The Power of Crisis

Ian Bremmer

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781982167523
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría política

New York Times Bestseller Renowned political scientist Ian Bremmer draws lessons from global challenges of the past 100 years—including the pandemic—to show how we can respond to three great crises unfolding over the next decade. In this revelatory, unnerving, and ultimately hopeful book, Bremmer details how domestic and international conflicts leave us unprepared for a trio of looming crises—global health emergencies, transformative climate change, and the AI revolution. Today, Americans cannot reach consensus on any significant political issue, and US and Chinese leaders behave as if they're locked in a new Cold War. We are squandering opportunities to meet the challenges that will soon confront us all.In coming years, humanity will face viruses deadlier and more infectious than Covid. Intensifying climate change will put tens of millions of refugees in flight and require us to reimagine how we live our daily lives. Most dangerous of all, new technologies will reshape the geopolitical order, disrupting our livelihoods and destabilizing our societies faster than we can grasp and address their implications. The good news? Some farsighted political leaders, business decision-makers, and individual citizens are already collaborating to tackle all these crises. The question that should keep us awake is whether they will work well and quickly enough to limit the fallout—and, most importantly, whether we can use these crises to innovate our way toward a better world.Drawing on strategies both time-honored and cutting-edge, from the Marshall Plan to the Green New Deal, T he P ower of C risis provides a roadmap for surviving—even thriving in—the 21st century. Bremmer shows governments, corporations, and every concerned citizen how we can use these coming crises to create the worldwide prosperity and opportunity that 20th-century globalism promised but failed to deliver.

CHAPTER 1 TWO COLLISIONS—US VS. THEM, AT HOME AND ABROAD

To survive our impending crises, we must avoid disaster in two relationships: the one we have with one another and the one between the US and China.

Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev understood that nothing inspires cooperation like fear of a common threat. But for now, Americans on both the left and the right too often treat one another as the greatest obstacle to the nation’s progress, and the US and Chinese governments have spent the past several years arguing over differences that both sides treat as irreconcilable.

Before we turn to the crises that will define our common future, we need to understand the forces most likely to prevent us from addressing them.

COLLISION COURSE 1: DYSFUNCTIONAL AMERICA

The United States is a nation of contradictions. When COVID hit, the US led the world in hospitalizations and deaths, and then set records for speed of production and distribution of game-changing vaccines. In January 2021, the country’s stock market surged to new heights even as a violent mob stormed the US Capitol in hopes of reversing the outcome of a national election. A month later, millions of Texans struggled for days without electricity, heat, or clean water even as the nation’s space agency was landing a vehicle on Mars. The American capacity for invention and innovation is unparalleled; the nation’s politics are broken. The United States remains the only nation that can project political, economic, cultural, and military power into every region of the world. And it’s at war with itself.

That’s why the first great challenge facing leaders and citizens of the most powerful nation on earth is how to build enough trust and cooperation to help the American people, and everyone else, meet the critical global tests ahead.

For now, Americans are anything but united. A report from the Pew Research Center published in October 2019 offered grim conclusions. Some 78 percent of Americans polled said divisions between Republicans and Democrats were increasing. Just 6 percent said they were decreasing. A majority (55 percent) said there’s a “great deal” of difference in what the two major parties stand for, up from about one-third in the mid-2000s. A startling 73 percent said that Democratic and Republican voters disagree not only on policy but on “basic facts” concerning what’s happening in the country and the world. Just 17 percent of Republicans said Democrats had at least some “good ideas,” and 13 percent of Democrats said the same of Republicans. That was before the election of 2020, Donald Trump’s refusal to concede defeat, and a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol.

Today, a majority of Democratic voters call themselves “liberal,” double the percentage from a generation ago. The number of Republicans who call themselves “conservative” has jumped from 58 percent to 73 percent over that same period. Self-identified independents now make up nearly 40 percent of the total US population, double the percentage from the 1950s, but these voters aren’t necessarily centrist. In a Gallup poll published in January 2021, fewer than half called themselves “moderate.” Most independents identify much more with one party than the other.

