Us vs. Them, page 14
There are plenty of examples of innovation coming from the developing world. For example, M-Pesa, a mobile payment system based in Kenya, allows people to use their phones to move money. The program, created in 2007 by mobile giant Safaricom, is now used by more than half the country. Kenyans were using this mobile platform to withdraw and deposit money, send remittances, pay bills, and access credit for years before these services became common in wealthier countries. More than 100,000 Kenyans have since signed up for M-Tiba, a “health wallet” available on mobile devices that allows users to save for health care expenses.32 These kinds of services are especially important in developing countries, where governments can’t keep pace with the growing demands for basic services of fast-developing middle classes.
Then there’s the challenge of protecting democracy. If governments can’t do it, maybe the private sector can. Google and its sister company Jigsaw have offered free software designed to protect elections from malicious manipulation. In 2017, the two companies helped to defend a voter information website in the Netherlands against repeated cyberattacks ahead of Dutch national elections. Jigsaw then offered a “Protect Your Election” suite of products to help guard against attacks on elections in France, South Korea, and Germany.33
Universities are stepping into the breach as well, including by hiring workers in communities broken by poverty and violence. Following riots in the city of Baltimore in 2015, Johns Hopkins University and its health system hired hundreds of new workers from the worst affected neighborhoods through a $69 million job creation program called HopkinsLocal. The University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania have experimented with similar initiatives in Chicago and Philadelphia, respectively.34
We can’t rely on companies and private institutions to do everything that governments can’t or won’t do. Private actors have private interests; they serve the needs of a limited number of citizens, and they don’t tend to last as long as institutions of government. Nor can local governments do it all. Many Americans have a “let the states decide” approach to a long list of issues, but for the most basic services, big differences in the ability and willingness of individual state governments to spend on education, public health, and public infrastructure exacerbate the problem of inequality of opportunity. This is true to varying degrees in every country. Yet private companies and institutions will be a crucial part of any serious effort to rewrite the social contract, because they can incubate ideas that governments won’t and experiment in ways that government can’t. This will make a difference. Companies can use the marketplace to find out what works and how people will respond to new ways of doing things.
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These are a few examples of the thousands of ideas under development in companies around the world, ideas that can be adapted, reworked, scaled up, and reimagined. Individually, they can help limited numbers of people meet limited numbers of their needs. Collectively, they can encourage the innovations—whether created by policymakers, entrepreneurs, or activist visionaries—that can help limit the inevitable human damage inflicted as we advance nation by nation and community by community from the old world into the new.
CONCLUSION
No one voted for Donald Trump because he believed the United States was growing more secure and more prosperous. In a country where working-age men without jobs outnumber those with jobs by three to one and half of unemployed men take daily pain medication, a lot of people want “change.”1
It’s hard to imagine what sort of future Americans can expect if the fate of these people is ignored.
It’s easy to find fault with populists like Trump. He’s obnoxious, dishonest, and incompetent. But Donald Trump didn’t create us vs. them. Us vs. them created Donald Trump, and those who dismiss his supporters are damaging the United States. There are good reasons to want smaller government. It’s natural to fear that Washington spends too much money. There are reasons to worry that political correctness will kill freedom of speech and the birth of good ideas. There are plenty of Americans who care sincerely about people with preexisting medical conditions, but who fear that creation of another entitlement program will one day bankrupt the country, leaving government without money to cover anyone.
These people aren’t stupid or mean-spirited. They don’t hate poor people. Some of them are poor people. Many are Americans who fear that intellect too often overrides common sense, that their countrymen are more interested in what they can get than in who will pay, that too many politicians care more about universal ideals than about American workers and their families, and that the country they knew is fading away.
Many Trump voters, including those who once supported Barack Obama, backed him because they wanted change. Actual change, not the kind of change promised on campaign posters. There’s a working class in the United States that really has seen more losses than gains from free trade. U.S. infrastructure is crumbling, the country’s education system is underperforming, its health care system is in real trouble, and the U.S. penal system doesn’t work. American soldiers have fought and died in wars that seemed to accomplish nothing and that were never adequately explained to the American people. These failures belong to the entire U.S. political establishment. Citizens feel lied to or ignored—by politicians, the mainstream media, the business elite, bankers, and public intellectuals. They believe the game is rigged in someone else’s favor, and they have a point.
