The System Didn’t Work From Italy to the U.K. to Ohio, the populist complaint is about justice, not economics. Bret Stephens

Posted By on December 6th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-system-didnt-work-1480982735

Leo Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Among the lessons of 2016 is that, politically speaking, Tolstoy was wrong.

This was the year in which everything that couldn’t, shouldn’t and wouldn’t happen, happened. In May, Filipinos elected a man who said he’d be happy to slaughter millions of drug addicts the way Hitler slaughtered millions of Jews. In June, the British tossed out the European Union, along with the toffs who had told them to stay in it. In October, Colombians rejected a deal with the FARC for which their president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A month later: President-elect Donald Trump.

Now Italians have overwhelmingly rejected proposed constitutional changes that were supposed to make their political system functional and economic reform possible. Beppe Grillo, the populist politician who led the charge against the changes, crowed on his blog Sunday that “times have changed.” Yes, they have.

 The Philippines, Britain, Colombia, America and Italy are big unhappy families. So is France, where the incumbent president doesn’t dare stand for re-election; and Brazil, which impeached its president in August; and South Korea, which is expected to impeach its president later this week. Nobody should think that Angela Merkel is a shoo-in for re-election next year, or that Marine Le Pen won’t be the next president of the Fifth Republic. One thing unhappy families often have in common is that their members aren’t averse to smashing the plates.

What happened? In 2014, Daniel Drezner, a professor at Tufts, published a book extolling the International Monetary Fund and other institutions of “economic global governance” for putting out the fires of the 2008 financial crisis. The global economy had been teetering on the brink of another Great Depression, but it didn’t fall in. Ergo, success.

The book was called “The System Worked.” Except it didn’t. The system did more to mask problems than it did to solve them. CONTINUE AT SITE

 

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