There’s also a geographic component to American partisanship. In the 2020 presidential election, voters in the nation’s most densely populated counties voted for Joe Biden by a margin of 29 points. Those in the most sparsely populated counties went for Donald Trump by 35 points. Those numbers were higher than for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the 2016 election. More disheartening still for those of us who believe in cooperation and compromise, a YouGov poll conducted in February 2021 found that 41 percent of Democrats view Republicans not as “political opponents” but as “enemies,” and 57 percent of Republicans said the same about Democrats.

Partisan bitterness is even more extreme inside government. In the 1980s, more elected officials of both parties could be called centrists, and there was more ideological overlap among lawmakers. Today, there’s almost no common ground between the most liberal Republicans and the most conservative Democrats, and the number of legislators who almost never vote with members of the other party has risen sharply. There’s now more division within Congress than at any time in over a century. That means less room for compromise among federal lawmakers on every issue.

DRIVING THE DYSFUNCTION

There is another important source of division: widening wealth gaps. Income inequality in the United States has reached its highest point since the Gilded Age. Within the thirty-eight-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), only Chile, Turkey, and Mexico have a larger gap between rich and poor than the United States. In the US, average incomes for the top 1 percent of earners rose by 226 percent from 1979 to 2016, while working- and middle-class income remained flat. The top 10 percent of Americans now own more than 70 percent of the country’s wealth. The top 1 percent control more national income than the bottom 50 percent.

Much has already been written on why that is so. The outsourcing of manufacturing and service-sector jobs to lower-income countries has driven down wages. Only about 5 percent of Americans still enjoy the advantage of collective bargaining offered by labor unions, down from about 20 percent in the 1980s. The earning potential conferred by a college degree is rising even as the cost of higher education rises beyond reach for many Americans. Households headed by someone with a bachelor’s degree can expect twice the income of those without one. And with smart machines replacing humans in the blue- and white-collar workplace at ever-increasing rates—more on that in chapter 4—future earning potential for the less fortunate is under heavy pressure.

THE AMERICAN WAY OF CAPITALISM

For two centuries, US businesses have created extraordinary innovation, wealth, and economic growth. Generations of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs and business leaders have been American—many of them immigrants and the children of immigrants who came to the US seeking commercial opportunities they couldn’t find anywhere else. That trend drove American industry in the nineteenth century, produced remarkable accumulation of American power in the postwar twentieth century, and enabled American companies to establish early dominance in the twenty-first-century information technology sector.

America’s capitalist culture reveres the “animal spirits” unleashed by market forces and the entrepreneur as the epitome of self-reliant individualism. According to a 2021 study, 68 percent of those who voted for Biden in the 2020 election and 61 percent of Trump voters expressed trust in their employers. Just 45 percent of Biden voters and 28 percent for Trump said the same of “government leaders.” Americans expect laws and voters to enforce checks and balances on politicians and political institutions, but many believe that the primary check on entrepreneurs and private-sector companies should come from the free market itself.

This veneration of the private sector allows neglect of American workers, whose interests don’t always align with their employers’. Some elected officials, many of them Republicans, fight hard to lower tax rates for companies and the wealthiest citizens while warning of the dangers of raising the minimum wage. Companies are allowed to deny growing numbers of their employees the health and pension benefits they need for present and future financial security. The regulatory environment is driven more often by the needs of the private sector than by the health, safety, and well-being of citizens in general. And as technological change makes labor less important to the future of capitalism, chronic inequality of opportunity will become an even bigger source of political tension. The flexibility of the US economy in response to the pandemic supercharged these trends and exposed social safety net gaps beyond anything seen in other wealthy countries.

