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.
