Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  These changes help to explain the sense of disorientation that many people feel in this era, and why it would have been an especially good time for elites to be trusted by their fellow citizens—and why it is so destabilizing when they aren’t. Rodrik brought up Hillary Clinton. “Her proposals would have done a lot more for the middle classes, and lower-middle-income classes, than Trump’s,” he said. But “she wasn’t getting traction, and I think it’s the sense of this loss of trust—that they’re associated with a group of globalist elites or just hanging out with Goldman Sachs and so forth. And it doesn’t matter how good your proposals are. Basically, if these are proposals that come from people whom you don’t trust fundamentally, if you don’t think that they have your interests in mind, then these proposals are not going to be taken seriously.”

  Because the globalists tended to hang out with other globalists, they were at risk of trapping themselves in an echo chamber. “There were a certain number of tales about how globalization was supposed to work, and these people kept telling these tales to each other,” Rodrik said. “This was the tide that was going to lift all boats. And this tale kept being told, and then it got reinforced, and anybody who rejected this tale was basically just a self-interested protectionist.”

  Rodrik asked, “If you have an understanding of the world that’s currently faulty, how are you going to find that out?” He answered his own question: “In an ideal democratic world, where citizenship is fully exercised and participatory, it’s a process of domestic deliberation where you’re testing your idea against other domestic citizens, and you’re seeing that, ‘Well, hold on; I thought that was a good thing, but what’s been happening in North Carolina, where these people have lost their jobs because of NAFTA?’ Maybe we didn’t put in place the kind of protections that were needed, and I can understand that. But that kind of exposure and that kind of challenge has not been truly provided.”

  Any position critical of globalization has had to contend with globalism’s One World moral glow, Rodrik said. Unity always sounds better than division, and engagement better than line-drawing. Bill Clinton himself had been the master of framing globalization not as something to be chosen, not as a particular arrangement of policies and incentives that could be done in various reasonable ways, but as an inevitability of moral progress. “I respect the antiglobalization people, and I think a lot of their criticisms are valid. But they want to take us back to a time that never was,” he once said in a speech, adding, “Human history is the journey of going from isolation to interdependence to integration. A divided world is unsustainable and dangerous. Antiglobalists want to go from interdependence to isolation, and it’s not possible.” What was sometimes a rather narrow vision of globalization, centered on what would allow businesses to expand most easily and protocol-optimize most seamlessly, was gussied up by such rhetoric into moral evolution. Which made it easy to cast criticism as hatred, even when it had nothing to do with it. You want to restrict some area of trade with Mexico? What, do you hate Mexican people? Don’t you believe that we’re all God’s children?

  For Rodrik, the dream of global harmony is admirable, and there is undeniable virtue in the philanthropy and social concern galvanized by an event like CGI. What worried him was that at the very same time, the globalist sphere of which it was part was continuing to undermine the idea of politics as the best way to shape the world. “The locus of politics, I think, is the key issue here,” he said. “What is the right locus of politics, and who are the decision-making authorities? Is it these networks and these global get-togethers? Or is it at the national level?” Who should make change, and where should they make it?

  As he said this, he could already hear the globalists’ objection: But we aren’t engaging in politics when we come to CGI or Davos or the Aspen Institute or Skoll. We are just helping people. “Probably people who get together in these congregations don’t think of what they’re doing as politics,” Rodrik said. “But of course it’s politics. It’s just a politics that has a different locus and has a different view of who matters and how you can change things, and has a different theory of change and who the agents of change are.” To put it another way, if you are trying to shape the world for the better, you are engaging in a political act—which raises the question of whether you are employing an appropriately political process to guide the shaping. The problem with the globalists’ vision of world citizens changing the world through partnerships, Rodrik said, is that “you’re not accountable to anybody, because it is just a bunch of other global citizens like you as your audience.” He added, “The whole idea about having a polity, having a demos, is that there’s accountability within that demos. That’s what a political system ensures and these mechanisms don’t.”

  The political system that Rodrik speaks of is not just Congress or the Supreme Court or governorships. It is all of those things and other things. It is civic life. It is the habit of solving problems together, in the public sphere, through the tools of government and in the trenches of civil society. It is solving problems in ways that give the people you are helping a say in the solutions, that offer that say in equal measure to every citizen, that allow some kind of access to your deliberations or at least provide a meaningful feedback mechanism to tell you it isn’t working. It is not reimagining the world at conferences.

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  The breakout session was called “Beyond Equality: Harnessing the Power of Girls & Women for Sustainable Development.”

  “Welcome to our sunrise service here at CGI,” the panel moderator, Melanne Verveer, said in opening. Her panel was, she said, emblematic of what lay ahead that day, for it brought together diverse stakeholders from multiple perspectives on the topic of women’s equality. The diverse stakeholders turned out to be three corporate executives and one UN man. There were no feminist thinkers, activists, lawyers, elected leaders, labor organizers, or other varietals of women-savers on the panel. Serious feminists might have found this slate of experts problematic, but it was not, by CGI’s standards, a poorly formed panel. On the contrary, much like the panel on globalism and its haters, it was a panel that could be counted on to provide the right amount of stimulation while worrying absolutely no one.

