Michael: Most people think populism is about a charismatic leader hypnotizing the masses. That's wrong. It's not about the leader at all. It's about millions of people feeling so ignored, they're willing to throw a rock at the system, just to see it break. Kevin: Whoa. That’s a powerful way to put it. It’s not about loving the guy with the weird hair; it’s about hating the building he’s standing in front of. It’s an act of desperation. Michael: Exactly. And that single, powerful idea is at the heart of the book we're diving into today: Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism by Ian Bremmer. Kevin: Ian Bremmer. I know that name. Isn't he some kind of a big deal in the world of geopolitics? Michael: He’s more than a big deal. He's the founder of Eurasia Group, the world's largest political risk consultancy. He literally advises corporations and governments on how to avoid global meltdowns. So when he says globalism is failing, he's seeing it from the absolute command center. He’s not just an academic; he’s reading the planet’s vital signs for a living. Kevin: Okay, so this isn't just a hot take from a pundit. This is the doctor telling us the patient is sick. So this idea of "throwing a rock"... does Bremmer have a personal connection to that feeling? Or is he just observing it from his high-rise office? Michael: That’s the perfect question, because this book is deeply personal for him. It’s rooted in his own life story, which is where we have to begin.

Michael: Bremmer grew up in the projects in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A tough, working-class area. From his window, he could see the glittering skyline of Boston, a city of wealth and power that felt a million miles away. He was a kid who saw the gap between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' every single day. Kevin: I can imagine. It’s like looking at a party you’ll never be invited to. That kind of thing can either inspire you or make you incredibly bitter. Michael: For him, it was inspiration. He got into a program called 'Teach a Kid How America Works,' and he met a bank executive named Tim. Tim gave him this classic, all-American advice: "Nobody’s stopping you. If you want to be successful, you just have to study hard and work hard. It’s totally up to you." Kevin: The American Dream in a nutshell. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Michael: And Bremmer did it! He studied, he worked his tail off, went to Stanford, launched his company, and became a massive success. He lived the dream. He crossed the bridge from Chelsea to Boston. But here’s the gut punch, the twist that sparked the whole book. Years later, after all his success, his own brother, who still lived in that world they came from, voted for Donald Trump. Kevin: Wow. That’s a family dinner I would want to avoid. So the author makes it out, but his own brother feels so left behind that he throws that political rock. Michael: Precisely. Bremmer realized that the promise that worked for him—"just work hard"—felt like a lie to his brother and millions of others. The promise of globalism, that a rising tide lifts all boats, had left their boat chained to the bottom of the harbor. His brother's vote was a rock thrown at a system he felt had betrayed him. Kevin: So how did this personal, family-level frustration become a global movement? It’s not just happening in Massachusetts. Michael: Bremmer argues that the elites were getting warning shots for decades and just ignored them. Think back to the 1999 WTO riots in Seattle. People from all walks of life—labor unions, environmentalists, anarchists—descended on the city. They were throwing rocks, smashing windows. They were screaming that this new global corporate order was not working for them. Kevin: I remember that. It was chaos. But at the time, wasn't it mostly dismissed as a bunch of fringe radicals? Michael: Completely. The "globalists," as Bremmer calls them, saw it as a sideshow. They went back to their meetings, convinced they were making the world a better, richer place. Then, less than a decade later, the 2008 financial crisis hits. The global economy nearly implodes because of deregulation and reckless bets by the biggest banks. Kevin: And what happens? The governments bail out the banks—the very people who caused the problem—while ordinary people lose their homes and jobs. The Occupy Wall Street movement springs up. More rocks are thrown. Michael: Exactly. But again, the global elites saw it as a temporary problem. They stabilized the markets, and the protestors eventually went home. The underlying anger, the feeling that the game is rigged, was never addressed. It just festered. Bremmer's point is that Trump, Brexit, and all these other populist movements weren't the start of the fire. They were the explosion that happened after the gas had been leaking for twenty years. Kevin: But here’s the thing that always gets me. Didn't globalism lift hundreds of millions of people in places like China and India out of poverty? Wasn't that the whole point? It feels like we're only telling one side of the story. Michael: That is the central, tragic paradox of the whole thing. And Bremmer confronts it head-on. Yes, it created a new middle class in Asia. But as Steve Bannon crudely put it, "The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia." For the people in places like Chelsea, MA, or the industrial heartland, it felt like their jobs, their security, and their identity were sacrificed on the altar of global progress. Kevin: So it created winners and losers, but the losers were told to just suck it up for the greater good. And eventually, they got tired of sucking it up. Michael: They got tired of it, and they started looking for someone to blame. And that's when the "us vs. them" narrative becomes so powerful. It's not about complex economic forces anymore. It's about "us," the hardworking citizens, versus "them"—the coastal elites, the immigrants, the foreign countries. It's a simple, compelling story. And when societies divide like that, they start to do something very ancient and very human. Kevin: What's that? Michael: They build walls.

