Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  The Social Good Summit was another of these private world-changing conclaves, a two-day conference bringing together “a dynamic community of global leaders and grassroots activists to discuss solutions to the greatest challenges of our time.” Held at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, it promised that its attendees would “unite to unlock the potential of technology to make the world a better place.” The mingling of public and private was everywhere at this event, as at so many others. The summit was sponsored by Target, Nike, and the Taco Bell Foundation, but the M&M’s found in the Digital Media Lounge were emblazoned with little icons representing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals—a major theme of UN Week that year. Before things got under way, there was a brief moment of silence to reflect on Alan Kurdi, a drowned Syrian boy who had seized the world’s attention: a spur to recall the refugee crisis. Then there was a flurry of business-speak: “In order to reach the world that we want by 2030, collaboration and co-design are key.” One also learned that “the Taco Bell Foundation believes that young people need to dream big.”

  These various events—Bill Clinton’s and the raft of other corporate-sponsored world-saving gatherings that benefited from his example—amounted to a kind of parallel UN Week, centered on MarketWorlders. Just a few miles from CGI stood the Langham building, on Central Park West, built in the style of the French Second Empire. In a high-up apartment owned by one of the barons of private equity, some Africans had been invited to talk to people with money about investing in Africa, at a dinner cohosted by one of the McKinsey-but-for-poverty consultancies. Over chicken curry and salad, there was talk of what deal possibilities there may be in Africa and of the stupidity of regulation and the importance of scale. Then the revelers boarded a black party bus waiting downstairs.

  The bus ferried its passengers downtown to a party in honor of Africa. On board was a tall, lanky executive at Uber who said he was responsible for opening up African markets for the company. It went to show how inclusively humanitarian efforts were defined in the new, enlarged UN Week. The bus pulled up to the Gramercy Park Hotel. The lobby was abuzz with word of a sighting of President Obama dining at a restaurant nearby. He was in town for UN Week, but he would also address the U.S.-Africa Business Forum. The party bus squad marched up to the rooftop, for a do organized by the new Africa Center on Fifth Avenue.

  The party was full of the kind of people who say they “live between” two places. Chicken sausages and deviled eggs swirled around. A prominent executive at Google could be seen making a Nigerian woman laugh. The vice chairman of one of America’s great newspapers was tapping the host of the party on the shoulder to ask where her father was. She was Hadeel Ibrahim, and her father, Mo, was said to be Africa’s richest man. Her cohost for the party was Chelsea Clinton, who didn’t show. Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, walked by. There was a brief toast to the Africa Center and Africa. Then back to business. Someone was whispering that one ought to get to know the man standing behind her, because he had an amazing place on Martha’s Vineyard, and it was actually not one house but three separate houses, and he liked to have interesting people there.

  Several of the people at the party that night worked for Dalberg, one of the antipoverty consulting firms, for which it was also, naturally, a big week. Dalberg disseminated a list of the side events at UN Week (or main events, depending on your view). On its calendar, the right-hand column noted whether and how one might join each event. Eight events had free registration, eight sold paid registration, and forty-eight were invitation-only. The ratio told a truth about the new, MarketWorld-led UN Week: When private actors move into the solution of public problems, it becomes less and less of the public’s business.

  The privateness of the Clinton Foundation’s endeavors had attracted criticism over the years. Who exactly was giving money? What exactly were their motives? Were they giving at least in part to secure influence or jobs in a future Hillary Clinton administration? Thanks in part to these criticisms—and to the expectation that Hillary would soon win, making the criticisms even more menacing—the conference that had done so much to transform UN Week was meeting for the twelfth and final time. And so there was nostalgia in the air at CGI that week—but also worry. A seething rage was engulfing many societies, fed by the perception that the kind of world-traveling elites meeting at this conference had done a better job of protecting their own interests in recent years than of making the world a better place.

  * * *

  —

  MarketWorlders were waking up to the anger. The events of 2016 had made it “the global elite’s annus horribilis,” in the words of Niall Ferguson, a Harvard historian, a preeminent and lavishly paid thought leader, and an esteemed member of the globalist tribe. He wrote in the Boston Globe of how he and his peers had laughed at Donald Trump in January in Davos, only to see him claim the Republican nomination; and then, some months later, ricocheting among Aspen, Lake Como, and Martha’s Vineyard, had failed to take seriously the campaign to sever Britain from the European Union, only to see it succeed. The world’s elites were being revolted against, and the revolts perhaps had something to do with how disconnected they were from the realities of others. Ferguson argued that his tribe of “rootless cosmopolitans” had no choice but to agree with this comment from the German finance minister: “More and more, people don’t trust their elites.”

