For 355 days of the year the sprawling Bauhaus campus of the Aspen Institute in Aspen, Colorado, is rigorously maintained in a state of minimalist serenity. Its undemonstrative grey exteriors, concrete floors and flat roofs form what its custodians refer to as a “total work of art” of over 2,000 square metres (22,000 square feet). The campus was constructed in the 1950s along the Bauhaus principles that form should follow function and that design can elevate the soul to transform the world. But for ten days every June, when the Aspen Ideas Festival is in full swing, a technicolour fever dream descends and the campus becomes a corporate never-never land.

This year Southern Company, an energy conglomerate, erected a plastic suburban smart-home in front of the institute’s marble garden of austere standing stones, decked out with a picket fence, lawn furniture and a charging station. Allstate, an insurance company, showed up with a juice kiosk, where smiling staff handed out freshly pressed concoctions of ginger, carrot and kale from the windows of a bright blue bus. Anderson Park, a lightly landscaped meadow with magnificent views of snow-capped mountains, was occupied by plexiglass neon trees and brightly coloured human-sized plastic balls. “This looks like where the Teletubbies was filmed!” one attendee exclaimed. The pièce de résistance was a large sculpture that spelt out “ IDEAS ” in Instagrammable rainbow hues. For it was ideas that were on offer, and ideas were what everyone said they had come to hear.

“These balls are kind of cool,” remarked Dan Porterfield, who runs the Aspen Institute, as we strolled down the park’s manicured path, a space designed to enhance intellectual and spiritual meditation. As we walked we kept stopping to say hello to Aspen supporters, devotees and collaborators whom we met along the way. There was Kyle Korver, a basketball player; Don Gips, former American ambassador to South Africa and Barack Obama’s director of personnel; Gary Lauder, grandson of Estée. Elsewhere around campus I spotted Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s senior adviser, chatting with former Tennessee senator, Bob Corker. Bill Browder, a financier and nemesis of the Kremlin, checked out the lunch offering in blue jeans and a baseball cap. Jackie Bezos, mother to Jeff, stood in line for the buffet. It felt like being trapped on the front page of the New York Times. (Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor of The Economist, also attended the festival and spoke on a number of panels.)

Porterfield, a former English professor, civil servant and university president, greeted participants with an amiable handshake and a smile. A little more than a year since taking over, he already seemed quite at home at the Aspen Institute. Porterfield is unfussy and effusive. He wore frameless glasses, a blue blazer and has closely trimmed grey stubble. In Washington, DC , where the institute has its administrative headquarters, this unthreatening style is known as a “ DC beard” – sufficient facial hair to hint at a personality, but not enough to jeopardise your chance of security clearance.

For the past 70 years the institute has helped to define and shape the spectrum of acceptable views in American politics. Though it calls itself a “nonpartisan forum for values-based leadership and the exchange of ideas”, it is more accurately described as a cross between a think-tank, a celebrity summer camp and a liberal-arts college. For most of the year the institute offers a plethora of policy and leadership-development seminars and summits. The Ideas Festival is the equivalent of its homecoming weekend, ten breathless days at high altitude (Aspen sits at just over 2,400 metres) when a swathe of Washington power-players, Republican and Democrat alike – politicians, journalists, Nobel prizewinners, self-help gurus, diplomats, poets, bureaucrats, artists and spies – make the pilgrimage to the mountain seeking enlightenment and intellectual recuperation. The tiny airport is filled with private jets and black Suburbans.

The walls of the institute’s buildings are a photographic “Who’s Who” of Western power over the past half-century. There are images of Obama holding forth as a young senator; Margaret Thatcher and George H.W. Bush walking the grounds just after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990; Condoleezza Rice, before she became secretary of state, leaning over a seminar table. Association with Aspen can endow you with the crispness, vitality and lucidity of the mountain air. The archetypal Aspen leader is expected to be an aesthete and a practitioner, an intellectual and an activist who can move seamlessly from discussing “The Nicomachean Ethics” to tax breaks. Five candidates in the Democrat presidential primary, from the party’s moderate wing, have held Aspen fellowships. The current governors of five states are graduates of just one of Aspen’s programmes – the Rodel fellowship. Politicians in France, Spain, Italy and many other countries have gone through similar programming. (Nearly 10% of sitting Ukrainian parliamentarians have attended an Aspen seminar, including the prime minister.) The institute currently has affiliate branches in Berlin, Kiev, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Rome, Mexico City, New Delhi and Tokyo. A New Zealand branch has just opened; plans are in the works for outposts in Britain, Colombia, the Balkans and a yet-to-be-decided location in Africa.

