Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  Clinton moved on to Renzi, whom he praised for having the courage to bring pro-market policies to Italy—to reform its labor market and to put up a controversial (and ultimately doomed) referendum to reduce the number of legislators and consolidate his own power. Renzi was exactly the kind of Moody’s-approved politician the room loved, and he said all the right things, which again had a theme of economics superseding politics. Italy, he said, couldn’t just be about masterpieces and culture anymore. It had to accept the “challenge of change.”

  Renzi dropped a casual aside in talking about his labor-market reforms that reflected another aspect of the globalist consensus. He said Italy’s rewriting, the previous year, of its hiring-and-firing laws had finally caught the country up to the standards of Germany and Britain. He added, “Obviously, U.S.A. arrived to this point twenty years ago.” The globalists believed that there were “right answers” in public policy—answers that made a place safe for the foreign investors that Macri had been worried about—and having a very flexible labor market, in which it is easy to hire and fire people, is one of those right answers. The right answer, then, was not arrived at democratically: It was not the answer the people of Italy had chosen, by action or inaction, during those twenty years of “delay.” It was a globalist truism that hovered over the country, waiting for it to get with the program and accept the prudent way of the world. And when at last it did, the nation’s prime minister could describe those earlier years, defined by other choices, as a delay. Italians, not famous for punctuality, were late in arriving at the globalists’ “right answer.” Leaders like Renzi saw the checklist program pushed by multilateral agencies and foreign investors as possessing a moral validity that democratic choices by his citizens lacked, because they were bad for efficiency and growth.

  Now Clinton turned to Mayor Khan, whom he praised as “a great example of positive interdependence.” MarketWorld believed in interdependence, because it reflected how the world was one, and also because it translated into more markets for companies to enter. (One often finds nationalistic people, but one rarely encounters nationalistic businesses.) Clinton recognized that this vision was under threat, for now “the intensity of the feelings of people resisting our being pulled together outweighs the intensity of those who are winning from this,” as he put it.

  It would have been useful to have onstage someone who actually felt some of the resentment that was roiling the world. Instead, it was left to Khan to explain it. He was asked, “What did the Brexit vote mean in terms of what’s going on all over the world?” “During the referendum campaign,” Khan responded, “people who have challenges getting their children into good local schools, people who worry about health care, people who worry about getting genuinely affordable homes were led down a path of the politics of fear. They were told the reason for your challenges and your issues is because of the EU, is because of the Other.” In other words, the people who voted for Brexit were easily misled sheep.

  Clinton piled on to this idea of false consciousness. “All these English counties voted to give up economic aid from the EU,” he said. “And they needed it, but they had no idea what they were doing. They just wanted to come inside and close the door. There is a kind of a visceral us-and-them mentality developing.” This was the diagnosis of the former president of the United States a few months after Brexit’s unexpected success, and two months before his wife’s unexpected defeat to a populist demagogue who allied himself with the Brexit campaign. The people setting themselves the task of understanding the anger around them were precommitted to the idea that the anger had no possible basis in reason or conscious choice. They could not process people who saw the world fundamentally differently than MarketWorlders did and, misguided or not, wanted to be heard.

  “I’m really proud that London was the one region of England to vote to remain in the EU, decisively so,” Khan said. “In my view, it’s not a zero-sum game. And London doing well is not at the expense of the rest of the UK. If London does well, the rest of the country prospers.”

  The idea that what was good for a prosperous, globally networked megalopolis full of bankers and other well-educated professionals who could afford to live there, and overrun by Saudi, Russian, and Nigerian absentee princelings who pushed up rents without contributing much to the economy or tax base or the communities they lived in—the idea that whatever was good for such a metropolis was automatically good for all of Britain was part of the conceit that some voters understandably rejected when the Brexit choice came before them. To cite one counterexample, Britain had in recent years been engaged in a political argument about austerity. The kind of fiscal “discipline” favored by City of London banker elites translated directly into the cuts to education and health and the reduced social mobility that left people angry and caused them to wonder how there was money to help foreigners. But there was no space in Khan’s vision for the idea that millions of ordinary people, in Britain and around the world, had suffered because things were too good and easy for, and too rigged in favor of, elites. He was offering another version of what Macri and then Renzi had voiced: The winners of globalization were in no way part of the problem; if we help them win, everyone will win.

  Here was represented the complex of CGI values in a single panel: doing the market-friendly thing instead of the idealistic thing; elevating what the people supposedly needed economically over what they wanted politically; believing that the right, data-driven, technocratic answers speak for themselves; judging politicians’ success by investors’ returns; thinking of market forces as an inevitability one must give in to, make way for, adapt to.

