Rejecting laissez faire’s rule by the wealthy, communism’s dictatorship of the proletariat, and fascism’s state-directed economy, the West took a different path—the re-democratization of economic policy and a politics of wealth redistribution. That path yielded decades of economic growth that built middle classes, and saw a level of prosperity previously unknown to human history, reducing what had become a massive gap between rich and poor. As such, the economic achievements of Western democracies stole the thunder of both communism and fascism, whose calls for revolution were always driven by
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