But over the past few years, in the Philippines and Hungary, Turkey and India, and in America itself, a new kind of leader has emerged, one whose characteristics are far from the Aspen ideal: bombastic rather than judicious, partisan rather than consensual, an inciter of passions rather than a follower of evidence. A world facing formidable challenges, including climate change, trade wars and rising nationalism, needs leaders willing to confront such threats – and Aspen reckons it can continue to supply them.

There are others, however, who believe that Aspen embodies the establishment complacency that created the conditions in which populism fomented. At the Ideas Festival, my handlers created an internal schedule for me, shuttling me from the head of one initiative to the head of another. The institute was building high schools, educating the underprivileged, creating cultural dialogue across continents. The $10,000 passes to the festival had paid for dozens of underprivileged youths – who comprised most of the racial diversity there – to travel to Aspen. These kids had been given the gift of “access”, I was told. They were lucky to have the “Aspen experience”. Did I have any questions?

The idea for the Aspen Institute first emerged after the second world war. In 1949 Walter Paepcke, a Chicago businessman, planned a bicentennial celebration of the life of Goethe. Paepcke and his wife, Elizabeth, chose Aspen because it was both beautiful and easily accessible from either coast. The couple felt there was an “urgent need” to understand Goethe’s thought: the world, still recovering from the war, had been cleft in half by the ideological battle between communism and capitalism. The Paepckes saw Goethe as a prime advocate of the underlying unity of mankind. He also worried about the corrosive effects of rapidly proliferating wealth. The Paepckes imagined that Aspen could become an “American Athens”, educating an upper-crust elite hungry for spiritual sustenance in the newly ascendant nation. Such work was vital “if the people of America and other nations are to strengthen their will for decency, ethical conduct and morality in a modern world”. Herbert Hoover, the former president, was named honorary chairman; Thomas Mann joined the board of directors.

In 1950 the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies was founded as a place of moral instruction for the “power elite”. The Paepckes didn’t want their creation to be merely a think-tank dedicated to policymakers. Nor were they interested in emulating business schools. They wanted to shape leaders, not merely improve managers. Back then, Aspen’s version of inclusivity meant inviting the men in suits. The new curriculum was modelled on what was known as the “Fat Man’s Great Books Class”, which Mortimer Adler, a philosopher who co-founded the Aspen Institute, had run in wartime Chicago exclusively for executives. The idea was that if thinkers and businessmen were forced into the same room they’d be cured of their mutual suspicion and “join together to supplant the vulgarity and aimlessness of American life”. Through encounters with the classics, executives would learn to restrain the worst excesses of capitalism and politicians would be able to draw on the wisdom of the ages as they reached their decisions. The “Aspen method” was born.

The Aspen Institute gradually cemented its place in American political life. “If you are not a graduate of Harvard, membership in the Aspen Institute will qualify you for a place on President Kennedy’s ‘New Frontier’ team,” the Chicago Sun-Times quipped in 1961. The institute made a name for itself as a place where American values were defended, and where the virtues of democratic deliberation, meritocracy and leadership with moral purpose were championed. It promoted a set of attitudes that transcended party affiliations and defined the acceptable parameters of American politics: anti-communism, Atlanticism, faith in the rules-based international order and the power of capitalism to benefit all.

Acolytes tend to describe the Aspen Institute and its workings in mystical terms. Porterfield, who was raised a Catholic, speaks with the zeal of a missionary about the institute he now runs: “It’s possible to actually create the beloved community if people put their bodies and hearts and souls in motion for change,” he told me, invoking Martin Luther King. Activities fall into three categories: leadership, policy and public events such as the Ideas Festival. Its leadership programmes include a variety of fellowships for executives and disrupters of all kinds, in politics, business, health and education. The fellowship experience revolves around the seminar room, where participants gather around in a “sacred circle”, read classic works of literature and discuss humanity’s greatest challenges.

