All that works in the modern world - Part I

Many of these people had been coming to Bill Clinton’s conference for years. Though they tended to label themselves such things as givers, philanthropists, social innovators, impact investors, and the like, recent political upheavals had given their tribe a new name that was sticking. They were coming to be known, by their friends and enemies alike, as globalists. Those arriving at the Clinton Global Initiative on that September morning in 2016 were looking forward to a week that had become a kind of family reunion for the globalists. And yet they were aware of gathering at a time when they were ever more despised. Around the world, suspicion seemed to be taking hold that jet-setters solving humanity’s problems in private conclaves was as much a problem as it was a solution.

The conference was one of many events taking place during what was known, somewhat anachronistically, as UN Week. The week got its name from the convening of most of the world’s heads of state in the city of New York. They went before the UN General Assembly one by one and there, standing before its famous green backdrop, sought to speak to the world. Because of their presence, the security in New York on this September morning was virtually militaristic, provided by darkly clad men whose scowling eyes presumed guilt. Every few minutes, a motorcade sped past in a coned-off lane reserved for heads of state and ministers. Here on Second Avenue, a group of protestors was seeking to warn the visiting dignitaries to keep their “Hands Off Syria.” On another corner, a pair of women in West African robes stood with clipboards, seeking signatories for a petition about health. They were positioned strategically close to the United Nations. Perhaps no one had told them that, thanks in large part to Bill Clinton, the United Nations was no longer where the action was during UN Week.

Clinton had left the American presidency in January 2001 as a late-middle-aged man needing redemption. He had survived two terms haunted by scandal, an impeachment vote by the House of Representatives, and an exit marred by dubiously given pardons and claims of stolen White House furniture. In Man of the World, an inside account of Clinton’s post-presidency, the journalist Joe Conason portrays the former president as anguished and under siege in the first months of his new life. The talk of scandal continued—first the fallout from the pardon and furniture affairs, then from the former president’s bid to set up his taxpayer-funded offices in a midtown Manhattan building whose rent would exceed that of the offices of the four other living ex-presidents combined. Clinton recovered from the outcry by instead setting up his office on West 125th Street in Harlem, where he tried to help the surrounding African American community by enlisting protocol-bearing business consultants to help shopkeepers pro bono. Still, the negativity was hard to escape. Clinton’s new speaking agent booked him gigs for up to $250,000 each, only to see many canceled thanks to what Conason calls “the deluge of public scorn.” Few foreign invitations were rescinded, though. There was a lesson in that for Clinton. “Soon he and his staff came to realize that however diminished his popularity might be in his native land, much of the rest of the world was ready to welcome and even celebrate him,” Conason writes.

Guided by this insight, Clinton began to make his first post-presidential forays overseas, which would set him on a path to becoming an icon of global philanthropy and the eventual subject of a made-for-television documentary titled President of the World: The Bill Clinton Phenomenon. He raised money for the earthquake in the western Indian state of Gujarat. He brokered complex deals to lower the costs of HIV/AIDS drugs in developing countries. Then, in 2005, attuned to the currents of his time, Clinton decided that if you wanted truly to change the world now, you needed the help of companies and plutocrats, and thus you needed your own conference on the MarketWorld circuit.

The idea that formed was to host a conference during UN Week in New York, to take advantage of all the world leaders in town, who could perhaps serve as lures to attract the rich and generous to the city. Clinton credited his longtime aide Doug Band with the idea of this timing. Clinton later recalled his own reaction: “I said, ‘Yeah. And everybody would have the exquisite joy of driving in New York City during the opening of the UN.’ Then I did probably an impulsive thing and said, ‘I’ll try this.’ ”

In January 2005, on a stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, one of the original conferences on the MarketWorld circuit, where corporate types paid vast sums of money to mingle with political leaders and others of similar social position, Clinton announced the Clinton Global Initiative. It would, he said, be like Davos, except it would require the rich and powerful people it brought together to commit, as a condition of showing up, to tangible projects for the global good. “I’m a big supporter of Davos, but the world leaders of the rich and the poor countries and everybody in between come to the UN every year in September,” Clinton said, according to Conason, adding, “So what I thought we would do this year is to have a somewhat smaller version of what we do at the World Economic Forum, but that it would be focused very much on specific things all the participants could do.” Decisions and actions, the actual solving of problems, would be the distinguishing feature of CGI. “Everybody who comes needs to know on the front end that you’re going to be asked your opinion about what we should do on AIDS, TB, malaria; what the private sector can do about global warming,” he said. Moreover, “you’re going to be asked to participate in very specific decisions about that and to make very specific commitments.”

