It is that time of year again. The skies over Davos are thick with private jets flying in billionaires to bemoan the problems of climate change and, as U.S. climate envoy
John Kerry
put it this week, save the planet. Traffic jams clogging the streets, security checks at every hotel, nonstop parties and receptions all over town—the World Economic Forum is back.
The locals seem unimpressed. As one harried resident told me, Davos natives treat forum week the way many New Orleans locals treat Mardi Gras. It’s a great time to get out of town and, with accommodations going for thousands of dollars a night, an enterprising resident can cover a year’s mortgage payments by renting out the old homestead to frenzied forum goers.
The antics of the Davoisie are easy to mock. It isn’t only the discordant but relentless mix of green virtue-signaling and conspicuous consumption. You will hear more talk about the evils of inequality here than anywhere except an American university’s diversity office, yet everyone wears a badge that delineates his exact place in an elaborate and inflexible pecking order.
But something serious is happening at Davos. The divide between the consensus of the business and political leaders who gather here and the values and perceptions that shape American conservatives and the Republican Party is growing into a chasm. Both sides will have to think and act carefully, or the upheavals in European-American relations that marked the Trump years will fade into insignificance when the GOP is back in power—with or without Donald Trump.
Criticism of Davos used to come mostly from the left. These days, its most bitter critics come from the populist right. And a Davos elite that once saw doctrinaire leftism as the greatest obstacle to global prosperity and progress now increasingly sees right-wing populism as the enemy of everything good.
The WEF grows out of a German understanding of capitalism. After World War II, German conservatives believed that to stave off both communism and right-wing populism, German private enterprise would have to adopt a more social posture. Business needed to demonstrate that capitalism could beat the socialists at their own game. Big business would work with the government to achieve important social-welfare goals. That necessarily implied coordination between private sector and…
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