The archetypal offering is the Aspen Executive Seminar, grandchild of the Fat Man’s Great Books Class. It is “the basic genetic code that informs everything the institute does, from its leadership programmes to its policy programmes”, as Walter Isaacson, a former head of the institute, put it. The experience is meant to imitate a university seminar. But instead of dwelling on scholarly niceties, discussions of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Virginia Woolf and Simón Bolívar are designed to engage participants on a personal level, inviting them to reflect on the manner in which they conduct their lives. “The Prince”, “Leviathan”, Ayn Rand’s “What is Capitalism?” and Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” serve as leadership texts. Confucius, Amartya Sen and Rousseau are also part of the curriculum. (Aung San Suu Kyi has now been excised.)

No political leader in recent memory has embodied Aspen’s ethos of purposeful self-reckoning more ardently than Barack Obama. His successor, Donald Trump, is less given to introspection. That change in approach has consequences for the entire nation. How has the Aspen Institute responded? With more discussion (though it did make an effort to attract Trump supporters to the Ideas Festival to explore the future of conservatism). As the masses gather against the elite, the elite digs in.

For a week in early June, the Aspen Institute allowed me to experience the Aspen method as a full participant in an executive seminar. I asked to take part after I found out that the seminar came with an intriguing, non-negotiable requirement: attendees must put on a dramatic staging of “Antigone”, a tragedy by Sophocles from the fifth century BC . All members must participate. The play tells the story of Creon, an uncompromising ruler, who forbids Antigone from burying her rebellious dead brother. For many, “Antigone” is the high point of Greek tragedy: Creon and Antigone embody the conflicting claims of public justice and private conscience.

“Antigone”, a play that questions the right of those in power to demand unquestioning obedience, tends to be revived in uncertain political times. But in Aspen it is performed many times each year. For the inaugural performance (in 1950 or 1951, no one is quite sure), businessmen donned togas and recited the play. Since then everyone from CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer to Queen Noor of Jordan to Netflix boss Reed Hastings has performed the play, as well as a revolving door of intelligence directors, colonels and consultants. Participants are encouraged to reimagine the play, including altering the ending. “Our year, I have to say, I was Antigone,” Madeleine Albright, a former secretary of state who is also an Aspen trustee, told me over the phone. When she participated in the seminar, the Dalai Lama happened to be visiting Aspen, so her seminar group took a lighthearted approach and altered the play in his honour. “I remember singing ‘Hello, Dolly!’” Albright recalled, except her group changed the words of the musical song to “Hello, Dalai-ah!”, “in honour of the Dalai-ah Lama”. “It really was fun,” she said. (The Dalai Lama, Albright said, “has a great sense of humour”.) In 2003, after leaving the State Department, she founded the Aspen Ministers Forum, which brings together senior diplomats and foreign ministers from around the world to discuss global challenges. In 2017 the group wrote to Congress urging it to keep supporting the Iran nuclear deal.

A few weeks before my seminar began, I received a customised anthology, along with instructions to read each text twice before arriving. I was also to prepare to start a “collaborative journey” and to “take three steps back from practical affairs”. Via email, I had to respond to a questionnaire about my leadership style: where was I in my “leadership journey?” What was the “greatest leadership challenge” at my organisation? “In one word, what is the greatest challenge facing our age?”

Much of the complex that contains the Aspen Institute is, in fact, a four-star hotel called Aspen Meadows, operated by Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. (Elizabeth Paepcke reputedly remarked that it would break her heart for the Aspen Institute to be turned into a five-star hotel, so they’ve had a narrow escape). I was presented with a schedule for the week and the names and biographies of my fellow leaders: the pillars of industry and culture were well represented. Among my colleagues were a Colombian oncologist, an air-force officer, a university president, a British investment manager, a cannabis executive, a social-media executive and a charter-school foundation president from New York. I was allowed to participate in the seminar as long as the identities of my fellow participants, who were not told in advance that I would be there, remained anonymous. We were led by two able moderators: Ami Dror, a former Israeli secret-service agent turned educational entrepreneur, and Ayanna Thompson, a Shakespeare scholar and professor of English. We got to know each other over an opening dinner of sea bass, strawberry flan and bottomless drinks. Some of my fellow-travellers told me that they went into the experience thinking that this would be a fun way to expand their networks and to learn how to sound and act like a leader. For many of us, it turned out to be far more revelatory.