Kevin: Okay, "building walls" is a phrase we hear a lot, usually in a political context. But Bremmer’s talking about something bigger here, isn't he? Michael: Much bigger, and much more chilling. He argues that walls are the inevitable consequence of an "us vs. them" world. And he uses one of the most stark, almost sci-fi examples on the planet to prove his point: Israel. Kevin: How so? Michael: Think about it. Israel is surrounded by instability and conflict. So what did they do? They built physical walls and high-tech fences. They developed the Iron Dome to shoot missiles out of the sky. They invested billions in detecting underground tunnels. They built a fortress. Kevin: And it worked, from a security perspective. Life inside Israel is relatively safe. Michael: That's the key. Inside the walls. Inside, Israel is a thriving, first-world tech hub. Per capita income is over $40,000. Unemployment is low. It's a success story. But Bremmer forces you to look at what's happening outside the walls, in places like Gaza. There, unemployment is over 40%. Per capita income is a tiny fraction of Israel's. It's a world of struggle and despair. Bremmer's haunting line is that walls don't kill democracy. They "protect democracy for 'us' by denying it to 'them.'" Kevin: Hold on. That is a terrifying thought. So a wall isn't just about keeping people out. It's about creating and maintaining two completely different, unequal realities right next to each other. Michael: Exactly. It’s a mechanism for sorting humanity. And if you think a physical wall is scary, Bremmer argues the new walls being built are far more insidious because they're invisible. They're digital. Kevin: You're talking about things like censorship, the Great Firewall of China. Michael: That's the beginning. The ultimate digital wall he describes is China's social credit system. This is a system the Chinese government is building to track all of its citizens' behavior—what you buy, who your friends are, what you post online, whether you jaywalk. All of this data is fed into an algorithm that gives you a single score. Kevin: Your "trustworthiness" score. Michael: Precisely. And that score determines your life. If you have a high score, you get perks: easier loans, faster visa applications, better schools for your kids. But if your score is low—if you're "discredited"—life becomes impossible. You can be banned from buying plane or train tickets. You can be blocked from getting good jobs. The government's official slogan for the system is bone-chilling: "Allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step." Kevin: That's like your Uber rating, but for your entire existence. It’s a digital cage. You can't see the bars, but they are everywhere. Michael: It's the ultimate wall. It's not on a border; it's inside society itself, sorting citizens into a new kind of caste system. And this isn't some far-off future. Bremmer shows how these sorting mechanisms are appearing everywhere. In the U.S., he points to new laws that make it harder for certain groups to vote. In Europe, he points to the rise of economic protectionism—not just tariffs, but thousands of new non-tariff barriers designed to protect local industries. Everyone is building their own kind of wall. Kevin: So is that it? Is this our future? Are we all just doomed to live in these walled-off societies, whether they're made of concrete or code? Is there any way out of this "us vs. them" death spiral? Michael: Bremmer says there is. He argues we are at a historic crossroads. We have a choice. We can either continue building these fortresses, which he believes will lead to a kind of global, digital apartheid... or we can do something much harder, but much more hopeful. Kevin: Which is what? Michael: We can rewrite the social contract.

