The Evolutionary Third Way: A U.S. Mandate for Change

The Evolutionary Third Way: A U.S. Mandate for Change
by Niki Raapana
July 18, 2008

"My call tonight, is for every American to commit at least two years -- 4,000 hours over the rest of your lifetime -- to the service of your neighbors and your nation."
(President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 29, 2002.)

Sometime around 1990, (so the story goes) two college professors figured out how to solve the American left v right divide. Reflecting on the lack of character in Harvard students during lunch one day, they were suddenly struck with how students should be taught the value of giving something back to their communities. The more they talked, the more these sociologists realized that nobody in America was representing their middle view. They agreed that people from the right should give a little leeway. The people on the left should have to give a little too. They decided the country needed a fresh perspective beyond the right-left paradigm. The end result would be a perfect "balance" between these polar opposites.

Professor Amitai Etzioni's new luncheon theory became known to political insiders as communitarianism; in public they mostly called it bipartisan support, or the Third Way.

When Etzioni established the Communitarian Network at George Washington University in DC, he began his new career as the "guru" behind the Third Way. As a senior adviser to U.S. presidents (as far back as Carter) and a former high ranking member of the Israeli military, Etzioni faced no difficulty in finding the funding and strong physical support necessary to further his new ideas. His new Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies immediately began publishing thousands of papers that would help elected American legislators to "shore up the moral, social and poliical environment" in the decaying United States. Within three short years the U.S. Congress had adopted his idea for a new kind of community policing and the Department of Justice financed the hiring of 100,000 new federal COPS in cities and towns across America.

The Third Way agenda is simply a new way to revise the American legal system from within. Third Way founders need a shortcut in order to require more citizen responsibilities without actually going through the lengthy legal process required for amending the U.S. Constitution. U.S. law is based in the contractual agreements between free citizens and their government servants, called constitutions. The Third Way negates all legal and binding contracts. It requires formerly free, state citizens to volunteer to become bonded workers for the community. We've been hearing this from American presidents as far back as Teddy Roosevelt, and it was renewed again by George Bush the 1st:

"Our goal is to engage everyone in volunteering from every walk of life. We also believe that "people in need" should also volunteer as a way to learn how to reconnect themselves to their society and its resources. Ultimately, we want volunteering to become a way of life for every citizen; for people to believe that volunteering isn't just nice to do, but necessary." (1000 Points of Light mission statement, the Bush's favorite charity)

The theory behind Rebuilding Community government was watered down for clueless American officials in the writings of Dr. Amitai Etzioni throughout the last decade of the 20th century. Etzioni's theory of enforcing the Community Good was in perfect harmony with United Nations Local Agenda 21 theory of enforced Earth worship. The Earth Summit in 1992 laid out the national blueprints for rebuilding a communitarian global system of religious governance. Harvard law professor MaryAnn Glendon described the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights as communitarian because the theory "kept the declaration from becoming either a highly collectivist or a highly individualistic document."

European discontent and continued national voter rejections of a unifying European constitution is based entirely on their anticommunitarian sensibilities. The Irish people are only the latest voters to insist on retaining their individual and national sovereignty. But in the U.S., deliberately misled voters are never presented with a full disclosure of communitarian legal principles. Etzioni's books have such a nice ring to them, people assume they know what it means just by reading his titles. My Obama swooning sister-in-law replied to my suggestion that she read Etzioni with her gut reaction to the titles of his books (like "Community and Morality in a Democratic Society"), and assured me she liked the sound of it.

"In the my wildest dreams, during eighteen years of championing communitarianism, I did not expect a presidential candidate to be as strongly identified with this political philosophy as Obama is." Amitai Etzioni's blog, May 23, 2008

Building upon an obscure political doctrine called the Hegelian dialectic, Etzioni's communitarianism combined meticulous academic planning with powerful financial backers (including Wall Street financiers and the Rothschild's Bank of England). His fresh ideas for a "new" Democratic movement carried the Clintons all the way into the White House in 1992, and again in 1996. The U.S. government and American colleges jumped on Etzioni's plan as if he were Moses and the commandment to Rebuild America came down from God himself. Nobody really knew what his fresh ideas were, but they obviously thought it sounded pretty good. As Michael D'Antonio explained in "I or We? Mother Jones, May-June 1994:

"This is the Clinton administration's version of 'family values,' something vague and moralistic that everyone supports but no one seems to be able to define," says Professor Walker. "I suspect that what the communitarians, and especially Etzioni, really want is to be influential with the White House. If that's an accomplishment, then they may already be achieving something."

