Erdoğan’s Flights of Fancy

From the outset, Erdoğan’s big infrastructure programs have been interesting for their interaction with democracy: at their best, as with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate program, such projects can be Keynesian expressions of national will. But under an undemocratic form of Keynesianism, as in Erdoğan’s Turkey, they instead became symbols of a slide into illiberalism. Young Turks were the first to notice. In Gezi Square, they pitched tents and sprayed environmentalist graffiti on walls against the “crazy projects.”