He spoke for more than an hour, perhaps one of his last major speeches to a world that still loved him, reciting the history of the CGI model and celebrating its accomplishments. The central thrust of that success had been the luring of private-sector actors into the public problem-solving arena. But it wasn’t always clear which had influenced which more. Clinton spoke of constant innovation, of impact, of scalability, of margins, of volume. This had not been his language coming out of Yale Law and campaigning around the state of Arkansas. One of the major cultural developments during his adult life had been the growing pressure on political leaders to tone down the political language and amp up the business jargon if they wanted to be taken seriously and get MarketWorld’s help. Clinton, like so many leaders, had accepted the bargain. It was another way in which the new philanthropic model that he had promoted was disruptive of, rather than contributory to, public life: The private sector didn’t merely add to the public sphere’s activities. It got to change the language in which the public sphere thought and acted.
Of course, no one at CGI would be caught denigrating democracy. The alternative mode of problem-solving that Clinton promoted was not intended to be in tension with democracy; it was meant to bolster it. He described CGI’s model of extrademocratic partnership as “living proof that good people, committed to creative cooperation, have almost unlimited positive impact to help people today and give our kids better tomorrows.” Then he added an astonishing aside: “This is all that does work in the modern world.”
According to the former leader of the most powerful country in history, a centrist but from the political left, whose wife hoped she was just a few months from her own long-sought turn at its helm, all that worked in the modern world was private, donor-financed world-saving, full of good intentions, unaccountable to the public, based on win-win partnerships initiated by companies and philanthropists and other private actors, blessed (sometimes) by public officials. All that worked was projects cooked up out of public view at a forum underwritten by Cisco, Diageo, Procter & Gamble, Swiss Re, Western Union, and McDonald’s. The only problem-solving approach that worked in the modern world, according to Clinton, was one that made the people an afterthought, to be helped but not truly heard.
Clinton now voiced the sense of besiegement that the globalists had been feeling. “This is a time when this sort of talk is not in fashion all over the world,” he said of their ethos. “Everywhere today,” he said, “there’s a temptation to say to everything I just told you,
‘No. You’re wrong; life is a zero-sum game, and I’m losing. You’re wrong; our differences matter more than our common humanity. To hell with the findings of the Human Genome Project, that we’re all 99.5 percent the same. No. Choose resentment over reconciliation; choose anger over answers; choose denial over empowerment; and choose walls over bridges.’
These are not the right choices. The choices you have made here, for eleven years, are the right choices.”
Was this the only way of framing the choices? Was there a case to be made for communities wanting to resist the globosphere—a case that deserved to be heard on its own terms, and not emptily smeared as favoring resentment and difference? Clinton’s globalist dream was admirable, but it was also intolerant of other dreams. It sought to make hard choices seem inevitable and uncomplicated. It sought to blur what happened to be good for the plutocrats in the room with what was good for ordinary people. It promulgated another inspiring vision of changing the world that left the underlying systems untouched. Clinton was right that his philosophy was meeting resistance, but he did not take much responsibility for why it was being resisted. The win-win doctrine upon which he had built his foundation was more than unfashionable. It was among the things inspiring the revolt by making so many people feel barred from decision-making about the future of their own world.
* * *
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Eight months later, Clinton was walking his dog near his home in the New York City suburb of Chappaqua. He ran into one of his neighbors, a “zany” right-winger who was a fan of Donald Trump and who, several weeks after the final CGI, had gotten his way with his neighbor Hillary’s electoral defeat. The neighbor and Bill had a tradition of bantering across the chasm between them. So that day, Clinton recalled, he was “ragging with him,” when at one point the neighbor said, “Obama and Hillary started the second Civil War.”
Clinton told this story sitting forty stories above Manhattan in his foundation office, sipping milkless tea. He had had half a year to digest the defeat that plunged America into the Trump era. If his wife had suffered most as the candidate whose platform failed, Bill had suffered in a different, more abstract way: Trump had defeated Hillary, but the ideas that propelled his “America First” campaign were a repudiation of the globalist consensus of which Bill had always been the louder and more unreserved champion.
“My whole life in politics was marked by a political version, on a small scale, of the epic global contest that is now under way between inclusive cooperation—involving networks and diverse people working toward a common goal—and the reassertion of tribal nationalism,” he told me. With the world aflame and even some in posh Chappaqua feeling the country to be in a kind of civil war, Clinton could not escape the possibility that his side was losing the “epic global contest” that had defined his career. His neighbor, if zany, had recently been backed up in his analysis by the writer Pankaj Mishra, who said of this explosive global moment of terrorist violence, raging xenophobia, and political upheaval, “Future historians may well see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third—and the longest and strangest—of all world wars: one that approximates, in its ubiquity, a global civil war.”
