Social democracy is the answer.
The question is how to deliver inclusive, broad-based wellbeing to the 650 million or so people in Latin America and the Caribbean. Despite a long history of social struggle and revolution, successive governments of various ideological stripes throughout the region have ultimately failed to provide its citizens the rights and opportunities embodied in their egalitarian national mythologies.
State-led, inward-looking development strategies crashed and burned, giving way to pro-market reforms under the aegis of the neoliberal “Washington Consensus.” Those didn’t deliver either. Democracy — embraced almost universally in the wake of the blood-soaked military dictatorships that prevailed from the 1960s through the 1980s — also failed to provide most Latin Americans with a life of dignity.