American democracy itself is eroding. Donald Trump was elected president with votes from 26.3 percent of eligible voters. Hillary Clinton won 26.5 percent, but lost the electoral college. Yet here is the most revealing number: Nearly 45 percent of eligible American voters didn’t vote at all. Some didn’t show up because they felt their vote represented a drop in the ocean, and some lived in states where the outcome wasn’t in doubt. Others felt that none of the candidates could or would make things better. But many of these more than 100 million eligible American voters just didn’t believe the outcome mattered. Just 36.4 percent of those eligible voted in the 2014 midterm congressional elections.2
It gets worse. According to a study published in The Journal of Democracy, the share of young Americans who say it’s important to live in a democratic country has dropped from 91 percent in the 1930s to 57 percent today. Fewer than one in three young Americans say that it’s important to live in a democracy. In 1995, just one in sixteen Americans agreed that it would be “good” or “very good” to have military rule in the United States. In 2016, it was one in six.3
Trump has made things worse. He has further poisoned the attitudes of his followers toward government and the media, inflicted lasting damage on U.S. ties with close allies, and embarrassed the country before the world. Worst of all, he has deliberately pitted Americans against one another for political gain. We see the polarized electorate in Trump’s own poll numbers. His supporters have backed him through conflicts and controversies that would have ended the careers of any other public official, and his detractors wouldn’t thank him if he pulled them from a burning building.
But when critics focus on the man and ignore the underlying emergencies that lifted him to the White House, they exacerbate the American problem of us vs. them. They make it easier to build walls and harder to help those who need help most. It’s much easier to mock Donald Trump, rail at his excesses, and caricature his backers than to work toward solutions to the problems that leave many convinced they have no future and that their fellow Americans don’t care.
As in the United States, it’s easy to demonize those Europeans who fear open borders as heartless racists who care nothing for refugees and hate Muslims. We can ignore those who say their governments have ceded too much power to bureaucrats in Brussels. But these people know that if they welcome unlimited numbers of migrants, they’re inviting large numbers of people to risk their lives and those of their children to make the journey and that smaller European countries will struggle to manage the overflow. They’re right that not all these migrants are truly refugees, and that encouraging so many to leave their home countries allows autocrats in North Africa and the Middle East to drive out those who don’t support them. It is not racist to acknowledge that the best of intentions sometimes produce terrible consequences.
Further, democracy is undermined when growing numbers of the decisions that govern people’s lives are made by people who don’t stand for election within the borders of their countries. Attacking political demagogues like Beppe Grillo and Marine Le Pen is one thing. Dismissing the hopes and fears of those who turn to them exacerbates the problem of us vs. them and makes it more difficult to rework the European social contract in ways that both left and right can accept.
Challenges that are serious for the United States and Europe are even more daunting for developing countries. The introduction of automation and artificial intelligence into the workplace will create more turmoil for workers in wealthy countries, but it will be profoundly disruptive in the developing world, where there will be fewer factory jobs to pull less educated people from the countryside into the urban workforce. Governments without money to invest in technological innovation—and to upgrade education systems and retraining programs to help citizens profit from it—will create fewer opportunities for young people. Social unrest will test the resilience of governments, and political officials will stoke more conflict between us and them to protect their own power and influence.
The result will be a widening of the divide between wealthy countries and poor ones—and between rich and poor within each country. And if we focus mainly on the demagoguery of the populists who try to take advantage of these trends, we will only widen the gap between those who can afford to ignore them and those who can’t.
There is another danger common to every nation on earth. Each year, human beings now produce more data than in every previous year combined.4 The choices we make, particularly online, help algorithms understand our interests, wants, and needs better than our friends and families do. Add the reality that people are easy to influence. Fake news generated on the Internet shapes public perception in ways we still don’t fully appreciate, and a coming wave of digitally sophisticated fake images and video will complicate things further. It’s not difficult to imagine a world in which technical specialists looking to make money help politicians looking to gain power understand and manipulate us in ways that undermine the political influence of citizens in every country. Over time, people wise up. They become less easy to fool. But they can easily become more cynical, and that can lead them to turn their backs on politics altogether, leaving elections to be decided by the angriest and most opinionated.
In the meantime, there are choices to make. Build walls? Or rewrite the social contract? Both strategies can work in many countries, at least for a while. Both demand capable government with the resources to construct and sustain these systems. The construction of walls won’t kill the idea of responsive government. It will simply create a form of digital apartheid that ensures some are well served while others aren’t served at all. As in Israel. And, increasingly, as in the United States. Reinvention of the social contract is going to be politically impossible in many countries for many years to come. The sense of crisis isn’t yet strong enough, because so many globalists continue to profit from the system as it is, and walls of various kinds will protect them, temporarily, from real danger. Things have to become much worse, particularly for the winners, before they can become better for everyone else. This is the ultimate failure of globalism.
