Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

The phenomenon Drezner details matters far beyond the world of thinkers, because on issue after issue, the ascendant thought leaders, if they are positive, unthreatening, mute about larger systems and structures, congenial to the rich, big into private problem-solving, devoted to win-wins—these thought leaders will edge out other voices, and not ju

And while this is highly questionable as social theory, it is a shrewd posture, because if the problem is a lack of linkages, those who are good at making these kinds of linkages are elevated as solvers. Those who propose to solve problems in other ways—especially by looking at power and resources and other things unsettling to winners—are sideline

The bearers of these protocols were, ironically, rushing in to shape the solution of problems that their methods were complicit in causing. Corporate types from the energy and financial industries were drafted into charitable projects to protect the world from climate change, even if their way of thinking about profit, as practiced in their day job

to one of the most powerful stages in the world, Giussani said that over this period, “certain ideas have got more airtime because they fit into those intellectual assumptions.” Others fit less well.

faulty, how are you going to find that out?” He answered his own question: “In an ideal democratic world, where citizenship is fully exercised and participatory, it’s a process of domestic deliberation where you’re testing your idea against other domestic citizens, and you’re seeing that, ‘Well, hold on; I thought that was a good thing, but what’s

You can talk about our common problems, but don’t be political, don’t focus on root causes, don’t go after bogeymen, don’t try to change fundamental things. Give hope. Roll with the waves. That is the MarketWorld way.

Porter spoke of how companies over the last generation had pursued a vision of globalization in which they owed nothing to any community.

Like Kat Cole, you learned to zoom in and not ask questions about what larger things you were abetting. And because the firm knew at some level what psychological sacrifice all this demanded, it had the decency to put on a speaker series for you, where museum chieftains and health care experts and this foundation president—people living closer to t

Sometimes even the most risk-averse politicians now casually voiced concepts coined at universities: “micro-aggressions” (Chester Pierce, psychiatry, Harvard, 1970); “white privilege” (Peggy McIntosh, women’s studies, Wellesley, 1988); “gender identity” (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine); “intersectionality” (Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, critical ra

Darren Walker,