towards competent governance, the
hallmark of European Center Right parties.
In the United States, recently released census data clearly indicates a trend away from radical alternative identity
politics (the hyphenated American) and a return to the shared ideal of an American Dream. Scholar Joel Perlman
says that the common spirit comes from old natural forces. Assimilation from intermarriage, education and upward
mobility returns the nation to its historic notion of commonality. This fall's elections may identify just who
misses the trend. For most Americans, it's towards a renewed national understanding that they want to be proud
of their separate ancestry but also proud of their common future. The Census reports that the trend is towards
the fast-growing group of un-hyphenated Americans.
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