Draghi’s personal qualities aside, the Italian political class is abdicating in favor of a retired, unelected official in his 70s.
The fact that Draghi is in power is owed to the machinations of Matteo Renzi, once seen as a young champion of the center-left, now reduced to the role of a disruptive spoiler.
Matteo Salvini of the League is biding his time.
The one option that Rome was not willing to consider when Conte’s government fell in January was an election.
The current Parliament is too afraid of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, which makes Berlusconi and Salvini seem tame.
Cleverly, Draghi has refused to make the mistake that dogged Monti’s premiership.
He has appointed a cabinet not of nonpolitical technicians but of representatives of the parties.
They will not be allowed to excuse themselves of responsibility or snipe from the sidelines.
But Draghi remains at the center.
He is no caretaker like Conte, who startled Italy by developing into an effective leader.
The expectations of Draghi are of a different order; he is “Super Mario.”
There is no escaping the fact that faced with a decisive historical challenge — restarting growth after decades of stagnation — Italy’s political class has chosen to delegate executive power to someone who has never been elected to office.
It is the ultimate victory of technocracy but also a do-or-die challenge.
Given the self-abasement of the political class, if the combination of Draghi and Next Generation EU fails to deliver growth, what future prospects are there at all?
No one could accuse the Biden administration of being nonpolitical.
The central organizing idea for both the White House and congressional Democrats is not to get caught in the logic of the Clinton and Obama administrations.
The irresponsible thing to do at this juncture would be to be “responsible” on fiscal policy.
Despite her track record, precisely on the issue of fiscal responsibility, Yellen was once again the candidate for treasury secretary acceptable to the left wing of the party.
It helps that in 2016, even as the Fed continued to raise rates, Yellen began to advocate for a “high-pressure economy” that would deliver full employment and uplift even those at the bottom end of the U.S. labor market.
The idea was a blast from the past.
It was coined by Arthur Okun, a leading Yale economist in Yellen’s time there in the early 1970s who, like Tobin, Yellen’s doctoral supervisor, had done a stint on the Council of Economic Advisers in the ’60s.
What is at stake in the giant stimulus program launched by the Biden administration is not just the social crisis left by the wreck of the U.S. labor market.
In light of developments in the Republican Party, securing a liberal vision of U.S. democracy demands of the Biden administration that it not lose control of Congress.
Whereas Draghi is facing the final battle for the technocratic vincolo esterno strategy, Yellen has cast her lot with the cause of politics.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
THE POLITICAL LEGACY OF JANET "TOODLES" YELLEN
Re: THE POLITICAL LEGACY OF JANET "TOODLES" YELLEN
The ultra-fine balance in Congress means that the left as well as the center of the Democratic Party have real sway.
They demand that a Democratic administration should actually deliver for the people who elected it.
Any attempt at finding common ground with Republicans has been abandoned.
The result is what has been called the most audacious break in U.S. policy consensus since the 1980s.
It means accepting, as Krugman put it in his most recent collection of essays, that in 21st-century America, everything is political.
Republicans have taken that stance since the 1990s.
Now finally Democrats are catching up.
The economics team in the Treasury and the White House continues to offer technical justifications.
But the stimulus push is above all the result of political calculation.
Biden’s stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan, was pushed over protests from none other than Summers.
The left cheered.
But Summers made at least one crucial point.
The plan may be a crisis response.
It will no doubt give the U.S. economy a high.
The question is, will it last?
Certainly what no one could claim for the plan is that it offers a long-run vision.
And if the truly strategic challenge facing progressive politics in the United States as in Europe is to find a new model of inclusive and environmentally sustainable economic growth, then the Biden administration has yet to deliver.
Everything, in fact, hinges on a promised infrastructure program to come.
That will be the real counterpart to the Next Generation EU program.
In the 1990s, you didn’t need to be a naive exponent of the post-Cold War end-of-history argument to think that the direction of travel for global politics was clear.
The future belonged to globalization and more-or-less regulated markets.
The pace was set by the United States.
That enabled technocratic governments to be organized around a division between immediate action and long-term payoff.
That was the trade-off that Draghi evaluated in his MIT Ph.D. in the 1970s.
The drama of Draghi and Yellen’s final act is that for both of them, and not just for personal reasons, the trade-off is no longer so clear-cut.
If the short-term politics fail, the long-term game may not be winnable at all.
“Whatever it takes” has never meant more than it does today.
Adam Tooze is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a history professor and the director of the European Institute at Columbia University. He is the author of Chartbook, a newsletter on economics, geopolitics, and history. Twitter: @adam_tooze
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/01/ja ... democracy/
They demand that a Democratic administration should actually deliver for the people who elected it.
Any attempt at finding common ground with Republicans has been abandoned.
The result is what has been called the most audacious break in U.S. policy consensus since the 1980s.
It means accepting, as Krugman put it in his most recent collection of essays, that in 21st-century America, everything is political.
Republicans have taken that stance since the 1990s.
Now finally Democrats are catching up.
The economics team in the Treasury and the White House continues to offer technical justifications.
But the stimulus push is above all the result of political calculation.
Biden’s stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan, was pushed over protests from none other than Summers.
The left cheered.
But Summers made at least one crucial point.
The plan may be a crisis response.
It will no doubt give the U.S. economy a high.
The question is, will it last?
Certainly what no one could claim for the plan is that it offers a long-run vision.
And if the truly strategic challenge facing progressive politics in the United States as in Europe is to find a new model of inclusive and environmentally sustainable economic growth, then the Biden administration has yet to deliver.
Everything, in fact, hinges on a promised infrastructure program to come.
That will be the real counterpart to the Next Generation EU program.
In the 1990s, you didn’t need to be a naive exponent of the post-Cold War end-of-history argument to think that the direction of travel for global politics was clear.
The future belonged to globalization and more-or-less regulated markets.
The pace was set by the United States.
That enabled technocratic governments to be organized around a division between immediate action and long-term payoff.
That was the trade-off that Draghi evaluated in his MIT Ph.D. in the 1970s.
The drama of Draghi and Yellen’s final act is that for both of them, and not just for personal reasons, the trade-off is no longer so clear-cut.
If the short-term politics fail, the long-term game may not be winnable at all.
“Whatever it takes” has never meant more than it does today.
Adam Tooze is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a history professor and the director of the European Institute at Columbia University. He is the author of Chartbook, a newsletter on economics, geopolitics, and history. Twitter: @adam_tooze
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/01/ja ... democracy/