  A panel like this was a perfect place to explore a question that Rodrik raised: Did this well-meaning, if democratically dubious, globalist private sphere “complement” nations seeking to solve their own problems, or did it inadvertently serve as a “substitute”?

  On the surface, the answer might seem obvious: How can a group of private people getting together substitute for democracy? Sure, they’re rich and powerful, but congresses and parliaments still do their work. Surely, they’re the ones setting the agenda.

  It isn’t necessarily that simple. A pair of Stanford sociologists, Aaron Horvath and Walter Powell, investigated the question and came up with a surprising answer. When elites solve public problems privately, they can do so in ways that contribute to democracy, and they can do so in ways that disrupt it. The former occurs when elite help “contributes to and enlarges the public goods provided by the state, and attends to interests not readily provided for by the state.” But the same elite help, backed by the same noble intentions, can instead “disrupt” democracy when it “replaces the public sphere with all manner of private initiatives for special public purposes.” These latter works don’t simply do what government cannot do. They “crowd out the public sector, further reducing both its legitimacy and its efficacy, and replace civic goals with narrower concerns about efficiency and markets.”

  Horvath and Powell’s most interesting analysis is about how elites can pull off this crowding out of vast machineries of state. How can private hotel ballroom hangouts have their way with democracies in possession of their own standing armies? The seasoned and astute private world-changer seeks to alter “the public conversation about which social issues matter, sets an agenda for ho
w they matter, and specifies who is the preferred provider of services to address these issues without any engagement with the deliberative processes of civil society.” The savviest of these elite saviors recognize that they live in democracies and respect that. They don’t ignore public opinion, but that doesn’t mean they base their help on that opinion. The disruptive approach to private helping, Horvath and Powell write, “in lieu of soliciting public input, seeks to influence or change public opinion and demand.”

  So one could ask about a panel like this: Was it merely seeking to supplement the public solution of public problems? Or was it engaging in the art that Horvath and Powell lay out, of seeking to bend an issue and the possible solutions to it in a direction favorable to elite interests, by tweaking how people think and talk about it?

  Right up front, the choice of moderator offered a clue to anyone seeking to answer that question. Verveer was a prudent selection by MarketWorld standards. She had been the first U.S ambassador for global women’s issues, and before that Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff during her husband’s White House days. Verveer was the kind of safe, corporate-sponsor-compatible feminist who got invited to conferences like this. (You didn’t run into feminist legal scholars like Catharine MacKinnon or feminist writers like Virginie Despentes in these halls.) Verveer had been active in the civil rights movement a generation ago. If one of the corporate panelists had looked her up before the talk and been concerned about a potentially political orientation, they would have been reassured by the website of her strategic advisory group. It featured a quote, from the CEO of Coca-Cola, about how “women are already the most dynamic and fastest-growing economic force in the world.” (MarketWorld being a small world, he was also the father of a cofounder of the Even app.) Verveer’s firm called itself a “center for thought-leadership,” offering advice and organizing “impact convenings” for clients. It made clear that it was not in the business of real, structural change. Its mission, borrowing a concept from Michael Porter, was “to create shared value—advancing women and girls while driving sustainable results.” In the age of markets, if feminism didn’t also fatten the bottom line, certain feminists appreciated that equality was an ask too hard.

  Verveer’s panelists on women’s equality were Bob Collymore, chief executive of Safaricom, a Kenyan mobile phone provider; David Nabarro, a special adviser to the UN secretary-general on sustainable development and climate change; Carolyn Tastad, who was in charge of North America for Procter & Gamble; and Jane Wurwand, the founder of Dermalogica, which sells skin products. They made opening speeches, and before long the conversation had pulled into the port where so many of them eventually dock—the idea that the solution to the problem (in this case, women’s equality) was entrepreneurship. “For me, it’s all about jobs,” said Wurwand. She noted that the beauty industry generates a disproportionate number of jobs for women. The best way to empower women, the thing it was “all about,” was getting them jobs in the beauty industry and helping them own salons. What would most liberate women happened to be the growth of Dermalogica’s own sector.

  “Excellent! Entrepreneurship!” Verveer responded. They were talking about the equality of women, but now, already, they seemed to be limiting the topic to jobs and the growth of their sectors. They were talking about feminism on the condition that they stick to the profitable wing of it.

  MarketWorld’s ideas weren’t promoted through propaganda and falsehoods so much as through this kind of confinement. Its weapon was not utterance but silence, the people it did not invite, the way it hemmed in a conversation. This approach eliminated the kind of expertise that could cogently and persuasively formulate a less MarketWorld-friendly response. In the absence of diverse voices, any criticism of such a panel might attract easy putdowns: What, you don’t think women can own their own beauty salons? What, do you think it’s better for women not to have jobs? This is why it was important not to have people sympathetic to such criticisms sitting on the panel.

