For every risk, Davos offers an identikit fix. Most of its Latinate prose sounds innocuous. But the lexicon betrays a worldview that is inherently wary of public opinion. Democracy is never a cure. If the middle classes are angry, they should listen more closely. Here was Davos’s 2015 solution to economic populism: “Without trust, no decisions at the international level will be taken. However, the responsibility extends beyond the political level: multinational companies and consumers also have a role to play to strengthen the argument in favor of global collaboration in the face of growing pressures to prioritize national economic self-interest.” Translation: Democracies must listen more to multinational companies. Pursuing national economic self-interest is always a bad thing. Yet what is still true for China, which has been greatly enriched by foreign direct investment, rings hollow to large chunks of Western society that believe they have lost their jobs, or forfeited their income growth, because of production shifts to China and elsewhere. Here is Davos’s solution to multipolar disorder: “Managing this risk will require flexibility, fresh thinking and multi-stakeholder communication.” No translation required—though it would be good to get a preview of the fresh thinking that Davos keeps saying we need (they are right: we do).

The gulf between the view from the Swiss Alps and realities on the ground continually widens. Given the electoral shocks of the previous year, the 2017 outlook is the best example to date. This is Davos’s solution to the immigration crisis convulsing European and American politics: “To some extent, the cultural challenges associated with immigration could be tackled by getting better at communicating change: data show that voters will change their views on cultural changes in society if politicians highlight the assimilation already taking place.” Which means that we need to get better at telling people how well things are going. And here is its cure for the West’s crisis of democracy: “One potential solution could be to make better use of technology in the process of government—not only to deliver services in a faster, more transparent, inclusive and consumer-oriented way, but also to establish a ‘digital public square’ with more direct communication between leaders and people.” Politicians should thus spend more time online. Davos perhaps ought first to have read what people are saying on the internet. As one person quipped about Donald Trump’s Twitter-propelled candidacy, “It is like the comments section running for president.” If this is thought leadership, how does followership sound? Davos has become the emblem of a global elite that has lost its ability to listen.

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A few months before I graduated from university in 1990, the Berlin Wall fell. A group of friends and I abandoned our tutorials and took a ferry from Dover to Zeebrugge and drove overnight to Berlin. We participated in that orgy of historic vandalism with chisels and small pick axes. We returned to England with small pieces of the Berlin wall. It was a dramatic and moving moment that I was privileged to witness. We believed we were on the right side of history. I still very much hope that we were. But we can no longer be certain. A decade later, I found myself employed as speechwriter to Lawrence Summers, when he was the U.S. secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration. Looking back, I am astonished at that era’s unshakeable self-confidence. This was the high noon of the Washington Consensus. Alongside Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, and Robert Rubin, the previous Treasury Secretary, Summers personified the global intellectual elite. Though often abrasive, he is also brilliant—especially when he is wrong. But when the facts change he is capable of changing his mind. By 2008 he had already walked away from much of the triumphalism of the late 1990s. Summers complained of “the development of stateless elites whose allegiance is to global economic success and their own prosperity rather than the interests of the nation where they are headquartered.” By 2016, he was warning that the public’s tolerance for expert solutions “appears have been exhausted.” He advised a new “responsible nationalism,” which would “begin from the idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximize the welfare of its citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good.” The global elites, in other words, need to catch up with how most people view the world— not the other way round. I believe what Summers is saying now closer to the truth.