  In New York in the run-up to UN Week, this mistrust had hung over a number of dinners, salons, panel discussions, and board meetings in preparation for the upcoming confabs. At these occasions, the question being asked was: Why do they hate us? The “they” were the rootless cosmopolitans’ less-rarefied fellow citizens, who in one place after another were gravitating to nationalism, demagogy, and resentful exclusion—and rejecting some of the elites’ most cherished beliefs: borderlessness, market cures for all diseases, inevitable technological progress, benign technocratic stewardship.

  Some of the elites believed that their beautiful dream had to be reexplained to the people. The vision of One World, open borders, technological progress, rule by data, MarketWorld supremacy—this was all part of the right vision wrongly sold. They hadn’t marketed globalization and open borders and trade with enough passion. They hadn’t properly sanded the rough edges of change, with things like job retraining for those displaced.

  There was another camp of MarketWorlders who had taken to wondering whether the globalist dream itself was problematic. It wasn’t that the members of this camp were nationalists; they, too, tended to be steeped in the doing-well-by-doing-good, globalist way of seeing. But the anger on the streets, in so many places at once, was starting to hit home. They were realizing that they and their fellow elites had failed to see mounting frustration, over decades, about the agonies of change that were only now becoming front-page news. They were acknowledging that the protesters also wanted the world to be improved—but they wanted more of a say in how; people believed the promises democracies told them about caring what they think, however poorly they had been fulfilled. That autumn, when MarketWorlders found themselves in heated discussion about the anger, some suggested to others: Maybe the problem is us.

  And what exactly was the nature of that problem? Many MarketWorlders were exploring that question in public.

  For Ferguson, he and his fellow MarketWorld elites had been drafted into a new class war. It was no longer rich versus poor but rather people who claimed to belong to everywhere versus people stuck somewhere—echoing his colleague Michael Porter’s notion of somewhere people and everywhere companies. In Ferguson’s telling, from the same essay as earlier, what went wrong was that the Somewheres were simply no longer fooled by the Everywheres’ performance of concern and charity, and the numbers finally caught up with the Everywheres: “No prizes for guessing which group is more numerous. No matter how many donations the global elite made, philanthropic and political, we could never quite compensate for that disparity.
”

  Like the protocol-guided companies that Michael Porter criticized, MarketWorld’s winners had, in Ferguson’s telling, surrendered any loyalty to place. The trouble was that the world was still governed by place, and so elites whose loyalties and projects focused on the global level were essentially pulling away from democracy itself. And some of the most militant globalists were now admitting as much. Lawrence Summers, the economist who formerly ran the U.S. Treasury and Harvard University, wrote his own apologia in the Financial Times, calling for an end to “reflex internationalism” and for a new, “responsible nationalism”:

  A new approach has to start from the idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximise the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good. People also want to feel that they are shaping the societies in which they live.

  Dani Rodrik, a colleague of Summers at Harvard, published a piece in the New York Times on the Saturday before UN Week admonishing the MarketWorlders against the assumption that what was good for them was good for everyone. Globalization, he argued, needed to be rescued “not just from populists, but also from its cheerleaders.” He wrote, “The new model of globalization stood priorities on their head, effectively putting democracy to work for the global economy, instead of the other way around.”

  Jonathan Haidt offered another theory of what went wrong in an essay that year. “If you want to understand why nationalism and right-wing populism have grown so strong so quickly, you must start by looking at the actions of the globalists,” he wrote. “In a sense, the globalists ‘started it.’ ” They started it, in his view, because the “new cosmopolitan elite,” as he called it, “acts and talks in ways that insult, alienate, and energize many of their fellow citizens, particularly those who have a psychological predisposition to authoritarianism.” For Haidt, globalists were utopians. They believed in change and in the future. They were “anti-nationalist and anti-religious” and “anti-parochial,” believing that “anything that divides people into separate groups or identities is bad; removing borders and divisions is good.” Their opponents, Haidt went on, could be understood as possessing an intuition about roots that Émile Durkheim helped to confirm with his landmark book Suicide: that “people who are more tightly bound by ties of family, religion, and local community have lower rates of suicide,” as Haidt voiced it. “But when people escape from the constraints of community they live in a world of ‘anomie’ or normlessness, and their rate of suicide goes up.”

  In Haidt’s analysis, globalism and antiglobalism are both cogent worldviews with valid concerns and data behind them. There are advantages to a world of free and rampant human mingling and motion, and there are different advantages to stable, tightly bound communities. But according to Haidt, the globalists had so convinced themselves of the moral superiority of openness, freedom, and One World that they were unable to process the genuine fear these things aroused in millions of people.

