“But why would you need it”Sir?” Reagan is seen flexing his worn, cut, wrinkled, tucked face. “This country needs a strong Republican, and I think I’m capable of doing the job. Why? I’m happy. I’m happy. He changes. “And I’ve got Nancy to help me sleep in the evening.’
Applause, laughter, and hats flying hanging in the air.
Discontent, anger and anger
Imagine this story today. If Donald Trump had asked a similar question in 2016, he could have replied: “Because I’m unhappy. I’m feeling awful. The relationship I have with my wife has become a mess.”
Then surely his Republican supporters would have cheered, but not with Reagan’s optimism, but Trump’s self-portrait, anger, discontent, and resentment.
Ronald Reagan, that carefree actor-president, might be the most recent US leader who channeled Americans positive feelings towards the market’s free market. In the manner Robert Putnam outlines in his famous research called Bowling Alone, Civil societies and the social bond in the US were strengthened from the start of the 20th century to the 1970s when the period of neoliberal reforms started.
From that point on, things started to fall apart. The development of mercantilism and economic nationalism, which seeks to benefit the state by gaining wealth through trade, has always damaged social bonds, although that’s not always a bad thing. It also can weaken relationships that are customer-centric or toxic.
The problems arise when mercantilism develops into a vast, generalized social dynamics that is exactly the effect of globalization that began to emerge during the 70s. The global economic crisis revealed the limitations of the Fordist assembly line model of mass production, and the world started to shift back to the open and non-regulated capitalist system of Manchester that was prevalent prior to the Second World War.
The remainder of the story that is the subject of our upcoming publication, The Great Regression, you already know.
A catastrophic degree of social decay.’
We frequently make the error of believing that globalization is a revolutionary new phenomenon that is modern and futuristic.
In reality, in his book of 1944, the Great Transformation, historian Karl Polanyi already explained the social and political crises of the post-war era in response to the failings of the market system.
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From his point of view from his perspective, the whole idea of self-regulating markets was unreal and self-destructive. It was also materially incompatible with the diversity of the human social lives.
For the pragmatic Polanyi, “free markets” are not real; “free market” never existed and never will exist. First of all, the mercantilism economic system always demanded an aggressive intervention by the state to alleviate the pain of its weaknesses and stop people from being dragged along by economic tidal waves.
Every government around the globe has been implementing this strategy since the 1980s. When it comes to privatizing public services such as the NHS, they have created massive opportunities for local elites to make money ( Argentina being one of the best examples) and sparked a flurry of real property speculation (take a look at the UK) and utilized public resources to save bankers from the consequences of their blunders (remember Spain? ).
