I've been thinking of the way that Third Way politics has been making an on- the-ground difference. The best that I could come with was the way it was being articulated explored and implemented by Noel Pearson and his associates at Cape Yorke to improve the conditions of life for indigeneous people.
Just by chance I happened to be reading a book called Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. This text charts critical indigneous writing since the so-called Aboriginal Renaissance of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Noel Pearson is not even mentioned! Yet this text charts critical writing by Aboriginal intellectuals beyond creative or aesthetic writing.
In a key speech Pearson outlines the problems indigenous people find themselves confronted by:
"The nature and extent of our problems are horrendous.... suffice to say that our society is in a terrible state of dysfunction.....In my consideration of the breakdown of values and relationships in our society - I have come to the view that there has been a significant change in the scale and nature of our problems over the past thirty years. Our social life has declined even as our material circumstances have improved greatly since we gained citizenship. I have also come to the view that we suffered a particular social deterioration once we became dependent on passive welfare.....our descent into passive welfare dependency has taken a decisive toll on our people, and the social problems which it has precipitated in our families and communities have had a cancerous effect on our relationships and values. Combined with our outrageous grog addiction and the large and growing drug problem amongst our youth, the effects of passive welfare have not yet steadied. Our social problems have grown worse over the course of the past thirty years. The violence in our society is of phenomenal proportion and of course there is inter-generational transmission of the debilitating effects of the social passivity which our passive economy has induced."
The emphasis on the dead end of passive social welfare is a classic Third Way perspective. In contrast, Blacklines devotes a page or so to the welfare issue under 'welfare corporatism' without going on to mention Pearson's critical response. The postcolonial authors in Blacklines are more interested in identity politics, land rights, and neo-colonial practices after the dismantling of colonialism in settler societies. They argue that colonial ways of knowing have never been dismantled, and are actively reproduced within the power dynamics of a postcolonial society such as Australia.
One can only presume that Noel Pearson does not have a critical gaze. Or that he has the wrong critical gaze in that he is not part of the Indigenous sovereignty movement and its connection to an agonist democracy. Is it that Pearson does assume that the Aboriginal polity as an enemy of the state in the contemporary liberal democracy. Or is because he is part of a Third Way politics, which seeks to obtain consensus beyond the traditional oppositions between the Left and the Right?
Or the silence a result of Pearson dealing with the wrong set of problems. Or he is approaching the social (health, welfare, domestic violence, alcoholism etc) in the wrong way. The judgment by the postmodern cultural left appears to be there is a closure of the social by the proponents of Third Way politics, as they seek to dissociate the social from the political.