Regardless of what Rabbi Etzioni tells us about his original idea, the theory of communitarianism has been around for at least 2000 years. The most ancient reference this author has found is when the Israeli people were held in captivity in Egypt. Called communitarian-ra, this was the legal code used by the Rabbis to control Jewish slaves assigned to their communities. The term lay mostly dormant until it resurfaced in the mid nineteenth century. Whereas the 1848 London Communist League's Manifesto rejected organized religion as the "opiate of the masses," the man credited with coining the term "communism" established the Communitarian Church in England. As for philosophical arguments defining free citizen's repsonsibilities, many of the terms for helping mankind to evolve to the next level of spirituality (called the World Spirit) originated in the Greek philosophy of democracy.

There is a very long list of philosophers and theologians who furthered the dialectical arguments that led humanity to the ultimate, perfect synthesis of ideas. The list includes some familiar names like Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse Sung, but most of the rest are as obscure to average Americans as the topic they wrote about. Communitarian scholars come from every nation, every political background, and every religion in the world. There are expert communitarians who are Muslims, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Bahai, Buddist, and Pagan (the Communitarian Church of Vermont practices witchcraft). Zionists, socialists, European kings and queens, African dictators, military juntas and elected representatives from the Western democracies all share the same goals and vision as their fellow communitarians in The People's Republic of China, Cuba, North Korea and the former USSR. Iraq's new form of government is "communitarian in nature" and shows the absolute determination of some nations to hold out against the global government's mercenaries, no matter what the cost. From New Orleans to the Phillipines, communitarian based sustainable development is the business mantra of the day, and it's all called Homeland Security.

If we poke around a little, we find others who shared Etzioni's and Rothschild's amazingly identical idea; a Catholic theologian arrived at the exact same dialectical synthesis in 1987. (The term communitarianism can also be found in secular documents published by Vatican authorities and Pope John Paul.)

"In a passage that is notable for its vagueness, Azevedo says that the CEBs should be the basis for a new communitarianism that rejects the two "bankrupt" models and systems "that are now polarizing the world," capitalism and Marxist socialism. This communitarianism is to be "a dialectical synthesis, a new creation, superimposing itself on thesis and antithesis rather than retrieving them." The passage illustrates the controversy in Latin American Catholicism between those who continue to endorse the "third-position-ism" (tercerismo) of Catholic social teaching and those (including all liberation theologians that I know of) who believe that only socialism can be in accord with Christian values." (Theology Today-Basic Ecclesial Communities in Brazil: The Challenge of a New Way of Being Church By Marcello deC. Azevedo, S.J.Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 1987. 304 Pp).

Still others were discussing Etzioni's new idea back in the 1960s, with a slightly different pronounciation:

" Starting in 1960, the doctrine of the movement, "National-European Communitarism" whose social character was affirmed from the beginning, derived from national-communist positions.

"After the definitive elimination of the right-wing sector of the organization in 1964, Thiriart would lead Young Europe in a direction in which two general orientations dominate: on one hand, radical anti-Americanism and, on the other, a progressive approach to national-communist positions. Thiriart sees Communitarism as surpassing communism and not as its opponent, this is a typical national-Bolshevik posture. In 1965, he defined Communitarism as "national-European socialism" and he added that "in the mid century, communism will become, wanting it or not, Communitarism". In this, history has had to agree with him given that before the fall of the Soviet block, the economic reforms that were introduced in Hungary and Romania took communist economy towards Communitarism."

"Jean Thiriart's doctrinal works of the early eighties and those developed in the same period by the P.C.N., assume this last tendency. For this purpose, this party presents Communitarism as an "ideology of synthesis that wishes to fuse Marxist-Leninist ideologies and national-revolutionary ones into a synthesis of doctrinal offensive: the socialism of the XXI century". (MARXISM-LENINISM AND NATIONAL-BOLSHEVISM. Bolsheviks.org)

The arguments posed before American voters never include the synthesis, nor have they ever voted on the theory of rebuilding communitarian communities. Our voters are asked to choose from the polar opposite sides of many issues, but not on the laws or public policies that settle the arguments, once and for all. And as the Third Way takes hold, voters are more often asked to choose candidates who hold opposite views on other important issues. For instance, Republicans who believe themselves to be anti abortion are often stuck in the dilemma of voting for an anti abortion candidate who also supports the global war on terror, regional free trade, and CAFTA (communitarian integration). Pro choice voters and Democrats, on the other hand, are stuck in the dilemma of voting for a candidate who claims to want to rewrite CAFTA and yet also supports Etzioni's criminal ideas for enforcing a new American morality. Of course, it's not a dilemma if Obama's supporters (like the Clintons' and both Bushs') don't know anything about their candidate's principles for "change."

