The successes of Reagan/Thatcher years provoked the rise of modernizing movements in the parties of the left, spawning the Democratic Leadership Council in the United States and the Third Way movement in Europe that tried to move the center of gravity of the left-wing parties away from their reflexive anti-bourgeoisism.  Thus, in the United States, Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 promising a “middle class tax cut,” and in the United Kingdom the modernizing Tony Blair promised not to raise income taxes.  In both cases, the left was clearly staking out a position in blue and orange territory.  But Clinton’s moderation was tactical.  Immediately after winning election, he rescinded his tax cut promise, and launched his wife upon a classic left-wing policy of comprehensive, mandatory national health insurance.  The Democrats lost control of Congress as soon as the voters had a chance to register their judgment of this breach of trust.  In 1996 Clinton had learned his lesson and ran as the friend of the middle-class “soccer mom.”  But Clinton’s anointed successor reverted to class war rhetoric in a failed campaign to “fight for the people against the powerful.”  Blair, on the other hand, began his ministry by freeing the Bank of England from control by the UK Treasury and holding the line on taxes.  Four years later, after a thumping reelection, his Chancellor of the Exchequer announced plans to cut capital gains tax rates to 10 percent.   The Third Way of the Democrats was therefore merely tactical, a ploy to win election; the Third Way of Tony Blair and New Labour seemed strategic, occupying and governing from blue and orange territory as well as the traditional red and green that the left has occupied for a century. 

When Bill Clinton led the New Democrats to victory, and even more, when Tony Blair led New Labour to victory, they had taken the first step to correct the fatal error of the socialist movement, its belief that the society of universal community could only be created by smashing the blue bourgeois society of rule and role complemented by the orange adventurers of business.  This threatened to lay siege to the bourgeois coalition in the Republican Party in the United States and the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom.  The only thing preventing total collapse was the Democratic and Labour party rank-and-file who remained Old Believers, reluctantly following their modernizing leaders along the Third Way merely for the sake of political power.  Although both movements were limited by the reluctance of the party faithful, they set up a challenge to the bourgeois parties.  What role was left for them if the economic policy of the left abandoned its anti-capitalist dogmas and accepted the civilizing cornucopia of the market economy?  The response of George W. Bush, Republican candidate at the end of Clinton’s two terms as president, was to move towards the green, repackaging the conservative message of the Republican Party as compassionate conservatism.  Republicans had been frightened by the success that Clinton had achieved attracting the votes of “soccer moms” and determined to show the American people that the conservatism of the Republican party was not rigid and ideological, but sensitive to the needs of middle-class mothers.

The orange creatives and green communitarians in the Democratic Party were insulted by the election of George W. Bush.  The administration of Bill Clinton had seemed to confirm their vision of a creative, progressive society moving away from rigid rules and towards an orange, creative, individualistic society that could obsolete the conformity of blue rules and roles.  Yet here was a man they reviled as a dull scion of a rich family who bested Vice-President Gore in the lawyering over the Florida election recount.

Then came the shock of 9/11.  Republicans reacted as blues, framing the attack in terms of good and evil.  Democrats were blindsided.  Their green communitarian consciousness that assured them that “violence never solves anything,” told them to ask “why do they hate us” and to wonder what the United States might have done to provoke such a bold attack upon its citadels of economic and military might.  But the vast majority of Americans were reds and blues.  They believed in the power and the goodness of the United States, and they were not disappointed when President Bush responded as a good tribal or nation state leader should, by vowing to defeat the forces that had attacked the American heartland.  Republicans responded to 9/11 by girding for war; Democrats responded by girding for diplomacy.

President Bush understood that the United States was at war, but he understood that as president of all Americans he needed to make a show of negotiation before commencing a war against the Axis of Evil.  So he dispatched his secretary of state to attempt a solution through the United Nations Security Council before invading Iraq to take out one of the major sponsors of global terrorism, Saddam Hussein.

So the political pendulum had begun to swing back to the right.  And it had begun to swing because of the inability of the left to engage the people on the question of immigration.  Socialism is a green consciousness that is warped back to red power consciousness by its inability to tolerate blue rules and orange adventurers.  But is also has an intolerance for the comfort of tribe and clan, except when whipping tribesmen and clansmen into a class or race war.  In Spiral Dynamics, blood relation is considered the purple level.  It is the level of emotional belonging, of clan, of party, of nation, of patriotism.  The left, of course, desires to abolish such reactionary and primitive relations, because they propose to replace the purple comforts of family and neighbor with the incandescent green of global and universal community and to replace the blue bonds of bourgeois marriage with free love.  And maybe they will, some day.  Or more likely not.  The rejection of purple consciousness by the greens causes another warping back, to beige instinctiveness.  This is why the left celebrates instinctive sexual coupling without regard to the purple emotional bonds of family, or the blue rules of the One Way.  But most humans are deeply disturbed by an abandonment of the emotional traditions of family and clan.  And they are completely disoriented by the demand to treat immigrants the same as their neighbors and family.  It just does not make sense to them to treat people that behave differently as though they were the same.  The shock of 9/11 therefore triggered an immediate return to patriotism, the safety of belonging to the nation state.  All the ground captured by the elite multiculturalists in the previous decade in assuring Americans that everyone was the same, and that other cultures were as good as ours, or even better, was lost.  Muslims were different; they did intend us harm, and the American people knew it.  The purple consciousness of belonging was real and meaningful, and could not be abandoned for the promise of a global green community that was clearly not ready for prime time.  All across the western world, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the left showed that it could not deal with marauding red power fiends: not in the inner cities of Europe and the United States, where underclass red impulsives both indigenous and immigrant were allowed to run riot; and not in the explosion of terror where well-born young Muslims turned themselves into missiles against the infidel and oppressive west.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill