Have just finished writing two papers with hard deadlines – now in the throes of grading – so two quick points, which either sort-of-resonate-with or half-contradict each other in ways that I don’t have time to think or write about.
First: ungovernability. Or, rather, “ungovernability.” Chris got a lot of flak in comments for suggesting that centrists and center-right people in the media were going to come out with suggestions that a bit of dictatorship might not be a bad idea. As he pointed out, there used to be a lot of people on the right and center-right who made these arguments – and not just about countries in the developing world. Crouch and Pizzorno’s _The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe_ is particularly good on this, as I recall. That said, unlike Chris, I don’t have strong expectations that this set of rhetorical tropes is going to emerge in the very near future (although it may in the medium term). The old crop of center-right dictator-fanciers were fans of dictatorships not because they were opposed to democracy _tout court_, but because they were opposed to certain parts of the economy being subject to political control. This is not so much of an issue these days. From a certain point of view, the European Central Bank is a more-than-acceptable functional substitute for General Augusto Pinochet. Indeed, being less publicly embarrassing, it is arguably superior. One of these days soon, by the way, I’m going to write my post on the editorial policy of the _Economist_ during the Irish Famine – it wasn’t one of its finer moments.
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