Flawed solutions to avoid conflict between society’s winners and losers

Ian Bremner on tackling the threat resulting from the rise of populist movements around the world

not. The political consequences of that frenzy are only now becoming clear.

In Us Vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism, Ian Bremmer – the editor-at-large of Time magazine and founder of the Eurasia Group, a think-tank and political consultancy – explains the current rise of populist politics, from Donald Trump and Brexit to the Front National in France, as a response to the economic upheaval created by globalisation.

Bremmer believes that populist movements will continue to gain ground as states struggle to meet the challenges of workplace automation and mass immigration, and as the gap separating those who succeed in the international marketplace from those who don’t gets ever wider.

This problem will be particularly acute in countries – such as Turkey, South Africa and Brazil – that are growing quickly but lack the resources and infrastructure of the West.

“There’s a larger crisis coming,” he writes. “Not just in the US and Europe, but in the developing world too, there will be a confrontation in each society between winners and losers.”

Rather than retreat into nationalist protectionism, however, Bremmer’s solution is for governments to invest in education, experiment with ambitious welfare initiatives such as the guaranteed basic income and reduce inequality by raising taxes on the ultra-rich. He also sees a role for the private sector in rebuilding public trust and – astonishingly – even cites Facebook as an example of how market innovation can help meet “the evolving needs of citizens”.

The general arc of his argument is bleak but his conclusion is relatively upbeat: “Survival requires that we find new ways to live together… this principle can work in any country where a positive political consensus is possible.”

There are, though, some sizeable inconsistencies in Bremmer’s thinking. As the book’s title suggests, he considers populism a bad thing – a dangerous ideology that seeks to divide voters along class or ethnic lines by appealing to their tribal instincts. “People who are afraid for their livelihoods lash out,” he says.

And yet, the policy platform he himself advocates contains a strong populist element.

New taxes on wealth, a citizen’s income, an expanded social security net: these are radical ideas that only a government of the far left, led by someone like Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, would realistically implement. Problematically, Bremmer seems to view Sanders – whom he accuses of stirring up public anger towards Wall Street and the one per cent – as the left-wing equivalent of Trump and therefore well beyond the limits of political respectability.

Another significant failing in Bremmer’s analysis is his assumption that all populists are against globalisation.

That might be true of Trump and Sanders. But what about Brexiteers? Many Conservatives see the UK’s exit from the EU as part of a broader project of global re-engagement; one in which Britain ditches the bureaucratic constraints of the European single market in favour of a laissez-faire “Anglosphere” bound together by reciprocal trade agreements with the US, Canada and other ex-British colonies. So Brexit is both populist and globalist (as well as being uniquely and disastrously British).

This brings us to the chief weakness in Bremmer’s narrative: his definition of populism is far too vague. Indeed, he applies the label to any movement