Third Way

In the mid- to late 20th century, politics tended to run on a either/or basis:

• Left/Right
• Socialist/Fascist
• Poor/Rich
• The working class/The upper class
• The ordinary man/the capitalist bastard

Well, you get the idea. Towards the end of the century, some bright spark (probably Tony Blair) decided that enough was enough, and that there had to be a Third Way. Indeed there was: straight down the middle. You might call it "Caring capitalism", or maybe prefer "Socialism with a grasp of economic reality". Whatever. Some say the Third Way is bunk. Some say it really works. Whats certain is that following a period of right wing dominance (the Thatcher/Reagan years), the Third Way enabled left-leaning parties to sweep to power across the West. Advocates included:

• Tony Blair (UK)
• Lionel Jospin (France)
• Bill Clinton (USA)
• Gerhard Schroeder (Germany)
• Ehud Barak (Israel)

Time will tell if the Third Way medicine provides a cure or just temporary relief. Clinton has fallen by the wayside. Barak never really did Third Way properly as he was hampered by coalition politicking and security problems. We shall see.

I managed to hack in to the top secret files of Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Finland. I found out that they use a shared program based on distributed databases where from they get guidelines to lead their party. It was revealed Schröder and Blair use the very same program in order to get advice how to cope with in political game.

The code below is the core of their program. Maybe it can be more easily understood if you remember that social democratic ideology has already reached it's utopia, culminating in Finland 1983 as Kalevi Sorsa, a former leader of the party put it: "Socialism doesn't get any better than this." The history since then has proved him right.

The whole source code can be downloaded from www.justdoit.gov and all questions should be sent to sdp@climax.gov

---

class ThirdWay {

   Situation current;   // class variable

   // constructor
   public ThirdWay( SDP perfect ) {
      current = ideologyToSituation( perfect );
   }

   //methods

   private action govern( Resources All ) { }   // empty method

   public Image populism( money lotsOf ) {
      Image img = new Image( lotsOf );
      img.clear();
      return( img );
   }

   private action getDirection( Utopia none ) {
      return( none.rnd );
   }

   public action stabilize( Utopia none ) {
      calmText = none.getOldRhetoric();
      calmText = distort( calmText );
      return( calmText );
   }

   public action getVotes() {
      while( true ) {
         moveToCenter( deny() );
      }
      return( null );
   }
}