The election of President Trump, as well as the populist groundswell that seemingly took over European politics in the last several years, has spawned a cottage industry of sorts for books about the peril facing liberal democracy and liberal institutions. Scholars at Harvard have explained exactly how democracies tend to die, former President George W. Bush administration alumnus and Atlantic editor David Frum has opined on how Trump is fundamentally undermining our unique political heritage, and many other pundits and commentators have offered prescriptions on how we can stem this anti-democratic tide. Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at Notre Dame, went so far as to say that liberalism, the philosophy underpinning our sociopolitical and economic systems, has failed.
A new addition to this growing canon is Ian Bremmer’s Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism. Bremmer is the president and founder of the Eurasia Group, an international consulting firm, an editor-at-large at Time Magazine, and a professor at New York University — in other words, an almost stereotypical resumé of globalism that would be rhetorically burned in effigy at a Trump or Marine Le Pen rally.
Bremmer’s thesis is incredibly honest: Globalism has not benefited everyone, and its very success sows the seeds of its downfall. “Even as it makes the world better, it breeds economic and cultural insecurity, and when people act out of fear, bad things happen,” he writes.
In a nutshell, Bremmer argues that international trade and technological innovation drastically changed labor markets, and many people unable to adjust to the changing economy feel left behind, or fear they are at risk to be left behind by further mechanization of the means of production. The resulting inequality feeds populist tendencies as citizens begin to find scapegoats for their woes, such as immigrants, inevitably creating an “us vs. them” mentality as they implore their government to protect them from threats to their livelihood.
Bremmer’s book stands out from others on this general topic, though. Most of the new literature focuses almost exclusively on the U.S. or Western Europe. Bremmer takes a much broader view, looking at the developing world as well. “It’s more global than most other writings out there,” he told me, “looking at how this phenomenon is spreading not just across the ‘west’ (plus Japan) but also through emerging markets.” Too much of the commentary makes “it look like the United States is the only game in town.”
Continuing mechanization, particularly outside of the developed world, will exacerbate this trend, according to Bremmer. There’s a chapter in the book that examines the fault lines in some of the world’s largest developing countries. Nigeria, for example, is Africa’s most populous country, divided almost evenly among Christians and Muslims. It’s also an incredibly economically unequal country.
The Nigerian government spends very little on public health and social programs, and despite a growing economy the number of people living in poverty has actually increased since the turn of the 21st century. This, combined with the fact that the government has been largely controlled by the Christian-dominated southern half of the country since 2000, puts stress on existing sectional and religious tensions that could flare up in the event of a steep economic downturn.
Bremmer is also not as optimistic as others about our ability to counteract these forces, due to the unlikelihood of strong policy action from national governments. We could end up making the problems worse. “Governments won’t do much to address the crisis of globalism head on. But people will; corporations will; mayors and governors will. We saw that in the immediate wake of Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement,” he told me. Since these responses won’t come from the actors that have the most power, though, they will be less efficient and slower, which could “compound problems of inequality rather than solve them.” Things will likely get worse before they get better.
In the meantime, states across the world will attempt to counteract the failures of globalism by building walls, both literal and metaphorical. “To create the appearance of protecting jobs and industries, we’ll see a continuing increase in garden-variety protectionism,” he writes. There will be censorship and “new barriers to the movement of people.”
He doesn’t believe things getting better is out the realm of possibility — it’s just not going to be easy. “The best-case scenario is that some of these more individualized attempts to address global problems start working, we get lucky with a scalable tech breakthrough or three, and we start to pull ourselves out of this tribalism sooner rather than later,” Bremmer said. The west’s political dysfunction, or relative lack thereof, plays a central role here. “I’m actually sanguine on that — by and large, you don’t have people threatening violence; there’s not much political and social instability (outside Twitter, of course).”
I think I am much more pessimistic than most of the authors writing on this topic, including Bremmer, about our ability to successfully curb the allure of populism. Nonetheless, he deserves credit for being willing to view the issue in a glass-half-empty manner, particularly in a time when politicians and activists routinely promise the world to their constituents.
Jerrod A. Laber is a writer and journalist living in northern Virginia. He was a Writing Fellow with America’s Future Foundation, and a Free Society Fellow with Young Voices.
