For the first ~200 years of its existence, the USA did lots of industrial policy openly, in fact that, along with anti trust, and government involvement in science and engineering, among other tings, were key elements of the core of its Project. But most was done at state and even local level. And the devil is in the details, the USA used to be a politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized system with limited but still quite substantial actually democratic governance structures that enabled diffused and decentralized economic and scientific decision making architecture
For the first ~200 years of its existence, the USA did lots of industrial policy openly, in fact that, along with anti trust, and government involvement in science and engineering, among other tings, were key elements of the core of its Project. But most was done at state and even local level. And the devil is in the details, the USA used to be a politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized system with limited but still quite substantial actually democratic governance structures that enabled diffused and decentralized economic and scientific decision making architecture