Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

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.”