What are the principles for Change?

In England the Third Way political party was introduced by Labour candidate Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair's new British centrist theory emphasized the tired dogma used in the old arguments between capitalism and communism, right and left, and everything inbetween. For some political theorists, communitarianism offered the ultimate evolutionary solution to the never-ending debates between the sides. The British Third Way Party explained:

"A party rather different from the rest, Third Way combines democratic socio-economic reform and inclusive nationalism with co-operative internationalism and ecological awareness; supporting the right to genuine self-determination for peoples throughout the world. The resultant synthesis, still evolving, offers an alternative approach to politics -- a new perspective, in contrast to the failed and outdated dogma of past and present governments...." (thirdway.org)

Communitarian socio-economics combines some aspects of the theory of social evolution with free trade capitalism and totalitarian communism. This is the Middle Ground where bipartisan legislation originates. The capitalist camp focuses on the benefits to the free market, while the communist camp focuses on the benefit to the masses, also referred to as the "common good." Both camps allow for various differences between their respective economic philosophies, and they continue to spin the same yarns exploiting their differences. If nobody on TV or newspapers explains the harmonization process to Americans, it's fairly easy to keep the masses ignorant of the actual structure of the emerging global synthesis of ideas. Nobody ever needs to explain to Americans how necessary capitalism and communism are to reaching the final synthesis of ideas. And, as Hegel said, only enlightened, fully evolved humans are capable of understanding how all men will attain freedom after everyone becomes a slave to the central, all-powerful state.

While the Third Way was being introduced to the North Americans as a fresh idea, it simultaneously appeared in the United Kingdom, Israel and all across Europe. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (founder of the Bilderberg meetings) may have actually been the first to introduce the term the Third Way.

Communitarianism is the political and legal foundation for global Free Trade (which explains why the capitalists support it). Communitarianism is the legal foundation for expanding the enforcement power of UN troops and COPS. It is the harmonization framework used by Monnet and Schumann when they engineered the agreements for the emerging European Union. Military trained almost from birth, Etzioni outlined plans for the US-UN global army in his book, "From Empire to Community" (which explains why both Lenninists and PNAC war planners support it). Communitarian environmental case law is on the record with the EU Court as far back as 1957 (which explains why the Trotskyites and greenies love it, and why the Europeans are stuck with it no matter what national voters say). EU communitarian integration requirements are the blueprint for the emerging North American Union (and nothing explains why the most vocal leaders in the American anti-NAU community refuse to even mention communitarian law).

Clinton's "new" Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was was formed by Al From on March 1, 1985, intitialy aided with funds from the Heritage Foundation chief Ed Feulner. According to the Washington Post, " From wants to escape the liberal-conservative tug of war, which the Democrats inevitably lose, and replace it with a brave new world of "information-age politics," "reciprocal obligation," "innovative non-bureaucratic approaches to governing," and a blizzard of equally ineffable buzz-phrases with which to bewilder GOP strategists." Senator Moynihan appears prominintly in DLC start-up operations, as do Lynn Forrester (who later married Sir Evelyn de Rothschild), Elliot Abrams (current chief of Middle East Affairs for NSC), Abram Schulsky, and Gary Schmitt, (later heard of the PNAC). Their think tank, called the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), was created to "define the Utimate Third Way." (Much of this paragraph comes from author/historian Anton Chaitkin)

In 1994, the Violent Crime Act was revised to validate and fund community policing, and Clinton thanked supporters at a DLC gala event with:

"We believe American citizenship entails responsibilities as well as rights. And we mean to ask our citizens to give something back to their communities and their country. I believe that, and if you do, we've got a great future."

