Writing for the Wall Street Journal but behind their paywall, foreign policy guru Walter Russell Mead assesses the WEF. He argues the sort of world favored by the attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos is farther away than it was a few years ago. You can access the column through the RealClearPolitics website for Monday, January 16. He writes:
The real scandal of Davos isn’t that it’s taking over the world. It’s that it’s failing. The Davos agenda—a global security order, an integrated world economy and progress toward objectives including decarbonization, gender equality and the abolition of dire poverty—is controversial in some quarters and on some points but is neither secret nor particularly nefarious. But far from imposing this agenda on a captive world, the Davos elites are wringing their hands as the dream slowly dies. (emphasis added)
Why is it dying? Mead suggests an answer.
People aren’t losing trust in their leaders because disinformation has muddled their brains. They are losing confidence because they sense that the establishment’s approach to the chief problems of the day isn’t working.
It is a crisis of competence. Why would voters expect an “expert class” that was so wrong for so long about Russia, China, Iran and Covid to know how to cope with a challenge as difficult and multifaceted as the energy transition? Why would they trust European and American politicians who are failing so woefully to handle massive illegal migration to manage the rise of artificial intelligence?
It's damn disheartening when you believe you are, or should be, leading humanity's parade and, looking back, discover almost no one is following you.
Utopianism like that of Davos always fails as it chooses to misunderstand human nature. Even to believe our nature can be dramatically altered, when much of it is 'hard-wired' genetically.
BTW, I disagree with Mead that the WEF agenda isn't "particularly nefarious." Messing with my diet and lifestyle is seriously nefarious and I'm not having it.
