In 2018 the highest hurdle yet was jumped in Italy, where two explicitly populist parties, the Five Star Movement on the left and the League on the right, together got 50 per cent of the vote – an earthquake in Italy, and by far the most alarming result yet for the European establishment, since both announced they had no intention of submitting the country to the dictates of any more austerity from Berlin, Paris or Brussels. That’s the message of the recent bestseller by an eminent American historian sympathetic to Biden, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle, who suggests that from different directions Sanders and Trump dealt such effective blows to Hillary Clinton’s embodiment of neoliberalism that the way was cleared under Biden for the balance between rich and poor in American society to start being altered, and the benefits of government-directed industrial policy to become visible to millions. The other, still more far-reaching, was the transformation after the death of Mao of the command economy in China in the Reform Era presided over by Deng Xiaoping, with the arrival of the household responsibility system in agriculture and the ignition by township and village enterprises of the most spectacular sustained burst of economic growth in recorded history – this too was improvised and experimental, without pre-existent theories of any kind.
Author: PaulHoule
Published at: 2025-04-13 20:15:34
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