Well, Brazil seems to be doing pretty damn well, all things considered. And its policies under Lula and Rousseff are broadly Keynesian. And I'd put the positive trajectory of their democracy over that of the US of A.
This doesn't *refute* Keynes's point, of course. A well-organized, brutal, efficiently repressive state can probably implement *any* big policy change more easily than states with viable democratic institutions, even those bourgeois states where democratic institutions seem more and more vestigial than real, as is increasingly the case in the US.
Also, to the extent that Keynes revealed his politics, it was a creepy sort of presumed-benevolent technocratic elitism, so no real contradiction there.
(Beyond Keynes's own writings, I rely for much of my conclusions about Keynes's personality and views from Skidelsky's very good biography--although Skidelsky comes to different conclusions; he's clearly a fan of Keynes the man...)
On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:09:02 -0500 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> writes:
>>
>> On Jan 29, 2012, at 1:29 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>>
>> > But there is a book or several to be written on the various
>> > intellectual sympathizers with fascism &/or Nazism & the strange
...