Obama's Third Way.(International Edition; HOW HE DID IT 2008)(Barack Obama)

Byline: Fareed Zakaria

Barack Obama has won more than a presidential victory. He has gained a chance to realign the national landscape and to create a new governing ideology for the West. Since the end of the cold war, two great political trends have coursed through the Western democracies. The first --led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the early 1990s--was the left's steady progress toward greater comfort with free markets and traditional values, in order to appeal to mainstream voters. The second was the ideological decline of conservatism, a movement now riddled with contradictions and corruption, as personified by George W. Bush's big-government, Wilsonian agenda. These two trends have intersected in 2008.

Of course, more Americans still identify themselves as conservatives than as liberals. There is a big, red America out there. But that's a reflection of the past three decades of conservative dominance, not a forecast of the future. "Among democratic peoples," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, "each generation is a new people."

Conservatives were ascendant in the 1980s and 1990s because they offered powerful prescriptions for the problems of the 1970s--stagflation and social unrest at home, and Soviet expansionism abroad. Arguing for less government, traditional values and a tough response to Moscow worked. But ever since conservatives have trotted out the same answers to every successive crisis. Consider John McCain's response when asked how he would handle the Wall Street meltdown. McCain vowed to end earmark spending, which has absolutely nothing to do with restoring confidence and credit to the markets.

Over the last two decades, the United States has produced an extraordinary burst of prosperity, some of which has reached a broad cross section of the society. We have the biggest houses and the flattest TVs in the world. But we have not been able to tackle a series of other, crucially important problems--affordable health care, good education for the poor and energy efficiency to name three. In all these areas, the solutions cannot come solely from the private sector. They will have to involve a large measure of government efforts.

As free markets, an open society and a diverse population gained strength, the traditional order that conservatism defended has been overturned in dozens of ways by ...