  The four panelists and Clinton speculated about “these people,” as Okonjo-Iweala called them. They mused about the anger on the other side and came up with convenient theories. Clinton offered that “the conflict model works better at a time of economic distress.” Okonjo-Iweala suggested that making vaccines more accessible—her bailiwick as the leader of a global vaccine alliance called GAVI—might help to reduce anger. (She didn’t mention the bankers for whom she now worked, and how it might also reduce anger if they were punished for their sins, if they compensated the public for the bailouts they got, if they had the humility to stop thwarting regulation of their conduct.) She plugged vaccines to the MarketWorld crowd in language they would understand: They didn’t just save lives; they were an investment, for healthy citizens mean more growth and taxes paid and companies started. Vaccines, she said, are “one of the best buys in economics today,” since “$1 invested in vaccines returns $16.” She gushed, “The rate of return on that is very high.”

  A moment later, Okonjo-Iweala said the globalist tribe represented in the room needed to “debunk those who are trying to use them as a platform”—the “them” being the angry voters. The people were being used; they were rubes. There was a total refusal to accept that angry people were actively, concertedly trying to tell their fellow citizens something, however flawed. And they weren’t here to tell them what it was in person.

  The panel members saw themselves as above and apart from fearful, conflictual politics. Their politics was technocratic, dedicated to discovering right answers that were knowable and out there, and just needed to be analyzed and spreadsheeted into being. Their politics had borrowed from the business world the pleasantness and mutualism of the win-win. It was striking to have five political figures share a stage and have not one moment of real argument. They all seemed to suppose that the good society was the society of entrepreneurs, whose success was tantamount to that of the society itself. That the weaving of the world was among the most vital human strivings. That government should work as a partner to the private sector, not a counterweight to it.

  One could forget, watching such a civilized group, that traditional politics is argumentative for a reason. It isn’t that politicians don’t know how to be nice, but rather that politics is rooted in the idea of a big, motley people taking
their fate into their own hands. Politics is the inherently messy business of negotiating and reconciling incompatible interests and coming up with a decent plan, designed to be liked but difficult to love. It solves problems in a context in which everyone is invited to the table and everyone is equal and everyone has the right to complain about being unserved and unseen. Politics, in bringing together people of divergent interests, necessarily puts sacrifice on the table. It is easier to conjure win-wins in forums like this one, where everyone is a winner. The consensus was a reminder of all the kinds of people and perspectives that had not been invited in.

  The panelists, though, knew they lived amid great anger, and they seemed to be groping for ways to respond to it. “What’s more important is, rather than playing on people’s fears, address them,” Mayor Khan said. Clinton confessed his fear that the winners of MarketWorld, confronting the rage all around them, would pull away from it. “One of the things that I think we really have to work on all around the world is not to let our urban, diverse, young, economically successful areas just basically say, ‘This is too exhausting. I’m gonna run away from the rural areas, I’m going to run away from all that.’ ” Would the anger over elite secession simply inspire more elite secession? Would the corporate escapism that Porter chastised and the cosmopolitan escapism of Ferguson’s fellow winners, having frayed the relations of so many communities and fueled so much discontent, reverse themselves as a result—or rather feel more justified now? Clinton said, “This is a big test for all of us.”

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  The dream of borderlessness pervaded CGI. Consider the panel moderated by David Miliband, the former British foreign secretary who now ran the International Rescue Committee. The topic was refugees. This kind of complex global problem gave MarketWorld types a straightforward way to condescend to national democracies. Hikmet Ersek, the chief executive of Western Union, sitting beside his fellow panelist the prime minister of Sweden, said, “One of the issues in the politicians, with all respect, Mr. Prime Minister, is that you guys are voted by local people, but you’re responsible for global issues.” Hearing this, Queen Rania of Jordan, a regular at these MarketWorld gatherings, added, “One thing that I find frustrating is that, looking around the world, most leaders are stuck in linear modes of thinking and in traditional approaches. Or they’re consumed by very urgent issues, like votes and short-term politics, that they don’t think of the disruptions that are happening in the world and the effects they’re going to have on us in the future.”

  This was very CGI. Here was a CEO lamenting that a politician represented an actual group of people from an actual place. This naturally stood in contrast to a money-transfer CEO, who represented the here-there-everywhere flow of capital itself and had a strong financial interest in borderlessness. But did that make an elected leader representing a specific group of people myopic? And then there was a queen suggesting that politicians are too consumed by the search for votes to think clearly about the world. For Queen Rania, the voting public wasn’t something that she and her husband, who was also at CGI, had to worry about—nor for the Western Union man, for that matter. Not worrying about votes was among the advantages of being a monarch or CEO. Here was globalism’s antidemocratic streak in open light. Globalists were boosting a way of solving problems above, beyond, and outside politics. They weren’t interested in making politics work better, but insisting on their own proprietary power to give the world what it needed, not necessarily what it wanted.

  Had the organizers of CGI truly been interested in why people resented the globalists, they could have invited Dani Rodrik, a Turkish-born economist at Harvard and author of several books on globalization. Rodrik’s bicultural life bespoke their One Worldism, but he had become one of the more incisive critics of how the globalists’ noble intentions undermine democracy.