  For example, what you didn’t hear asked at CGI was: Didn’t the beauty industry fuel the very commodification of women that sustained gender inequality? In a world of true gender equality, might not the beauty industry shrink? Isn’t it possible that there would be millions fewer nails done and heads blow-dried and bottles of foundation sold in the egalitarian world the panelists claimed to want? Naomi Wolf writes in her book The Beauty Myth that “whatever is deeply, essentially female—the life in a woman’s expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin—is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease.” This perceived ugliness is, she notes, good for business, because industries like retail and advertising—not to mention salons and plastic surgeons—are “fueled by sexual dissatisfaction.” Wouldn’t true equality for women be a win for women but a loss for Dermalogica?

  You did not get into testy structural things like that here. That was getting into the zone where someone’s progress comes at a cost to someone else’s business—someone who is a speaker at and/or sponsor of this gathering. And because the staff had done each part of their job right—from the selection of a moderator to the choice of the panelists to the framing of the topic—there was little risk of such questions. The panel itself was an endlessly sunny, conflict-free zone. It was rare to have a genuine, full-throated philosophical disagreement, which was remarkable given the topic of women’s equality. Sometimes, when a hairline fracture opened between two panelists, a skilled moderator could, as Verveer did in this very panel, rush to say, “I don’t think Bob and David are in conflict with each other.”

  To keep disagreement out of one’s panels was not just an aesthetic decision. In some small way, it changed how the world operated, because it shaped what ideas got talked about, and what solutions got acted on when people left this room, and what programs got funded and didn’t, and what stories got covered and didn’t, and it tipped the scale in the direction of the winners once again, ensuring that the friendly, win-win way of solving public problems would remain dominant. People asking big questions about the underlying system and imagining alternative systems would not be attending.

  The market consensus also served to elevate certain kinds of solutions over others, to give them a kind of Good Housekeeping seal. For example, the panelists spoke of diversity, and the moderator told everyone what her consulting firm made good money telling people: that diversity wasn’t only just but also profitable. “The diversity advantage is truly an advantage,” she said. They turned to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Tastad, of P&G, tried to give these a boost by saying, “The SDGs are fundamentally consistent with our company’s core purpose, which is empowering lives.” Good to know.

  Then the moderator came at the same concept another way by asking whether the panelists saw women’s equality becoming a fundamental part of business strategy, or whether it would continue to languish as a priority mostly of philanthropists and corporate social responsibility departments. Wurwand thought it was a competitive advantage. “Empowering girls and women is the hot new branding thing!” she explained. In MarketWorld, this was important to underscore to the audience. “So it’s not just the right thing to do,” Verveer said. “It’s the business-smart thing to do.” This was the highest praise a cause could receive.

  Women’s equality, it was now said, was a $28 trillion opportunity. This had become a near-constant refrain in MarketWorld—some permutation of the words “women,” “equality,” and “trillion.” If the logic of our time had applied to the facts of an earlier age, someone would have put out a report suggesting that ending slavery was great for reducing the trade deficit. “Of course, you should do it because it’s the right thing to do, but there’s a strong business case,” Collymore, of Safaricom, now said. In other words, of course you should do it because morality is enough, but since we all know that morality isn’t actually enough, you should know that the
business case is fantastic.

  Now it was Q-and-A time, and the cult of consensus continued. Only once did the pleasantness break. A woman with a German accent, who said she was from Healing Hotels of the World, rose to make a comment. Speaking of the women the panel had spoken of helping, she said, “Sometimes I think that, with all our ideas, we victimize them.”

  That simple statement suggested a range of possibilities. What if they in the doing-well-by-doing-good set were wrong? What if their exclusions and noninvitations and silences were mistakes? What if those omissions, with the enormous financial backing that they enjoyed, had real consequences in people’s lives? What if the reason much of the world had in recent centuries turned away from closed-door conclaves of unelected, unaccountable people making decisions for humanity is that they could do more harm than good? Didn’t democracy arise because of a wise wariness of such rooms? What if it was unfair and illegitimate for an unelected body to have any errors they make so widely influence societies and ramify into the lives of millions of people without the power, connections, and platforms to register their interests and talk back? What if reimagining the world in such rooms was, in fact, the business-smart thing to do but not the right thing to do?

  The Healing Hotels woman’s comment was the only one the panel ignored. The moderator listened, nodded, moved on.

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  These questions of anger and participation and democracy had hovered over the conference, and they hung in the air in the final session of the final day of the final Clinton Global Initiative. The session title was “Imagine All the People.” Its centerpiece was a much-anticipated valedictory address by Bill Clinton. He wanted to lay out his own first draft of CGI’s legacy.