His more conservative supporters were no doubt puzzled, probably irritated, by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s sound bite, following the G20 Summit in Hangzhou. Asked what was the most important decision, he quipped, the urgency of “civilizing capitalism …”

It was a smart aleck bon mot one might have expected from a Barack Obama, not from one of the most conservative leaders in the democratic world — a former Goldman Sachs banker, no less. It was signal of the rising panic among politicians of every stripe about the threats to their parties and nations.

The headline alarm bell is, of course, Donald Trump. He has less well-known, but equally terrifying cousins, in Germany, France, Poland and sprinkled across Asia, Africa and Latin America. It is almost trite, by now, to admit that his angry populism is driven by deepening divisions across racial, ethnic, social and class lines.

Today, even conservatives admit that failure to slow and then reverse rising inequality in family income and assets risks destabilizing democracy itself. The research is conclusive: seriously unequal societies are more unstable and violent, less productive and more corrupt. What to do about it is somewhat less clear.

Thomas Piketty, the controversial French political economist, in his bestseller, Capital, starkly framed the challenge. Some conservative economists whinged that he had torqued his numbers in making his case for equality. No one challenged his core thesis. The 20th century narrowed social inequality in most advanced countries for one reason only: successive rounds of disastrous asset destruction.

Two major wars and a dozen less painful ones combined with a deep global depression, overlaid with massive tax increases to fund the wars and then the rebuilding, crushed wealthy family fortunes everywhere.

The explosion in inequality kicked off by the unprecedented wealth creation of the Industrial Revolution — one that gave birth first to Marxism and then fascism — was temporarily blocked. Technology, productivity gains and globalization have returned us to “normal”: the rich are getting richer. Faster.

Until the ’80s, most policy-makers — Keynesian and conservative — claimed that they had the tools to boost productivity and manage inequality through monetary, fiscal and social policy. Now almost seven years after the “great recession” red faces in finance ministries and central banks are everywhere. Productivity, income and employment levels are stalled, public debt and inequality rise inexorably.

This failure is now seriously alarming to many G20 leaders. For decades conservative leaders have peddled the seductive nonsense that cutting taxes, expenditure and waste would solve all. Progressive leaders, equally disingenuously, refuse to admit that public sector productivity slid as spending rose. They sneered at critics who warned mounting public pension costs, salaries, and staff sizes could not continue forever.

As they say in 12-step addiction programs, recognition and acceptance are the first steps to recovery. So perhaps we are at the beginning of a more sober democratic discourse. The urgency to create a more effective basket of economic and social policy — “civilizing capitalism” — seems finally to be seizing our political elites. What should be in the new basket remains mostly baffling.

Like recovering addicts we know what we must stop doing: shrouding the planet in a poisonous fog, clinging to tax policies that encourage bad business and personal choices, cowering at resistance to big changes in social programs and regulatory regimes long past their “sell by” dates, throwing money at education and health-care systems driven more by institutional territorial ambition than delivered outcomes, etc.

Overcoming populist anger will require delivering real proofs to cynical middle class voters. Following the Brexit disaster, Joe Biden eloquently outlined the goal in words that could have come from FDR in the middle of the 1930s crisis of democratic capitalism.

We say to our children, Biden reminds us, “that if they work hard, if they struggle … they will have an opportunity to live a better life than the generation before them.” He closed with the classic American vision that this pledge is underpinned by “a simple belief that anything is possible.”

Well, maybe.

For many voters, progressives and conservatives are equally tainted by their failures. Either libertarians and conservatives — or social democrats and liberals — will soon need to demonstrate they have those proofs. To begin to deliver on Biden’s dream for our children.

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Or a seriously weakened Angela Merkel may struggle to restrain a group of bullies and clowns like France’s protofascist Marine LePen; Russia’s elected czar, Vladimir Putin; Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Italy’s Trotskyite comedian Beppe Grillo as the leaders of a very different G20 summit next year in Hamburg.