Where and when it becomes possible to experiment, efforts to rewrite the social contract will work most easily in countries with relatively homogeneous societies, borders that face relatively little pressure, and the means to continually expand economic productivity. But this principle can work in any country where a positive political consensus is possible. Remaking the relationship between citizens and government is much more likely than the construction of walls to create lasting security and prosperity for the greatest number of people.
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History and personal experience show that people give their best when the best is required of them. That day is coming sooner than we think. Even those who think they want war will change their minds when they see its costs. Human beings use their natural ingenuity to create the tools they need to survive. In this case, survival requires that we invent new ways to live together.
Necessity must again become the mother of invention.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was born in Lexington, Virginia. Just before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I spent a day at the Virginia Military Institute, the oldest state-supported military college in the United States. It’s a great place to go to have your faith restored in America, because every acre of that campus offers a reminder that no matter how divided the country, when we set our minds to it, Americans are capable of instilling the sort of values in our young men and women that the world can be proud of. I was struck again and again by the school’s emphasis on integrity and stewardship.
I took the tour, got a feel for the place, visited with cadets, and then gave a speech to the student body. I remember one cadet’s question in particular—about trade. I had spoken about the importance of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). I argued that if our government backed away from it, China would fill the vacuum, creating longer-term problems for the United States.
The cadet said he was from West Virginia. He said there were no jobs there. Coal mines and factories were shut down. Families were fractured. People felt forgotten. He told me that his family opposed NAFTA and free trade generally. He wanted to know what he should tell them to change their minds on TPP.
I told them he shouldn’t try to change their minds, that while I supported the deal, there was nothing about our system that made me believe that trade would help him, his family, or his community. It made sense for his family to oppose trade until people took the consequences of trade for families like his much more seriously.
That’s not a very satisfying answer, but it’s an honest one. For me, it felt like the beginning of a more ambitious answer about where the world is headed. I hope this book takes that answer a little further.
I’m grateful to a number of deep and provocative thinkers for helping me get my head around these issues. To Carl Bildt, Borge Brende, Vint Cerf, Jared Cohen, Ivo Daalder, Mohamed el-Erian, Catherine Fieschi, Adam Grant, Richard Haass, Wolfgang Ischinger, Bob Kagan, Zach Karabell, Parag Khanna, Sallie Krawcheck, Christine Lagarde, David Lipton, David Miliband, Maziar Minovi, James Murdoch, Niko Pfund, Alec Ross, Kevin Rudd, Nouriel Roubini, Marci Shore, Doug Shuman, Nick Thompson, Enzo Viscusi, Steve Walt, and Fareed Zakaria. And I keep thinking about James Chace and David Fromkin, whose opinions frame so many of my own. I miss them. A lot.
My profound appreciation also to our whip-smart team of political scientists at Eurasia Group. If I’ve had any success as a “global thinker,” whatever that means, it’s because of how much they’ve taught me, the ways in which they bring their disparate backgrounds to their work, how much they’ve challenged me, and how much we’ve learned together when we don’t have the answers (or think we do . . . and find out we don’t). In particular, my thanks to Andrew Bishop, Chris Garman, Ayham Kamel, Alex Kazan, Dan Kerner, Cliff Kupchan, Evan Medeiros, Tsveta Petrova, Mij Rahman, and Karthik Sankaran, who went beyond the call of duty to help with the research that went into Us vs. Them. Anahita Arora offered many important ideas and generous support for this book.
I’d call Willis Sparks my alter ego, but after fourteen years and six books, there’s much more id involved. He’s absolutely brilliant, and I honestly can’t remember what it was like to work without him. Leon Levy, Gabe Lipton, and Edana Ng round out our crack research team, our inner circle on everything global, and they’re a pleasure to work with.
Alex Sanford started off working with me on research, then communications and media, and now runs a whole damned media company. She’s still on point making sure the book gets out there, with the critical support of Erina Aoyama and Alex Gibson, whom we both deeply admire. My warmest thanks to Kim Tran and Ester Bakalli, who keep me sane on a daily basis. And Sarah Henning, my chief of staff, who makes the implausible look effortless. Because she’s damned smart.
I’m grateful for my publishing team. Adrian Zackheim has been my partner in publishing crime for a decade now. Given that nobody reads books anymore, that’s indeed what it feels like, yet we still manage to stay in business. He must know a guy who knows a guy. We both appreciate the work of Will Weisser and Bria Sandford. Four tips of the cap to Tara Gilbride and Stefanie Rosenbloom at Portfolio and to Allison McLean and Liz Hazelton at Amplify Partners, our aptly named publicists. Plus my agent, Rafe Sagalyn. (Having a book agent feels kind of globalist.)
To my chickie, Ann; my brother, Rob; my sister-in-law, Elizabeth; and my adorable new niece, Elisa.