  What these confessions sometimes passed over was the immense amount of racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, male chauvinism, and slandering of immigrants undammed and even stoked by the populists. Those sentiments were real and played an important part in the story of the political turmoil. Yet it could also be argued that MarketWorld’s sins—those being apologized for by Ferguson and the others—were partly to blame for giving the right-wing populists, ethno-nationalists, and others their opening.

  In an interview by email some days after CGI but before the presidential election, Clinton offered his own estimation of what lay behind the surge of populist anger. “The pain and road rage we see reflected in the election has been building a long time,” he said. He thought that the anger “is being fed in part by the feeling that the most powerful people in the government, economy, and society no longer care about them or look down on them. They want to become part of our progress toward shared opportunities, shared stability, and shared prosperity.” But when it came to Clinton’s solution, it sounded a lot like the model to which he was already committed: “The only answer is to build an aggressive, creative partnership involving all levels of government, the private sector, and non-government organizations to make it better.” In other words, the only answer is to pursue social change outside of traditional public forums, with the political representatives of mankind as one input among several, and corporations having the big say in whether they would sponsor a given initiative or not. The swelling populist anger, of course, was directed in part at the very elites he had sought to convene, on whom he had gambled his theory of post-political problem-solving, who had lost the trust of so many millions of people, making them feel betrayed, uncared for, and scorned.

  What people were rejecting in the United States, Britain, Hungary, and elsewhere was, in their view, rule by global elites who put the pursuit of profit above the needs of their neighbors and fellow citizens. These were elites who seemed more loyal to one another than to their own communities; elites who often showed greater interest in distant humanitarian causes than in the pain of people ten miles to the east or west. Frustrated citizens felt they possessed no power over the spreadsheet- and PowerPoint-wielding elites commensurate with the power these elites had gained over them—whether in switching around their hours or automating their plant or quietly slipping into law a new billionaire-made curriculum for their children’s school.

  What they did not appreciate was the world being changed without them.

  * * *

  —

  The organizers of this final CGI, held in the throes of the antiglobalist revolt, decided that a panel on the topic was a must. And the organizers evidently concluded that the panel should consist entirely of globalists, with no one representing the other side. (This was not the only exclusion on display: Those inspired by the topic to come toward the front of the room would find the first several rows of seats mostly empty but reserved for deep-pocketed sponsors, including McDonald’s and the Rockefeller Foundation.)

  The formal title of the session was “Partnerships for Global Prosperity.” A more fitting title would have been “Why Do They Hate Us?” Bill Clinton was moderating this panel. On it were Mauricio Macri, a former businessman who had defeated Argentina’s entrenched populists to become president; Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, who styled his own career on the pro-market progressivism that Clinton called the “Third Way”; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former Nigerian minister and World Bank official, often seen in Aspen and at TED and elsewhere along the MarketWorld circuit, who had recently joined the investment bank Lazard; and Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London and a champion of the doomed Remain campaign to keep Britain in the EU. The panelists represented the left and the right, and everybody onstage was part of the globalist, cosmopolitan, technocratic, win-win consensus, promoted and sponsored by MarketWorld, that had come under fire of late.

  Clinton praised Macri for bringing common sense to a country afflicted by what he called “a totally discredited economic and political situation.” Then he invited Macri to share with the audience “what you found, what you’re trying to do, and how others can support this, particularly people from the private sector and NGO sector.”

  “Argentina, as you know, President, has suffered decades of populism,” Macri began. He framed the victory of his pro-business campaign as a collective decision that Argentines “deserve to live better. We wanted to be part of the world. We wanted to cut with isolism.” He knew his audience was interested in making the world a better place, so he decided to focus his remarks on his plan to reduce poverty in Argentina. Even so, he came nowhere near the concepts of equality and justice and power; he didn’t broach a topic like land reform or the concentration of wealth in a handful of families. Instead, he spoke of making it easier to do business. “We know—we all know—that to cut poverty, you have to create good jobs, quality jobs,” he said. “And for that you need to create an environment of trust, of c
onfidence. You have to assure the investors you will be attached to the rule of law, that you will be reliable.”

  What he was arguing was classic MarketWorld win-win-ism, inflected by globalism: The best thing for the worst-off people in Argentina was to do whatever made foreign investors and international agencies feel at home. That is why, he said, he was making “tough decisions”: to unify the country’s exchange rate, release the payment of dividends abroad, settle the country’s disputes with foreign bondholders. He was proud to have brought an International Monetary Fund delegation to Argentina not long ago. He was excited to have hosted a business and investment forum the previous week, drawing a few thousand businesspeople from several dozen countries. “We need all global companies coming to Argentina, so as to help us developing our country,” he said. His vision of the good society as a place reassuring to foreign capital was a curious solution to the problem of publics swimming in resentment against the globalists and the winners from change.