The first CGI got many warm reviews. Tina Brown, the veteran magazine editor, wrote, “Clinton seems to have found his role as facilitator-in-chief, urging us to give up our deadly national passivity and start thinking things through for ourselves.” She made a pointed comment about CGI as an alternative to the public, governmental way of solving problems, in light of the colossal state failure exposed by Hurricane Katrina the month before. “Commandeering the role of government through civic action suddenly feels like a very empowering notion—the alternative being to find oneself stranded in a flood waving a shirt from a rooftop,” she wrote. Indeed, as CGI developed, it brought together a growing number of people interested in “commandeering the role of government”: investors, entrepreneurs, social innovators, activists, entertainers, philanthropists, nonprofit executives, protocol-equipped consultants, and others, who came to brainstorm new double-bottom-line funds, plot against malaria, and also, since they were in town and so was everyone else, cut their own deals. And with every passing year, their growing presence seemed to shift the center of gravity of UN Week.

As CGI developed, two words came to define it: partnerships and commitments. Clinton invited people from various sectors—entrepreneurs, philanthropists, political leaders, labor unions, civil society—to work together on initiatives for societal betterment and to make public promises about what they planned to achieve. This approach spoke of an emerging view of how progress is made that Bill Clinton hugely endorsed and actively evangelized. Clinton had as a young man gone to Yale Law School, and for decades afterward, he pursued the improvement of the world through the instrument of politics and the law. He had embraced liberalism that was, in the words of the writer Nathan Heller, a “systems-building philosophy,” whose revelation was “that society, left alone, tended toward entropy and extremes, not because people were inherently awful but because they thought locally.” Private individuals couldn’t be relied on to see the big picture of their society, Heller writes, but “a larger entity such as government could.” When he started in public office, Clinton believed public problems were best solved through public service and collective action. During his White House years, though, and even more decisively afterward, he had been won over by the theory that it was preferable to solve problems through markets and partnerships among entities private and public, which would find areas of common cause and work together on win-win solutions.

Early on, Clinton wondered if people would pay money to attend an event whose purpose was to get them to contribute more money, and volunteer on top of that. “I mean, who’s ever heard of paying a membership fee to be asked to spend more money or spend more time?” he joked.

He underestimated himself. The commitments brought rewards. If you worked for a consumer products company and committed to making water filters available to millions, or a foundation that committed to restore some hearing to hundreds of thousands, you might be invited to come up to the CGI stage. There Bill Clinton would stand beside you and read your commitment to the room and praise you. This moment would become, among the doing-well-by-doing-good set, the coveted capstone to a career: People who were influential and/or rich but relatively unknown would bask in the celebrity-like glow. It was also a good way to get your face before a lot of rich and powerful people if, say, you were seeking investors for your new fund. If you owned a plane and had a lot more money where that charitable commitment came from, as the Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra did, you could soon find yourself trotting the planet with Bill Clinton as your door-opener and bro. You would help him with his foundation, and he might let you into his inner circle, and being in his inner circle might benefit you the next time you bid on a mining project. 

By Clinton’s count, the twelve CGI meetings had inspired some 3,600 commitments. The organization claimed that these commitments had improved more than 435 million lives in 180 countries—a figure that was as impressive as it was hard to verify, since this new mode of world-saving was private, voluntary, and accountable to no one. One commitment, titled “Creating Prosperity with Major Corporations,” was put forward by TechnoServe, the antipoverty consulting firm, in partnership with companies such as Walmart, Coca-Cola, Cargill, McDonald’s, and SABMiller; it later submitted a progress report claiming to have implemented a “business plan competition program for entrepreneurs at the ‘bottom of the pyramid.’ ” Another commitment was titled “WeTech.” Drawing on partners such as McKinsey, Google, and Goldman Sachs, the initiative promised education and mentoring programs for girls and women seeking careers in science and technology.