  “There’s no more global citizen than I am,” he said on the phone from his office at the Kennedy School. “I know more about the rest of the world than I know the United States. I carry the passports of two countries, and most of my friends here are non-U.S.-born.” So one might have expected Rodrik to recoil, as so many of the globalists did, when Theresa May, the British prime minister, smeared “citizens of the world” shortly after coming to power in the choppy wake of the Brexit referendum. “Today,” she said,

  too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass on the street. But if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means.

  Rodrik observed a swift and fierce reaction to those words among his fellow well-educated and world-traveling elites. The near-universal globalist reaction was that the statement was wrong and malicious: “It was just trying to appeal to the basest instincts within people.” What struck Rodrik was that “the reaction was so predictably negative to something that seems to me to be so patently obvious on the face of it.” What May was suggesting was perhaps problematic in its attempt to pander to the rising tide of xenophobic feeling. But it was also, Rodrik felt, referring to a real problem: that so many elites—often well-meaning—who speak grandly, airily of improving the world as a whole have rarely attended a community meeting; that so many elites who claim to feel linked to all humanity have chosen to live sequestered from anyone not of their class. “The people around the Clinton Global Initiative or the liberal globalist establishment have told themselves a story about how they’re really working for the world,” Rodrik said. “But they are not really a part of a political process. A political process requires that you’re competing with and you’re testing ideas against other citizens. Citizens are defined as being members of a preexisting political community. We obviously don’t have that at a global level.” In other words, politics is about actual places, with actual shared histories. Globalism, chasing a dream of everyone, risks belonging to no one.

  For Rodrik, it isn’t just that solving things at the global level (which, in the absence of world government, often means privately, which often means plutocratically) lacks legitimacy. Pushing things up into that realm gives globalists “moral cover or ethical cover for escaping their domestic obligations as citizens in their own national setting.” It is a way of doing good that allows them to ignore the fact that their democracies aren’t working well. Or, even more simply, it allows them to avoid the duty they might otherwise feel to interact with their fellow citizens across divides, to learn about the problems facing their own communities, which might implicate them, their choices, and their privileges—as opposed to universal challenges like climate change or the woes of faraway places like Rwandan coffee plantations. In such cases, diffuseness or distance can spare one the feeling of having a finger jabbed in one’s face.

  The globalists, Rodrik said, have embraced a theory of progress that is out of step with the facts of the age. “There’s a general understanding of how the world works that lies behind those kinds of initiatives, which I think is false,” he said. “And that understanding is that what the world suffers from is a lack of true international cooperation.” This understanding is right on some issues, such as global pandemics and climate change, he said. “But in most other areas, when you think about them, whether it’s international finance, whether it’s economic development, whether it’s business and financial stability, whether it’s international trade—the problem, it seems to me, is not that we don’t have sufficient global governance, that we don’t have sufficient global cooperation, that we’re not getting together enough. It’s just that our domestic governance is failing us.” He added, “Many of the problems that the world economy faces—whether it’s trade restrictions or financial instability or lack of adequate development and global poverty and all those things—many of these problems would in fact become much less severe if our local politics were w
orking right.

  “And the idea that you could just either develop these solutions from outside,” he continued, “or you could parachute them in, or you could bypass local politics through these transnational kinds of efforts—it seems to me it’s well-meaning; it’s definitely worth doing as complementary efforts. But when it becomes a substitute, when it starts to replace the hard work that we should get engaged in, in terms of our domestic political processes, then I think it becomes potentially quite perverse.” Rodrik saw a “direct link” between this doing-well-by-doing-good antipolitics peddled by the globalists and the chaos of 2016. “The world’s financial and political and technocratic elites,” he said, were “distancing themselves from their compatriots. And then what that results in is a loss of trust.”

  C. Z. Nnaemeka wrote a prescient essay about this distancing in the MIT Entrepreneurship Review a few years ago. It criticized elite twenty- and thirtysomethings’ neglect of what she called “the unexotic underclass”—people neither rich enough to be global elites themselves nor poor enough to get the global elites’ attention. “Chances are there are more people addressing the Big Problems of slum dwellers in Calcutta, Kibera or Rio, than are tackling the big problems of hardpressed folks in say, West Virginia, Mississippi or Louisiana,” she wrote. This preference for distant needs and transnational problem-solving can deepen the feeling that all those globalists are in cahoots with one another and not attentive to their compatriots. This feeling is puffed up by a vast and cynical complex that produces conspiracy theories and fraudulent news to this effect. The feeling is also given air by very real changes in the world over the last generation that have meant more decisions that affect people’s lives being made in nations not their own, more of their children’s toys being made in cities whose names they cannot pronounce, more of the decisions about what they read being made by algorithms whose creators stay invisible.