than a societal revolution that would upend the way people usually operated: from doctors and tax collectors and lawyers who took bribes to cabdrivers who didn’t give receipts. Greece also had a bloated, mismanaged public sector and a stunted private one, both legacies of a political system prone to clientelism and corruption, which had caused the demon-word “socialism” to creep into the censorious Western rhetoric about the country. I wondered how the West had ever allowed Greece, a member of NATO, to become so Socialist in the first place.