The seminar began immediately after eating, with a discussion of “An Agreement of the People”, a manifesto written in 1647, during the English civil war, about the nature of the British constitution. The text focused on whether there should be universal male suffrage or whether property holders alone should have the vote, lest the people rise up and “take away all property”. Thompson gave us our directions: the pamphlet concerned the question of who had a stake in society. Could we apply these same arguments to 21st-century America? We were split into two groups, assigned a side, and told to prepare talking points to debate. “What we do is talk about texts out of context,” she said. I followed the property defenders into an adjoining room where we developed our arguments against expanding the electorate. Democracy might be a good idea in theory, suggested the social-media executive, but it might not lead to the best “outcomes”. Our group nominated an education consultant from Memphis to speak on our behalf: “The law of man should be the law of the land,” she said, in a cool, convincing manner. There was silence. We were unsettled by how commanding she was. Then a charter-school advocate, an African-American woman from Washington, DC , cut in: “Shut the fuck up.” Everyone laughed. Thompson brought the group to order. “We start with a debate at the Aspen Institute,” she explained, “because we want to show there are multiple sides of the story.”

Over the next week, we raced through our anthology, frantically asking questions. Why was there so much inequality? Why were racism and sexism so persistent? What was happening to our world? We looked to these texts for solutions. We discussed an excerpt of the “The Communist Manifesto” that chronicles the development of rapacious capitalism. “I read all of this and I think about Amazon,” said the investment manager. The precarious state of politics hung over our conversation: Hobbes’s description of life in the state of nature – “nasty, brutish and short” – prompted the president of a charter-school foundation to liken the vision of the “Leviathan” to “a Donald Trump inaugural speech”. Yet though we were urged to relate these books to our lives and the world, the Aspen bubble meant that reality receded into the distance. Sure, we checked our phones for the news during breaks, but it seemed like the tribulations of the world would never disturb the institute’s Alpine idyll.

At our first rehearsal of “Antigone”, a box of props from previous productions was deposited against the wall and people start batting around ideas. “What if the men are women and the women are men?” “What if Antigone is Siri?” “What if the Chorus is a Facebook group?” “I don’t like that Antigone dies,” complained a valuation consultant. “Well, there’s a version of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ where they both get better,” said the university president. Over the course of our deliberations, everyone tried to steer the conversation towards their preferred outcome, which made me wonder if being a good leader is fundamentally a matter of strategically mobilising the syntax of politeness. “It would be great to have a statement that articulates our approach,” said the social-media executive. Finally, the education consultant from Memphis suggested that we stage the play as a trial, with Antigone on one side and Creon on the other. Everyone liked this approach: instead of reading from the script we would distil it to its essence and turn the play into an arbitration between law and conscience (a full courtroom procedure was deemed too complicated). With this decided we broke for the day, reconvening a few hours later for a wine-tasting on a sunlit terrace.

We were told that by studying these books we would blossom into the “values-driven” leaders that Aspen reveres. On most days the programme ran from 8am to 8pm. People took it seriously. After all, the seminar costs $11,350 in tuition, room and board. No one was allowed to shirk or whisper. Mobile phones were banned from the seminar room, though the charter-school advocate from Washington, a single mother, was given special dispensation: every day she worried whether her son, a tall black teenager, would make it home safely.

