BritanniQ: The rise of Davos Sapien
The following opens the latest issue of BritanniQ, Bournbrook’s weekly newsletter in which A D M Collingwood curates essays, podcasts, books and quietly patriotic beauty, and sends the best directly to your inbox.
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High in the Swiss Alps, near the Austrian and Lichtenstein borders, the streets will be sprinkled with rose petals and the air scented with honeysuckle in preparation for the arrival in Davos of the world’s gilded plutocrats for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. The WEF, led by Klaus Schwab, a man who often looks more like the epitome of a cartoon villain than characters in Marvel films, is the fount of many internet conspiracy theories. Yet, as Thomas Fazi writes in a penetrating essay, “there is nothing conspiratorial about the WEF, to the extent that conspiracies imply secrecy”. He notes: “On the contrary, the WEF – unlike, say, the Bilderberg – is very open about its agenda.”
The problem with the conspiracy theorists is that they distract from just what that agenda has involved: a globalism that has has hollowed out Western living standards and productive capacity, sending it mostly to South East Asia, where governments are, unlike their western counterparts, most certainly not indifferent to what is made by whom and where, and have thus overseen surging median wages.
It is worse than that, though: Mr Fazi writes that the great success of the agenda most prominently espoused by the WEF (but also, BritanniQ would add, the EU, the post-Third Way Democrat and Labour Parties, and much of the European intelligentsia) has been “insulating policy from democracy by transferring the decision-making process from the national and international level, where citizens theoretically are able to exercise some degree of influence over policy, to the supranational level”. Not a conspiracy, then, but no less nefarious for it.
