The takeaway from President Trump’s visit to the World Economic Forum, in Davos, is that it didn’t go as badly as it might have. The President stuck to the written text. His hosts were gracious. Or, according to a less generous take, Trump went to a party to which he had always dreamed of being invited and the big boys, impressed by his stature, played nice. The general consensus betrays our low expectations: the best that can be expected of the President is an empty speech and a semblance of dignity in response to softball questions.

American media often refer to Davos as the ultimate gathering of “globalists,” a term that long ago lost any specific meaning. It might be more accurate to describe the World Economic Forum as a get-together where people who manage vast sums of money or otherwise wield outsize influence try to get a grasp on the political, social, and economic world in which they are living. The conversation occurs on three temporal levels: the present, the immediate future, and the distant future.

The conversation about the present focusses on the transactions of today, and this is the level at which Trump addressed the gathering. He talked about America’s booming markets, boasted of cutting taxes, and claimed to have eliminated more regulations than any Administration in the history of this country. He addressed the only reality he is ordinarily capable of perceiving: right here, right now. As is normal for Trump, his rhetoric implicitly denied the very possibility of a tomorrow in which his Administration’s policies may have consequences beyond an immediate market boost.

Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned that tax reform is risky beyond the immediate term, not only for the United States but for the world. Lagarde, who was one of the co-chairs of the gathering, also noted that, five years ago, she warned that unequal economic growth was unsustainable, and that growing economic inequality would lead to the rise of populist and nationalist politicians. Back then, she said, no one wanted to hear her words of caution.

Another speaker who addressed the risks visible in the immediate future was the philanthropist George Soros. He began by talking about the existential dangers of nuclear war and climate change, but the bulk of his remarks focussed on the hegemony of the giant I.T. companies. Social networks, he said, induce people to give up their autonomy, or “freedom of mind.” If that’s not bad enough, there is the potential of the I.T. monopolies colluding with autocratic regimes, such as Russia or China, to institute “totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined.”

Then there were the visionaries. They included John Goodwin, the C.E.O. of the Lego Foundation, who took the world to task for perpetuating educational models “suitable for the demands of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution or the twentieth-century knowledge society, but not the twenty-first-century reality.” He underscored that education has fallen perilously behind the times, not only in the developing world but everywhere. The Israeli historian Yuval Harari said that the products of the twenty-first-century economy will be “not textiles and vehicles and weapons but bodies and brains and minds.” The result, according to him, will be a species of beings as different from today’s humans as we are from our primate ancestors.

Reading the U.S. media, you would think that all the attendees of Davos 2018 cared about was whether Donald Trump obeyed the teleprompter and sounded reasonably civilized while inviting the moneybags of the world to invest in the United States. Soros’s remarks got a bit of coverage, while the more visionary conversation seemed not to register at all. This shows how provincial we have become. Our chronic embarrassment—or fear of embarrassment—when it comes to our President may be a new phenomenon, but our lack of imagination is not. The American political conversation has long been based on outdated economic and social ideas, and now it’s really showing.