Exacerbating these problems is the growing importance of money in American politics. US political campaigns have become exponentially more expensive since the 1950s, making elected officials deeply dependent on the goodwill of people and organizations willing to bankroll their careers. And this trend has only accelerated in the last decade, since a 2010 Supreme Court decision allowed corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. The 2020 elections for president and control of the two houses of Congress cost about $14 billion, more than double the previous record set in 2016. Much of that money comes from deep-pocketed individuals and companies that expect a return on their investment—a return that boosts large companies and wealthy individuals, often at the expense of the nation as a whole.

DISCREDITED MEDIA

Small donors are still a crucial source of campaign cash, and to reach these donors, politicians must grab and hold public attention. To build a following on social media, influencers have learned to stand out from the crowd, often by shocking viewers in order to go viral with their content. In US politics today, candidates play the same game. To raise the ever-increasing amounts of money they need to compete for power and influence, they make outrageous statements and take extreme positions to seize the spotlight. Social media trends have taught them that anger drives attention, therefore money, and therefore success. America’s so-called culture war began long before the advent of social media, but these new tools give it new energy and urgency.

In fact, in recent decades Americans have lost more trust in the media than in any other institution. Tens of millions of Americans now receive their national and international news from sources they expect will confirm their worldview and political biases—and there is virtually no interaction between these information sources and those sought out by partisans from the other end of the political spectrum. MSNBC hosts tell left-of-center consumers of political news about the latest Republican moral outrage and then bring on the same guests we saw last week to tell us just how outrageous these outrages really are. Fox preaches to a conservative older audience who want to believe that every Democrat is a dangerous leftist radical. The genuinely radical messaging that we now see via incendiary information outlets and platforms like OANN, QAnon, and 4chan began with the market- and culture-changing popularity of political talk radio and the growth of cable TV news in the 1980s. All these trends began in the United States. In Europe, regulators place higher value on personal privacy, more restrictions on free speech, and harder limits on the influence of social media companies. In Japan, mainstream media is generally less politicized, and adults spend far less time than Americans and Europeans on social media platforms.

Social media algorithms have created a business model, driven by advertising dollars, that productizes the personal data of citizen-consumers. As I’ll detail in chapter 4, this has brought online bots into the media bloodstream to shape public opinion, sometimes via disinformation that distorts reality and drives attention—and ad revenue—while consumers become inured to online shock and outrage.

RACE—THE PAST IS PRESENT

There are no sources of outrage more deeply embedded in American life than structural racism and the determined efforts of some to pretend it doesn’t exist. Those who dismiss the importance of race in American life argue that slavery, segregation, and other forms of discrimination bear no relation to current events. But, to paraphrase William Faulkner, institutional racism isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.

As part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, the newly created Federal Housing Authority instituted a process of redlining neighborhoods, creating boundaries that segregated residents by race, to rigidify the separation of white and black Americans, even in communities where segregation was illegal. The inability of black Americans to get mortgages in redlined neighborhoods prevented them from amassing equity and savings they could pass to future generations. The 1935 Social Security Act didn’t provide coverage for farmers or domestic workers, the two job categories that included most black Americans, leaving them without unemployment or retirement insurance. Black Americans were also cut out of the GI Bill, which provided other veterans with education, low-interest loans, and other benefits. Black veterans unable to earn degrees had little hope of building careers and little wealth to leave for future generations. That’s part of why, for all the talk of a growing black middle class in America, the median wealth for a white family was $171,000 in 2016 and just $17,600 for a black family. Racial discrimination wasn’t just confined to black Americans. Asian American immigrant women couldn’t vote until they gained citizenship, and that didn’t happen until 1952.

Despite these institutionalized disadvantages, other forces, including the civil rights movement, affirmative action, and one of the world’s most permissive systems of immigration, have created unprecedented opportunities for Americans of color. The United States is the only majority-white nation in history to elect (and then reelect) a black head of state. And the country has become much more racially diverse—the US is expected to become majority non-white in about 2045.