The world was in “a period of intense resentment,” Clinton said. “In a time of extreme resentment, it’s more important to people that you hate the same things and the same people that they do.” He looked not only at the U.S. election but also at Brexit, at frothing far-right populist movements in Europe, at the unhinged antidrug crusader who now ran the Philippines, and beyond, and he concluded that despite the prosperity and promise that his new philosophy had spread, “You still have this enormous zero-sum bloc in the world. Win-lose”—people who believed that their progress could only come at the expense of someone else’s. He continued to believe in the linearity of progress and growing borderlessness; he assumed the world would come to its senses. He figured, to paraphrase an old line of his, that there was nothing wrong with the world that couldn’t be fixed by what was right with the world.
This faith reflected the standard MarketWorld response to what Mishra dubbed the “age of anger”: that, yes, the winners of the age had to do a better job of extending victory to others. But this was a facile answer. It avoided the harder, more urgent question facing the winners, which had to do with their culpability for what had happened, and whether they, and the system they oversaw, would have to change. It was admirable that some of the elites had contributed to Clinton’s causes. But didn’t those elites bear responsibility for the anger, fueled by mistrust of elites, that was bubbling in America and internationally? “Yes, absolutely,” Clinton said. “But.”
The “yes” part of that was the overconfidence of the winners in globalization as a win-win. “I think a lot of people who lived in comfortable circumstances in theory knew that there were some dislocated people,” he said, “but thought there were always going to be more winners than losers.” That assumption had not necessarily aged well. As for the “but” part, Clinton blamed his political opponents on the right. “I also believe that when the difficulties became apparent, at least in America, people on our side, whether they were rich or middle class, were much more willing to do something about it,” he said, “whereas the people on the other side realized that if they didn’t do anything about it, they could blame us and be rewarded for their misconduct.” He added, “So we’re responsible, but the people who didn’t
want to respond are more responsible.”
In hindsight, Clinton said, he and his fellow globalists could have done more to help ordinary people absorb the shocks of change. He could have insisted, when signing the North American Free Trade Agreement as president, on more restrictions on that freedom. He wondered if he should have imposed a tariff on firms that moved their factories overseas, leading to job losses, and then sought to export products to American consumers—and whether he should have linked his support for NAFTA to such a tariff. He imagined what that position might have been: “Look, I’d be happy to sign this, but I want a fee on the exporters sufficient to take care of the people that they dislodged.” He could have fought harder for job retraining monies to be allocated before trade agreements were signed, and for more corporate incentives to keep jobs in the country. He added that when President Obama had brokered the global climate accord, he, similarly, could have offered more of a plan to coal miners and others who would be displaced by change. Clinton took a measure of responsibility for failing to do these things, but he noted, reasonably, that he had been opposed by his Republican opposition on virtually everything. So these regrets might have been moot.
Still, his political opposition as president does not tell the full story of why recent decades have been so grueling for millions of Americans. Clinton, like Obama after him, was up against militant conservatives and libertarians, backed by plutocratic donors, who loathed the very idea of public, governmental problem-solving. To be clear, that is the movement chiefly responsible for market supremacy’s takeover of America and the bleak prospects of millions of Americans. Yet the Republican Party represented less than half of the nation, and the Democratic Party had a chance to stand for a robust alternative to market hegemony. And you could say that it did to an extent—but it often did, under Clinton, and Obama, in a tepid, market-friendly, donor-approved way that conceded so much to government’s haters that the cause lost the fire of purpose.
Jacob Hacker, the Yale political scientist, who was once described as “an intellectual ‘It boy’ in the Democratic Party,” said in an interview, “Many progressives still believe in a role for government that is pretty fundamental, but they have lost their faith in the capacity to achieve it, and they’ve in many cases lost the language for talking about it.” Republicans, he said, are straightforward in their contempt for government. Democrats, especially those of the Clinton school of centrist, triangulating, market-friendly politics, don’t counter the contempt with a vigorous embrace of government. Rather, Hacker said, candidates like Hillary Clinton speak in a “gauzy” language about “bringing people together across lines of race and class” and “solving problems together in some vague way,” but remain “understandably reluctant to talk about the use of government itself.” They campaign like this in spite of policies that remain committed to government action. Even their proposed policies, though, reflect ambivalence: health care for all, but not through public provision; help paying for college, but not free college; charter schools, but not equal schools. Bill Clinton had distilled this hesitancy when he famously declared, in a passage whose second sentence is rarely included in quotations, “The era of big government is over. But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.”
Hacker argues that this hesitancy and “loss of faith in government” has “hugely asymmetric effects on the two parties.” He said, “For Republicans and the right, it is—for the most part, though not always—conducive to their aims, because if government doesn’t do things, it can often be consistent with what they would like to see happen. But for the left and for Democrats, it’s a huge loss, because their vision of a good society is one in which a lot of valuable public goods and benefits have their foundations in government action.”
To illustrate Hacker’s point: Bill Clinton’s heart disease had led him to experiment with healthier diets. Because of this, he decided to address the problem of childhood obesity, which is of course abetted by processed food and soft drink makers with great political clout and a knack for insinuating their products into public schools.
