Politic Shock is a breezy canter that reviews more recent macro developments in politics and economics and examines the rise of Modi and Trump and what this means for liberal democracy. Identifying the year 2016 as one of seminal import, the author, a Labour party Peer in the House of Lords, poses a question as to whether it will be “marked in history as the year when there was a dramatic political shift across the world?.... When the Old Order—the Liberal Order, which had set the agenda over the previous fifty years—had a number of reverses?”
In six pithy chapters Desai embarks on a sweeping survey that locates the history of the Liberal Order (LO) in 1917, the year which marked the entry of the US into the First World War, as also the Bolshevik Revolution—events that symbolised the waning of “European domination”. The first chapter is the most substantive and reviews the last century when “the Old Order collapsed”. In broad brushstrokes, Desai glides from 1918 through the Great Depression of 1929 and strings...