We repeatedly turned to Plato’s “Republic”. We couldn’t escape him: even the restaurant at the institute is called Plato’s. When we discussed his allegory of the cave, the university president stood up and drew a picture of the cave and the men who lived their whole lives inside it. Bewitched by the shadows from their fire, they believed these made up the whole world. “What is being described here?” Thompson asked. “Fake news,” said the university president. Only the enlightened can escape and discover the world outside. We considered our position: were terms like “best and brightest” corroding society or strengthening it? Were we the chosen ones who had managed to see the light or were we still chasing shadows? “The problem is that you have this Aspen lens, and it makes you feel enlightened,” the foundation president remarked. “No,” said a former special-forces officer, “that’s just the altitude sickness.”

The Aspen method is supposed to make you uncomfortable. The seminar shapes you, I was warned, by breaking you. By the third or fourth day, people’s walls start to crumble. There are tears. The Colombian oncologist, a man with a Jewish last name, confided that after he and his family moved to America, “I felt safe.” But when Trump praised white nationalists who had marched in Charlottesville, his wife had come to him and said, “I think we made a mistake giving our daughter your last name.” His voice broke as he said this. I tried to comfort him by telling him that my own family had had similar discussions, but found myself tearing up as well.

On the fourth day we read Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”, in which he condemned the “appalling silence of the good people”. Several people silently cried. “Are we the white moderates?” Dror asked. “Yes,” the global head of education, a white woman from San Francisco, answered. Later, the education consultant from Memphis, who is African-American, told us that she had been stopped three times by strangers as she walked around Aspen. A financial analyst, a white woman from New York, suggested that they were probably just curious, that their questions were innocent. The cannabis executive, also a white woman, pointed out to the analyst that no one had stopped to interrogate her in the same way. “You’ve taken a risk in coming here that I did not,” the cannabis executive said to the black woman. The financial analyst did not appreciate the tacit suggestion that she was racist. A chill descended. The investment manager intervened: “What can we do that’s not overthrowing the government tomorrow?”

I was surprised by the extent to which these committed professionals of all political stripes, Democrat and Republican, foresaw political upheaval. Though each had some stake in maintaining the status quo, they were largely pessimistic about the future. A few wondered aloud about the prospect of an uprising. The chief medical officer pondered if the “shocks” we were undergoing – Brexit, Trump and beyond – were in fact making our society “more resilient”. The education consultant from Memphis confessed that she was a “baby prepper”, planning for social unrest. There would be violence, she warned, and she wanted to be sure her stockpiles were maintained. Conversations kept coming back to the feeling that we stood at the brink.

Earlier in the week, by way of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd”, we had considered how we would go about putting down mutinies among our staff. Yet just a few days later we found ourselves discussing whether we would take part in the coming revolution. (That the revolution was, indeed, coming was not a major point of dispute.) I asked my fellow participants: what exactly would they rebel against? And whose side would they take? But time was running out. We had been conversing civilly for too long. We broke for coffee, and the staff swept in to clear our plates.

The winds of populism, anti-intellectualism and virulent nationalism have shaken the devotees of Aspen. Its graduates no longer set the political agenda. Mortimer Adler, one of the co-founders of the institute, once remarked that Aspen was proof that, “in the scale of values, the Platonic Triad of the true, the good and the beautiful takes precedence over the Machiavellian triad of money, fame and power.” But what Aspen views as the true, the good and the beautiful is not winning at the moment, and the institute is not entirely innocent. It has become a place where celebrities mingle so freely with businessfolk and politicians that they have come to believe that they could easily do each others’ jobs. Along with the TED Talks, the Aspen Ideas Festival has turned policymaking into a form of entertainment in which the most authentic-sounding and emotive performers rack up ardent followings. In doing so, it contributed to the reinvention of the celebrity politician in the digital age. In this sense, the Aspen Institute is both political poison and cure. It may yet come up with solutions for our age of populism, but it is also inescapably part of its cause.

When I spoke to Eric Motley, the institute’s executive vice-president and a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, he wondered aloud, “how do you safeguard yourself from the leaders who will destroy the very foundations of American democracy?” He continued, though, to have faith: the executive seminar would help people grapple with this “inflection point in American history”.