Kevin: Rewrite the social contract. Okay, Michael, that sounds huge and incredibly academic. What does that actually look like for a regular person? It sounds like something you'd debate in a philosophy seminar, not something that fixes real-world problems. Michael: I get the skepticism, but Bremmer makes it very concrete by looking at history. He says we've been here before. Think about the United States during the Great Depression. The system was utterly broken. Capitalism had failed. People were starving. The "us vs. them" rhetoric was at a fever pitch. The country could have collapsed into revolution or fascism. Kevin: But it didn't. FDR came in with the New Deal. Michael: Exactly. And what was the New Deal at its core? It was a rewriting of the social contract. Before that, the government's role was minimal. If you got old and couldn't work, that was your family's problem. But in 1935, the government created the Social Security system. It was a radical idea: the state now had a fundamental obligation to provide a safety net for its elderly citizens. It was a new promise. A new deal between the government and the people. Kevin: So you're saying we're at another one of those moments? The old promises of globalism are broken, just like the old promises of laissez-faire capitalism were broken in the 1930s. We need a New Deal for the 21st century. Michael: That's precisely the argument. Necessity is the mother of reinvention. The old contract—go to school, get a job, work for one company for 40 years, get a pension—is dead. The rise of automation and the gig economy has destroyed it. So we have to invent a new one. Kevin: Okay, I'm intrigued. But what does Bremmer actually suggest? Does he have real answers, or is this just a hopeful call to action? Some critics have said his solutions can feel a bit centrist or cautious. Michael: It's a fair critique. He doesn't propose a total overthrow of capitalism. He's a pragmatist. But the ideas he floats are designed to start the conversation. For example, he talks about the need for portable benefits that follow workers from gig to gig, so you don't lose your health insurance or retirement savings just because you're a freelancer. Kevin: That makes a ton of sense. The 9-to-5 job is disappearing, but our social safety net is still built around it. Michael: He also explores more radical ideas, like a tax on robots. If a company replaces a thousand human workers with robots, maybe a portion of the profits gained from that automation should go into a fund for retraining those displaced workers. He even touches on Universal Basic Income, not as a free handout, but as a way to provide a stable floor so people have the security to take risks, start a business, or get new skills. Kevin: So it’s about creating a new kind of security in an insecure world. It's not about protecting old jobs from being destroyed by a robot; it's about giving the human the tools to go find or create a new, better job. Michael: You've nailed it. The goal isn't to stop the future. It's to build a social contract that can handle the future. And it's not just up to the government. He highlights the role of private organizations, like the Rumie Initiative, which uses crowdsourcing and cheap tablets to bring education to kids in refugee camps who have no other access to it. It's about everyone recognizing that the old system is failing and stepping up to invent new solutions.

Michael: Ultimately, Bremmer's message is that 'us vs. them' isn't the disease, it's a symptom. The disease is a social contract that was written for a world that no longer exists. And we can either build walls to contain the symptoms, which he warns will create a form of digital and physical apartheid, or we can be bold enough to actually try and cure the disease. Kevin: It really reframes the whole debate. The problem isn't Trump, or Brexit, or populism. Attacking those things is like swatting at mosquitoes when you're standing in a swamp. The real work is to drain the swamp. Michael: And that requires imagination and courage. He points out that faith in democracy itself is falling, especially among young people. A shocking study he cites shows that in the 1990s, only one in sixteen Americans thought military rule would be a "good thing." By 2016, it was one in six. Kevin: One in six. That's terrifying. That means people are so desperate for a solution, so tired of the broken promises, that they're willing to throw away the entire system. They're willing to throw the biggest rock of all. Michael: Which is why the choice is so stark. It's not about left versus right anymore. It's about the past versus the future. It’s about whether we retreat into walled-off fortresses of fear, or whether we have the guts to reinvent how we live together. Kevin: It leaves you asking a pretty big question: Are we builders or are we inventors? Do we just keep patching up the old, crumbling structures, or do we have the courage to design something new from the ground up? Michael: That's the question he leaves us with. And it’s not a rhetorical one. What do you all think? What would a new social contract that works for everyone actually look like to you? We’d genuinely love to hear your ideas. Kevin: Let us know. This is a conversation we all need to be having. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.