Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Her claim, rather, is that citizens of a democracy are collectively responsible for what their society foreseeably and persistently allows; that they have a special duty toward those it systematically fails;

for two reasons, Cordelli said: “because you’re worth nothing without society, and also because we would all be dominated by others without political institutions that protect our rights.”

because of how it is done:

Republicans, he said, are straightforward in their contempt for government. Democrats, especially those of the Clinton school of centrist, triangulating, market-friendly politics, don’t counter the contempt with a vigorous embrace of government.

Women’s equality, it was now said, was a $28 trillion opportunity. This had become a near-constant refrain in MarketWorld—some permutation of the words “women,” “equality,” and “trillion.” If the logic of our time had applied to the facts of an earlier age, someone would have put out a report suggesting that ending slavery was great for reducing th

MarketWorld’s ideas weren’t promoted through propaganda and falsehoods so much as through this kind of confinement. Its weapon was not utterance but silence, the people it did not invite, the way it hemmed in a conversation.

“What is the right locus of politics, and who are the decision-making authorities?

“Human history is the journey of going from isolation to interdependence to integration.

It is a way of doing good that allows them to ignore the fact that their democracies aren’t working well.