This general approach to change jibed with what Clinton had stood for while in power: the championing of globalization, the embrace of markets, compassion, the declared end of labor/capital conflict, the promise of the rich and poor rising together—the insistence that loosened regulations good for Wall Street would also be good for Main Street; the marketing of trade deals craved by large corporations as being ideal for workers. The country was two months away from a referendum on Clintonism. Hillary Clinton had beaten Bernie Sanders, who spoke of putting the “billionaire class” in their place in order to make the working class thrive, whereas Clinton had spoken of wanting everyone to do better. Now she found herself up against the ultimate win-losey opponent, though this time of the race-baiting, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist sort. Donald Trump had harnessed an intuition that those people who believed you could crusade for justice and get super-rich and save lives and be very powerful and give a lot back, that you could have it all and then some, were phonies. He had harnessed these feelings, to the bafflement of many, despite embodying the pseudo-concern he decried.

The criticism of what CGI did and represented had been building over the years, fueled by never-ending questions about whether the philanthropy was an end in itself for many of the attendees or rather a means to more self-serving ends. “It’s Davos for the social do-good set,” Darren Walker said one morning that week, sitting in his Ford Foundation office. The new UN Week lived at “this intersection of doing well and doing well by doing good.” He credited Clinton, whose event Ford was sponsoring, with the change. “It really was through the vehicle of CGI that so many new actors were mobilized and so many different modalities like impact investing—all of these other things started.” Clinton had used his extraordinary powers of convening to bring improbable partners together, and creative solutions to poverty and suffering had been born. However, Walker said, it was also the case that “philanthropists and commercial enterprises saw in CGI a platform that they could leverage for both doing good and building their brands.” As a result, self-service flirted dangerously with altruism at CGI, in Walker’s view. Why were all these CEOs flying in? “They fly here because they see investment opportunities; they see branding opportunities,” Walker said. Clinton’s brilliance had been in using his gathering “as a way to give people a profile” if they agreed to help people. But this had, by Walker’s lights, clouded the motives of the giving that CGI unleashed. Now others were following its example of barnacling themselves onto UN Week, and “hundreds of side events,” as Walker put it somewhat exaggeratedly, had come into being. “The risk in this is the potential canceling out,” he said. “It’s this idea that you can support a health initiative in Nigeria on the Niger Delta to reduce disease or diarrhea or whatever, and you can also make an investment in a company that is a polluter in the Niger Delta.”

The blurring of public good and private desire during UN Week, if seeded by CGI, was no longer confined to it. Indeed, other public-private world-changing events in its mold, if not remotely at its scale, had sprouted across the city, growing more numerous every year: a meeting called Make a Difference, Invest with Impact; the GODAN Summit, inviting you to “Join the Open Data Revolution to end global hunger”; another called Leveraging the SDGs for Inclusive Growth at George Soros’s foundations (the SDGs being the new Sustainable Development Goals); a meeting on “sustainable finance” at HSBC; the Concordia Summit, where “thought leaders and innovators” meet to “examine the world’s most pressing challenges and identify avenues for collaboration,” sponsored by Coca-Cola and J.P. Morgan; and, courtesy of sponsors Citi, Mars, and SABMiller, an event called Business Collaborating to Deliver the SDGs; the Africa Alternative Investment Intensive Forum; Catalyzing Climate Change Innovation Through Charitable and Impact Investment; a networking event called Scaling the Clean Economy, hosted at the international law firm of Baker McKenzie; the U.S.-Africa Business Forum, convened by Bloomberg Philanthropies; and the Every Woman Every Child Private Sector-Innovation high-level luncheon.

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 confidence. 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.

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.”

—

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 working 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.

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.

—

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 how 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.

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.

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.

This article is adapted from the book Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas, Chapter 7