Others believe that Aspen needs to change. The most forceful challenge to its worldview came in 2015 when Anand Giridharadas, a writer and former Aspen fellow, spoke at the institute before a largely hostile audience. He asked in advance for forgiveness. “The Aspen Consensus, in a nutshell, is this: the winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm,” he said. “Sometimes, I find myself wondering what we’re actually doing here in Aspen…Are we using our collective strength to challenge the powerful, or are we helping to make an unjust, unpalatable system feel a little more digestible?” Albright came up to him afterwards and “gently disparaged” his speech, he says. He expanded his lecture into a book, published last year, entitled “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World”. “If you are a small group of business elites gathering in the hills in 2019, you have a very high risk of being on the wrong side of history,” he told me. “Bubble-bath interviews are not the answer to an age of populism.” He acknowledges that he is a product of the Aspen world, which is why he cares about its future. (I, too, am part of this world. At the festival I encountered contemporaries from high school, university and graduate school. I watched a former colleague of mine being interviewed. I have written for the Atlantic, which co-hosts the festival.) Yet there is a more fundamental threat to the Aspen Institute than a prophet without honour such as Giridharadas: that the elite will continue to meet with the elite, and gradually grow irrelevant.

The executive seminar and the Ideas Festival are supposed to be complementary. “They balance each other,” Isaacson told me. “It’s useful to have both types of experience: very intimate, monastic ones and very public ones. Any good stable molecule ought to have two strong atoms to it.” But unlike the executive seminar the Ideas Festival didn’t have many moments of reckoning. Two days after we took our stroll together, Porterfield walked through campus with a new companion: Mark Zuckerberg had come to town as an unannounced special guest. It was a last-minute surprise for everyone, including the organisers. After years of declining invitations, Zuckerberg’s team at Facebook had called up and asked for an audience. He was given a friendly interlocutor, in the person of Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar who has consulted for Facebook. Apart from a small press pool, reporters were excluded. Amy DeMaria, the institute’s vice-president of communications, grabbed my arm and brought me in as her guest, ushering me past a private security guard who tried to stop me. So I got to see Sunstein ask Zuckerberg, gently, if he could “say a little bit” about why he is calling for governmental regulation and what “inspired” him to do so. Zuckerberg took a breath and turned to face the crowd. His voice was deep if slightly harried, and his face impassive. Fixing the social and political problems exacerbated by social media, he said, was not Facebook’s prerogative alone. “It’s above our pay grade,” he said. He was briefly heckled and then applauded.

Facebook is collaborating with the Aspen Institute on an adaptation of the Aspen method that will “explore ideas around challenging conventional leadership”. Participants will not be required to perform “Antigone”, but if they were, I wonder if they could replicate the ruthless efficiency with which my cohort tackled it. “Nine-Minute Antigone” was our group name. We distilled the arbitration into a series of questions: is it better to value discipline over morality? How do we distinguish between a just and unjust law? How do we define what is right and wrong? We selected quotations from our anthology that offered competing approaches. We chose a judge, and put Creon, the despotic ruler, on the side of law, and Antigone, the rebel, on the side of conscience. But we were divided about who should win. A handful of people identified with Creon. Antigone acted selfishly, one person remarked. She thought only of herself. The plan was for the judge to mull over the case and tell us his verdict only during the performance. The investment manager raised his hand again: “I just want to point out that we’ve spent the whole week talking about just government and we just decided to give one person power over the entire decision.”

He was right. It was an embarrassing oversight. We created a fix. The decision wouldn’t be left to the expert judge but to the people. Instead of allowing Antigone to die gruesomely, as she does in the play, we would kill the judge, who we named Socrates, instead. And so, on the afternoon of the performance, we assembled near the marble garden, where a bar had been set up in the shade. We nursed our wine and beers as we ran through a full rehearsal. Then our moderators arrived, signalling that it was time for the show. Our appointed narrator stepped forward: “We are gathered here, in the light of the sun, to arbitrate the tensions between conscience and law. We are asking: what society do we want to live in?” Antigone and Creon delivered their opening statements, and then one by one, we stepped forward to say our parts. When it was time for the judge to deliver his verdict, we strode towards him, armed with umbrellas, to prevent him from speaking. “We choose democracy!” we half-heartedly chanted, as we acted out his murder. “Revolution” by the Beatles played as we took our bows. Justice was dead and we had killed him. We were Aspen leaders now.■