But the Republican Party, now financed and supported overwhelmingly by white Americans, has found ways to rewrite voting rules to hold back the tide of history. Local laws targeted at making it more difficult for black citizens to vote, an American trend with a very long history, continue to be passed in dozens of US states. More broadly, many black Americans are driven to prove their lives matter by double standards they encounter every day. When crack cocaine devastated urban black communities in the 1980s and early 1990s, many in government and the media treated the problem as a crime wave. When the focus of addiction turned to white Americans hooked on opioids and other prescriptions drugs, the trend was treated as a tragedy. White Americans accordingly do not see the police killings of black people suspected of petty crimes by white police officers as black people do. And as anger over injustice grows on one side, resentment, fueled by partisan media and online disinformation, drives politics on the other.

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Other factors also drive division and dysfunction in the US, but I believe these are the most influential and durable. And each of these trends—corporate capture of governance; the dominant influence of money on US politics; the inequality of wealth and opportunity these phenomena create; the power of increasingly immersive new media to commoditize suspicion, dread, and anger; and the long-term corrosive effects of institutionalized racism—continues apace.

SOLUTIONS

Democrats and Republicans can prove to the American people that they understand the forces reshaping economies everywhere and can ensure that every working American has a reasonable chance to succeed in a changing world. They can invest in lifetime universal education so that the United States can draw on the highest possible portion of its human talent to build the world’s most innovative workforce. Accept that the nature of work is changing and create more flexible health and other quality-of-life benefits to profit from continued expansion of the gig economy. Make social media companies responsible for mis- and disinformation published on their platforms. The corporate and individual supporters of television’s Public Broadcast System and National Public Radio could finance nonpartisan public social media to provide another source of information that isn’t structuring its content to compete for media market share. Agree on a common set of rules to prevent the most egregious forms of partisan gerrymandering by either side. Experiment with ranked-choice voting in local elections to minimize extreme polarization. Challenge politicians to speak to voters who don’t traditionally support them. Experiment locally with various forms of universal basic income, and be honest in appraising both the positive and negative results.

I’m not naive enough to believe that most American lawmakers will support any of these ideas, but the fifty US states and local governments have always been laboratories of democracy. Some of their inventions have damaged democracy and national cohesion, but others have moved the nation forward. States like California, Florida, Illinois, and Massachusetts—with two Republican and two Democratic governors and a total of more than seventy million people—are already heading toward a $15 minimum wage over the next several years, no matter what Congress does on this issue. New York City is already there. And the nation’s largest metropolis also held its first ranked-choice mayoral election in 2021—almost certainly a bellwether for other counties, cities, and states.

Let’s remember too that Obamacare, the plan to expand health-care coverage to millions more Americans, became much more popular after Democrats found the votes to push it through Congress and consumers saw the benefits for themselves.

More broadly, the two parties recognize the power of appealing to “working families.” Democrats make economic appeals to the sense of self-interest in this group, while Republicans make cultural appeals to tribal solidarity. But both parties share an interest in finding ways to strengthen America by strengthening blue-collar citizens. All these experiments can help meet their needs. And Democrats and Republicans must learn one of the crucial lessons that the inequality created by laissez-faire globalization has taught us: not only must US foreign policy serve the needs of working-class Americans, but these citizens need to see and understand its benefits.

Americans and the US economy have recovered better and faster from the pandemic than have other advanced industrial economies, thanks mainly to the country’s entrepreneurial business culture, pro-business regulation, a surge in government spending, and a willingness to keep interest rates low. The immediate relief provided by massive stimulus will convince many in power, and many ordinary Americans, that the crisis is over, and that life can return to normal. Unfortunately, that sense of normalcy is the biggest obstacle to change that America now faces, because relief allows complacency without addressing any of the bigger problems described above.

In a country as politically decentralized as the United States, state and local governments, in partnership with like-minded corporate and philanthropic leaders, can do more to help those hurt worst by the ...