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Emmanuel Macron at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Image: Getty)
Reports of Davos Man’s demise, unlike in Mark Twain’s case, aren’t exaggerated. Davos Man is shorthand for the 55-year old World Economic Forum’s annual gathering of a wealthy global elite, mostly privileged politicians and powerful financiers, atop Davos, a Swiss ski resort. Davos Man’s no longer synonymous with respected leaders and authoritative experts imparting insights for our collective benefit. Davos Man’s an increasingly irrelevant figure.
He symbolises Big Government and Big Business’ vanishing roles as prudent economic stewards and trusted guardians of the public interest. He revels in his exclusivity, preaching to a choir of globalists who constitute an establishment “Who’s Who.” Engineer Klaus Schwab founded WEF as far more than a meeting of influential minds; he designed it as a meeting of our self-anointed betters for their own betterment.
Davos Man speaks foremost for the world’s elitists, be they heads of government, corporate titans, or billionaire controligarchs. Davos Man also speaks for the technocrats and bureaucrats who ensure governments run ‘properly’ regardless of a government’s popular mandate.
The arrogance of these ‘experts’ reassures them public consultation is neither desired nor required. Why democratise policymaking when top-down governance serves them so well?
Consequently, Davos Man remains detached from ordinary people’s lives and thereby disconnected from their needs. So, he lacks awareness of the tectonic plates shifting beneath Western politics and commerce in favour of pragmatism, transparency, and grassroots democracy.
WEF has frequently operated as a quasi-global government and propagandist via its instrumental networks of highly-placed politicians, corporate leaders, and journalists.
Whether the perceived crisis is climate change, nationalism, populism, or protectionism, Davos Man knows tighter State control of the public and the marketplace, exercised through regulations, bans, and censorship, is always the correct answer.
Davos Man’s Eurocentric biases and anti-democratic prejudices are as worn and outdated as the EU, itself. Featured speakers this week include authoritarian European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and wildly unpopular French President Emmanuel Macron.
Both are demonstrably ‘over their skis’ in their current offices. They are joined by numerous EU Lite politicians, such as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. In 2023, he openly told WEF he was “speaking as a European.”
Carney shares Davos Man’s predilection for multiple passports and global citizenry. Ironically, the EU has damaged Davos Man. Brexit fractured the political centre of Europe, weakening unified EU action and diluting collective Western influence at forums like WEF.
Trust in multilateral institutions, from the EU to the WTO, to the UN, evaporated as nations increasingly opted for bilateral or ad hoc arrangements.
No longer a joyful celebration of Western-led globalisation, WEF is now more like a forum grappling with its own unravelling.
WEF’s current agenda suggest organisers suspect Davos Man’s best days are behind him. This week’s focus upon navigating economic rivalries exposes how the post-Cold War, WEF-led consensus no longer holds. The event’s theme, “A Spirit of Dialogue,” is an unsubtle acknowledgement of this.
Davos Man also squandered trust through allegations that WEF’s flagship Global Competitiveness Report was rigged by its founder to punish the UK for Brexit, and to favour India to “protect our relationship.”
Contributing to Davos Man’s decline is his firm positioning on the unpopular, politically correct side of today’s (and tomorrow’s) policy debates. He favours crony capitalism, mass-migration, open borders, globalisation, the EU, the UN, digital ID, digital currencies, COVID-style draconian public health measures, Net Zero energy policy, woke culture, and censored speech.
Why is anti-globalist Donald Trump speaking to the anti-populist WEF? Unlike Davos Man’s favourite speakers, Trump addresses him from a position of comparative political strength and democratic legitimacy, not from weakness or fear of the voters’ wrath. America First Trump, an ardent nationalist, ventured onto the globalists’ home turf to speak (his) truth to waning power, while rhetorically waving Davos Man’s growing irrelevance in its face.
WEF’s status also has suffered from an explosion of interest in “Davos in the Desert,” the annual Riyadh-based Future Investment Initiative (FII) summit, which is antithetical in tone and tenor to “Davos in the Alps.”
In under a decade, the pragmatic FII became the world’s most influential gathering of business, tech, and scientific resources and intellectual horsepower. A larger, more interactive and inclusive, and truly global gathering, FII now forms a critical mass committed to deepening entrepreneurship and free market capitalism’s unique ability to produce sustainable improvements in most people’s quality of life.
When he descends 5,000 feet from his Alpine perch, Davos Man will come down to earth. In late middle age, he’s experiencing inevitable decline. Plummeting from the world’s preeminent policy influencer to irrelevance in old age is painful.
Davos Man’s shelf life will soon end. The world sheds no tears. Elitism on such a global scale came at enormous cost to everyone else. Balancing the ledger is a necessity.
English (US) · 