The rich, as F Scott Fitzgerald noted, “are different from you and me”. Their wealth, he wrote, makes them “cynical where we are trustful” and their affluence makes them think they are “better than we are”. These words ring truest among the billionaires and corporate executives flocking to the Swiss ski resort of Davos this week. The highs recorded by stockmarkets, the tremendous monopoly power of tech titans and spikes in commodity prices reassure the rich cosmocratic class that they have weathered the storm of the financial crisis. The moguls can talk safely about inequality and poverty. But they will do little about it because they do not think their best interests are aligned with citizens. This is a mistake of historic proportions.

Since 2015, Oxfam calculates, the richest 1% have owned more wealth than the rest of the planet. The very wealthy think they no longer share a common fate with the poor. Whatever the warm words at Davos, no company bosses will put their hands up to the fact they play one country against another in order to avoid taxes; no firm will be honest about their attempts to stymie trade unions or about how they lobby against government regulation on labour, environment or privacy that tilts the balance of power away from them and towards the public. The largest western corporations and banks now roam the globe freely. As memories of the financial crisis recede, they are going back to the myth that they are no longer dependent on national publics or governments. Lobbyists for the corporate world claim that markets are on autopilot, that government is a nuisance best avoided.

Quick guide What is Davos 2020? Show Hide Davos is a Swiss ski resort now more famous for hosting the annual four-day conference for the World Economic Forum. For participants it is a festival of networking. Getting an invitation is a sign you have made it – and the elaborate system of badges reveals your place in the Davos hierarchy. The meeting is sponsored by a huge number of international banks and corporations.

For critics, “Davos man” is shorthand for the globe-trotting elite, disconnected from their home countries after spending too much time in the club-class lounge. Others just wonder if it is all a big waste of time. The 2020 meeting is being advertised as focusing on seven themes: Fairer economies, better business, healthy futures, future of work, tech for good, beyond geopolitics and how to save the planet. Young climate activists and school strikers from around the world will be present at the event to put pressure on world leaders over that last theme.

In fact, government provides the infrastructure and investment that private enterprise needs. Government patrols property rights, giving inventors monopoly profits. When a crisis strikes, it is home governments that come to rescue of big business. Sir Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, aptly remarked that “global banks are international in life but national in death”. When governments have stepped in, whether through bailouts or quantitative easing, it has generally further enriched the rich rather than the toiling classes. These matters are determined by policy choices. From afar it seems that the rules have been written to redistribute income upward. Those rules can be re-written, and it’s clear the world needs new progressive ideas. But Donald Trump is not going to provide them. The US president’s first year has been unremittingly disgraceful, demeaning him as well as the dignity of his office. Mr Trump made his fortune as a real estate magnate. He should be at home with the super-elite of Davos. Yet Mr Trump will turn up this week as a bomb-tossing outsider.

It is time to acknowledge that the current mode of trade globalisation opened the door to demagogues like Mr Trump. Globalisers damaged their own cause by failing to understand that competition for jobs from countries with lower labour, environmental and human rights standards was of valid public concern – and hence put no remedies in place. Businesses wanted, and want, to exploit these differences for profit. Politicians should not have obliged them without addressing the distributional consequences of trade with welfare spending, worker engagement and educational support. In the absence of such measures and concerted international action on social dumping, populism will spread – aided by elite selfishness, introspection and its capture of the political process.

As Branko Milanović, an expert on inequality, wrote of Davos’ attendees, they “are loath to pay a living wage, but they will fund a philharmonic orchestra. They will ban unions, but they will organise a workshop on transparency in government.” The political and economic crisis requires the balance to be restored between the nation-state and an open global economy. The rich need to drop the idea that they are a class apart and take a broader interest in society. Otherwise, growing inequality will see more people living in fear and fewer in hope. That would be a disaster for democracy and see Trumpism become a permanent feature of the political landscape.