Comment by robertlagrant
11 days ago
> The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point.
I think this is because China is an autocracy, so they can make long-term plans. Democracies that swing as wildly as the US currently does is no place for that, and that's not limited to the new administration.
Did America stop being a democracy under FDR? Conflating specific term limits with autocracy/democracy is a bit dramatic.
There isn't anything physically stopping America from doing what China is doing. We literally did it first (in modernity)! Albeit for too short a time before the robber barons and foreign interests retook control.
I think what I wrote here covers what you're saying:
> Democracies that swing as wildly as the US currently does
It's not "robber barons" etc. It's just two very different worldviews existing in one place that cause big swings in policy when the other one is elected.
I'm not talking about Red vs. Blue. US national policy doesn't actually swing that much when Red switches to Blue and so on. Yes, Trump abandoned this or that agreement, but Biden generally didn't reverse.
I believe Lee Kuan Yew said "In China, you can't change the government but you can change the policy. In America you can change the government but you can't change the policy", referring to the postwar neoliberal / Deng era.