"Now, this is what I want to say to you: You have to decide what your mission is in this new world, because the truth is, we are already making a difference in the new Democratic Party. In the last two years, despite the atmosphere of contentiousness and all the difficulty, more of the DLC agenda was enacted into law and will make a difference in the lives of the American people than almost any political movement in any similar time period in the history of the United States. And you ought to be proud of that."

Then Clinton called Community Policing, "a DLC idea, we've been advocating for it for years." When Clinton established his Council on Sustainable Development, every U.S. agency followed suit and changed their mission statements to reflect the new idealogy of the Third Way. Every local community development planning team in the U.S. from 1995 onward included a community cop. By 1999, Community COPS were busy revising local noise and land use ordinances and training all city employees to serve inside inspection "warrants."

When Republican candidate George Bush II took the seat of power in 2000, few of his Republican supporters cared or noticed that he supported all the Third Way objectives. The administration of Bush II pushed the entire Third Way agenda into the 21st century.

"Bush's inaugural address," said George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni, a communitarian thinker, "was a communitarian text, full of words like 'civility,' 'responsibility' and 'community.' That's no accident. Bush's advisers consulted on the speech with Putnam." (Washington Post Staff Writer Dana Milbank, February 01, 2001 "Needed: Catchword for Bush Ideology, 'Communitarianism' Finds Favor" )

The world is adapting to the challenges of the information age by reinstating an ancient form of community slavery. Once it's fully implemented, the world will be a safter, healthier place for all living creatures. Once we adjust to the rules for living in Eden and learn to honor our Big Mother, some of us can sit back and enjoy the fruits of other's labors, an easy transition since so many of us are already adjusted to handouts from our progressively generous state. Today it doesn't matter that the U.S. political parties promise the same things as the Russian Communist Platform did in 2002. We are all communitarians now, and whether we know what that means or we never know what that means, our lives have been changed, forever.

"On Sunday, April 25, 1999, President Clinton and the DLC hosted a historic roundtable discussion, The Third Way: Progressive Governance for the 21st Century, with five world leaders including British PM Tony Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Dutch PM Wim Kok, and Italian PM Massimo D'Alema, the First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and DLC President Al From... The Third Way philosophy seeks to adapt enduring progressive values to the new challenges of the information age. It rests on three cornerstones: the idea that government should promote equal opportunity for all while granting special privilege for none; an ethic of mutual responsibility that equally rejects the politics of entitlement and the politics of social abandonment; and, a new approach to governing that empowers citizens to act for themselves." (New Democrats Online, ndol.org)

Less than ten years since that historic Third Way roundtable discussion, and we are assured by Obama, Hillary and McCain that all major 3rd way changes will continue as planned.

From Barack Obama's website we can easily find "Barack Obama's Plan for Universal Voluntary Public Service:

“Your own story and the American story are not separate — they are shared. And they will both be enriched if we stand up together, and answer a new call to service to meet the challenges of our new century … I won't just ask for your vote as a candidate; I will ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am president of the United States. This will not be a call issued in one speech or program; this will be a cause of my presidency.” (http://www.barackobama.com/issues/service/ )

So, what happens to the communitarian's plan if Obama somehow manages to lose in November?

"After all, Obama's hardly alone. Sen. John McCain is a passionate supporter of Washington-led (and paid-for) "volunteerism," as is President Bush. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and John Edwards both campaigned for the presidency on compulsory national service." (Jonah Goldberg:Forced servitude in America? LA Times Editorial, July 8, 2008)

Our leaders know changing the U.S. into a completely new political system under international trade and environmental agreements that comply with global communitarian law doesn't need to concern American voters. All American voters need to know is that somehow this lovely new system will empower us to act for ourselves. Just because it sounds bad to some people doesn't mean it's bad, right?

Footnote:

I'm not a supporter of the Ron Paul Revolution because I understand the communitarian purpose for the revolution. The Libertarian's silence on the topic, when they are named as the only opponents of communitarianism (called the Libertarian-Communitarian divide by E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post) assures me there will never be any opposition. However, it's interesting to note that Congressman Ron Paul may be the only candidate in the 2008 presidential contest to ever write an opposition opinion of the Third Way policy agenda.

Niki Raapana is an author and co-founder of the Anti Communitarian League, an Alaskan mother-daughter webteam devoted to studying harmonizations in communitarian integration with a focus on the new legal policies and programs. The most recent version of their book condensing their massive body of research and translating it for average readers is called "2020: Our Common Destiny." http://nord.twu.net/acl