I read Daniel Larison for passages like this

I guess you could call him my favorite paleoconservative . . .

It is an exaggeration to say that the “third way” was buried in 2008. Let’s remember that the eventual 2008 Democratic nominee ran a fairly cautious campaign that put him to the right of both Clinton and Edwards, and it is difficult to see how Obama has actually governed as a left-populist. He pandered to anti-NAFTA sentiment as a candidate, but in office he has been a less-than-enthusiastic but reliable supporter of free trade agreements. Indeed, on virtually every issue Obama has arguably been less liberal than Bill Clinton as these things are conventionally defined, and even on health care the legislation that Obama signed was far less ambitious than anything Bill Clinton proposed, and for that reason it remains unsatisfying to many progressives. It must be mystifying to those progressives how anyone on the other side of the spectrum can see Obama as a left-wing ideologue, just as it was baffling to many of us on the right how Bush could be perceived as a big right-winger. The more insufferably “centrist” an administration is, the more its partisan opponents feel compelled to portray it as radical.

Of course, we call Bush a radical right-winger because we define the right wing as imperialist and hard-line defense of capitalists, which he was. Of course, by this definition the "third way" was the name given for the formerly left-of-center party signing on with the policies of what had been the far right wing of American (and British) politics through the 80s, which the right then took as an authorization to really go for broke. Of course, the "right wing" by comparison to which Larison wants to call Bush not-right-wing is just no more a purely imaginary political force than the "left" by comparison to which Obama is not-left-wing. The difference, though, is that although it has little or no force in contemporary politics, the left in this sense, has historically been a powerful force; unlike Larison's conservatism which I'm inclined to think has always been a pious mirage of a certain brand of disaffected intellectuals.