gracchusdixit

Two days ago, the 2018 World Economic Forum opened in the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos.  Once upon a time, Davos was an obscure and rather remote spot, situated roughly where the borders of Switzerland, Italy, and Austria converge.  Thanks to the World Economic Forum, however, it has become famous—so famous that no one any longer uses the formal name of the conclave.  “Davos” is enough.

Founded more than 40 years ago by a German-born professor of business at the University of Geneva, Davos was originally intended to introduce American management practices, then thought to be the global creme della creme, to the supposedly sluggish and backward companies and economies of Europe.  Gradually, Davos morphed into something far more—nothing less than the premier gathering of the global economic elite, where presidents and prime ministers, bankers and CEOs, economists and academics rub shoulders and congratulate one another on their membership in the world’s most exclusive club.  It has become, in effect, the annual convention of the neoliberal economic order, when participants restate, reinforce, and reaffirm their belief in the tenets of global capitalism:  the superiority of so-called “free” markets, the supremacy of so-called “free” trade, and the unfettered freedom of capital to pursue profit wherever profit can be found.

By all accounts, the mood at this year’s meeting is nothing less than euphoric.  Buoyed by the corporate tax cuts recently passed in the United States, the pundits and panjandrums of Davos are predicting an economic boom, not only in America but in the rest of the world.  These expectations will soon be passed down as holy writ to the rest of us by hundreds of sycophantic journalists, who flock to Davos like bees eager to lick up pollen.  To the smug, self-satisfied elite who convene at the World Economic Forum, the only world that matters is their world.

No one expressed this conceit better than the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who, in 1992, published a book called The End of History and the Last Man.  Rare for a work so densely packed with sometimes daunting philosophical and historical ideas, Fukuyama’s magnum opus quickly became an international best seller.  It also became, for a while at least, the neoliberal equivalent of the Communist Manifesto—to wit, the defining text of global capitalism.

Writing just three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama argued that history had for all intents and purposes come to an end.  What he meant by “history” was the long struggle between the two opposing ideologies of capitalism and socialism.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, he claimed, history had declined a winner:  capitalism and the liberal democracies that embraced it were on the road to becoming the universal and permanent economic and political system to which all nations would someday evolve.

From where we sit today, scarcely 20 years after Fukuyama’s screed was published, it is hard to believe that his rosy and confident prognostications were ever taken seriously, let alone treated as gospel—for the social, political, and economic institutions he declared to be triumphant are now everywhere under attack or crumbling under the weight of their own contradictions.  Indeed, Fukuyama himself recanted his views some years ago, candidly admitting that he not only underestimated the fragility of neoliberal institutions but misread the trajectory of history itself.

Fukuyama’s recantation has done little, however, to cause the Davos elite to confront, let alone question, their own assumptions.  As they sip champagne, nibble foie gras crackers, and natter on about Greek debt or the GDP of Uzbekistan, there is little indication that they have even the slightest inkling that their world and the real world are moving in two, radically different directions.

The European Union, which Fukuyama once judged to be the “probable model” for the political future of the planet, is struggling to survive, as some of its most important member states drift toward right-wing authoritarianism.  Germany, the EU’s most important and stable member, finds itself on the razor’s edge, after a Neo-Nazi party won an shockingly large slice of the votes in that country’s most recent elections, and the once indomitable Angela Merkel fights for her political life. A majority of the electorate in the United Kingdom, that phlegmatic bastion of global capitalism, have voted to turn their backs on the European Union altogether, opting instead for ethnic and economic isolation.  Around the globe, tyrants are rising up like dragon’s teeth; the siren song of xenophobic nationalism is drowning out the voices of moderation and tolerance; the rule of law is being discarded as a nettlesome impediment to the will of autocratic leaders.  These include, not only the dictatorial presidents of Russia, Turkey, and the Philippines, but the increasingly authoritarian and lawless President of the United States.

As creative and productive as capitalism undoubtedly can be, it can also, like the Hindu god Siva, be profoundly destructive.  Unfettered capitalism turns citizens into mere consumers.  It uproots social and cultural traditions that are centuries-old.  It transforms human beings into disposable commodities. That citizens and human beings would someday rise up against these depredations was inevitable.  What wasn’t inevitable, what didn’t need to happen, was a turn toward nationalism, racism, and autocracy.

The global elite, as they gather on the empyrean heights of Davos, seem blithely unaware of all the chaos down below.  Like the Roman Emperor Nero, they appear to be fiddling all the while Rome burns.  If they do not soon put aside their fiddling, the conflagration will consume us all.