By: John Cassidy
June 18, 2019
In the fall of 1999, I interviewed Tony Blair, who was then the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, at 10 Downing Street. I asked Blair, a former barrister who had rebranded the vaguely socialist Labour Party as the explicitly pro-enterprise New Labour, if he believed socialism was dead. He hemmed and hawed. Eventually, he said that if I meant old-style socialism—extensive government controls, punitive tax rates on the very rich, and a pervasive suspicion of capitalism—then, yes, socialism was done.
At the time, this wasn’t a particularly controversial thing to say. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, state socialism on the Eastern Bloc model had been discredited. China and India had both embarked on historic efforts to deregulate their economies and embrace global capitalism. In many Western countries, the parties of the center-left had adopted, or were about to adopt, more market-friendly policies. Blair and his friend Bill Clinton claimed to be pioneering a “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism.