Later this week representative of the finance, corporate, political and academic elites will gather in Davos, Switzerland, as they do at this time every year for the World Economic Forum. In previous years the mood had been upbeat, these people were confident that as they ate $40 hot dogs, sipped $20 coffee and knobbed $1000 an hour prostitutes all paid for one way or another by us poor schleppers who work our arses off just to keep rooves over our heads and food on the table, that their chit chat and shady deals would shape the future of the world.
This year they are not quite so cocky, in fact they are shitting themselves as they struggling to answer the question ‘where did it all go wrong’ and cower in “silent fear” as they face a force they have not previously encountered – populism, the will of the people, or rather the refusal of the people to bow to authority, to automatically defer to the dick who is waving a degree certificate in ancient history and claiming it qualifies him to pontificate on how a modern business should be run. The irresistible might of the popular voice was first demonstrated by the “unexpected” Brexit vote and subsequently by the “shocking” election of Trump. As Moises Naim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it, “there is a consensus that something huge is going on, global and in many respects unprecedented. But we don’t know what the causes are, nor how to deal with it.”
Adding to the farcical nature of this year’s Davos shindig is that, while one of the main topics of discussion is “populism” and social and wealth inequality, overnight a new Oxfam study revealed that not only 8 people own the same amount of wealth as (the poorer) half of the world, but that since 2015, the richest 1% has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet. It is expected that many of the “eight people” highlighted by Oxfam will be present at Davos.
For all the pontificating of politicians, academics, religious leaders and media luvvies, in the decades since we started to hear the mantra that globalisation would make us all equal and propsperity, inequalities have grown exponentially and the gab between rich and poor has widened from a chasm until it is now an abyss.
One of the factors in the rise of populism and an acceptable type of nationalism is that trust in governments, companies, the media and the political establishment has evaporated almost completely as ballots from the United States to Britain to the Philippines have rocked political establishments and scandals hit business. Trust in the media itself, meant to be an objective and impartial observer of the Davos boondoggle, yet sadly captured, has likewise crashed to record lows across all age groups.
Thus the executives, bankers, professors and politicians present at the Forum find themselves in a totally unfamilar position. Some have made placatory noises about learning from past mistakes but it is not in their nature to admit mistakes let alone learn from them. They cannot bluff and bluster as they have in previous years when the difficult questions were raised. They know that nigel Farage or beppe Grillo, Marine Le Pen or Donald Trump, Geert Wilders or Bernie Sanders, Frauke Petry or Rodrigo Dutarte are going to keep on questioning.
As Bloomberg puts it, while “the top executives, financiers, academics and politicians making their way up the mountain to the World Economic Forum will be talking a lot about such non-establishment leaders as President-elect Donald Trump, France’s National Front chief Marine Le Pen and Italian populist Beppe Grillo of the Five Star Movement, they won’t be meeting them. Not one of the leaders bent on overturning the world order as Davos has designed it will be present.”
So much for Davos learning from its mistakes, or truly seeking to reach out to its sworn nemesis: those who have been elected because they represent everything Davos is not.
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