It was to be expected that the right’s answer to this problem would be a hymn to the free market. The left, though, might instead propose to marshal government and the law to protect children from companies they can neither vote against nor easily organize to thwart on their own. From an ex-president without legal power but still with the ability to galvanize a movement, one could imagine a campaign, modeled on those of the Progressive Era, to pressure the government to put an end to this abusive profiteering. Yet his proposed answer was to make it easier for the offending companies to make money selling healthier products.
“If you want to get them to do less harm, it requires innovation, because they still have to make money, especially for publicly held companies,” Clinton said. This was, quite literally, the bottom line. The needs of the market came first. Even a man who had spent his lifetime in politics felt a duty to be solicitous of the businessperson’s concerns. Rather than insist that the companies stop shaving years off of children’s lives, especially poor ones’, we had to make sure they had a better business model waiting on deck to replace the current, noxious one.
Clinton recounted the double-barreled argument he made to the companies: “We know you don’t want to give all these schoolchildren Type 2 diabetes. We know you don’t want to do it because it would hurt your heart, and because when they’re in their mid-thirties, in wheelchairs with their legs cut off, they ain’t gonna be drinking a lot of soda pop.” Not harming children was not only the right thing to do but also the business-smart thing to do. Otherwise, Clinton said, “their own business model will devour itself.” He had worked with the companies to reduce voluntarily, as a group, the calories in their products. They had done so, and children were better off, and government hadn’t had to be bothered. “The best government looks for ways to make things work more in the private sector,” he said. And he was proud that he had helped children in a way that preserved the companies’ ability to make a reasonable return. “They’re all still making money, because they did it together,” he said.
In this embrace of making things work in the private sector, even when big business is harming children, Clinton revealed how he had made peace with market supremacy. At one point, he used a phrase that captured this acceptance. When faced with a bad system, knowing it is flawed, and wanting to change it, but not wanting to overplay your hand, what do you do? “How much do you do the right thing?” he asked. “How much do you feed the beast?” Perhaps Clinton, like many of his fellow win-win globalists, had, on the question of how to confront the influence of plutocrats over the last generation, overfed the beast. What did he make of the criticism that the private-sector-led approach to social change undermined the habit and idea of governments taking the lead in solving problems? “I think there’s some truth in that,” he said. And he said that he tried wherever possible in his philanthropic efforts to work with local governments, and “to reach out to the NGOs in the area, and to be open to the suggestions of people.”
Such attempts to work with government, though, were not the same as a conviction in the power of government, the supreme power of government, to better people’s lives. Clinton seemed to acknowledge this when he said that some globalist do-gooders, whether at home in America or in their work abroad, had at times neglected the duty to make democracy stronger. “If you do this at any scale at all, you have an obligation to build the capacity of the governments to solve the problems of the people and to fight corruption,” he said. Yet so many globalists who pursue change today overlook that idea, and Clinton did worry about that. He said, “What I’ve tried to do is to say to, like, the founder of Toms Shoes—who gives shoes away; he’s a good man—or any number of these other younger entrepreneurs, who I think are wonderful, is that, whenever possible, the most positive and lasting impact will be if you do this in a way that i
ncreases the capacity of the local officials, both the administrative, public servant types and the elected officials, to take care of themselves.”
Accordingly, Clinton proposed a test for do-gooders to judge whether their help is actually improving things: “When you get done, will it be sustainable, and will the people be governed by more effective, more responsive, more honest government?” Yet it was easier to apply that principle to a project in Africa, perhaps, than it was to deploy it in America when taking on the problem of soft drinks, juice boxes, and childhood obesity. One’s American plutocrat friends didn’t necessarily have a problem with more energetic government in Africa. But they preferred win-win solutions in their own backyard, where energetic government sounded like it could end up being expensive.
Clinton didn’t like to think that his connections to, and enrichment from, the super-wealthy had changed him in any way, or shaped his manner of thinking about things. Yes, he had become, in a sense, one of the worldwide chieftains of thought leadership, charging as much as a few hundred thousand dollars a speech. Yes, he reportedly lunched before some of these speeches with smaller groups of plutocrats who paid, say, $10,000 a head to eat with him and hear his take on the world. But, Clinton argued, “When you can’t make decisions which benefit them anymore, it’s less of a concern.” He said this as though it were impossible to imagine how the opportunity to earn tens of millions of dollars after a presidency might affect a president’s fight-picking decisions while in office.
In our present age of anger, so many people seemed to intuit that their leaders becoming fellow travelers of billionaires and millionaires did have some effect on what they believed. That intuition had hamstrung his own wife’s campaign. It had helped Bernie Sanders’s unlikely primary challenge, and then Donald Trump’s unlikely election victory—made all the stranger by the fact that Trump incarnated the very problem he named. Was it inevitable that the leaders of a democracy should affiliate mostly with plutocrats after their time in public office? Was that not related to the problems of mistrust and alienation and social distance that lurked behind the anger now confronting elites?
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World Page 27
