Financial elites, huh? Can’t live with them, can’t stop obsessing about their snowsuits. Still rocking from the revelations elicited from US President Donald Trump by Piers Morgan on ITV at the weekend — that he has met Morgan before and definitely remembers him, that he is super successful in everything he does, and that he feels love for all people — we greet the week with a significant shift of the intersection point between politics and money.
Rally Trump was trenchantly anti-globalisation; Victory Trump was savagely anti-elites. Campaigning in green ink and governing in poison pen, he never essayed that Clintonian Davos sheen, the smooth, luxurious world where billionaires were doing everybody else a favour and heads of state moved respectfully among them by invitation.
Trump was, reasonably enough given his bellicose protectionist rhetoric, viewed with fear and scorn by the globe’s high net worth individuals, his own net worth notwithstanding. That changed pretty easily: he gave a speech with the accent on transnational cooperation, ardently desirous of mutually beneficial deals, offering a full complement of sympatico ideas — tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, an end to environmental hooey — and went away Davos’ darling.
British Conservatives are coagulating around the Boris Johnson view, that Trump should be cultivated any way he wishes, since our prosperity is more important than any of that values flim-flam. But perhaps more surprising is the ease with which the international financial elites have decided to weather the wall-building, Muslim-banning, white-supremacist, hyper-bordered politics that the US president represents. A cultivated, colour-blind internationalism always seemed so axiomatic to free-market fundamentalism. If people can’t move then only capital can move; if only capital can move, it’s not a free market. This, it transpired, was just an elegant thought experiment, a “what-if?” idea to be floated in side meetings and over dinners. If push came to shove, a very different worldview, of continent against continent, religion against religion or race against race was fine too,so long as the trade survived.
It would be disingenuous to express real surprise — you don’t go to Davos for unwavering values and internal consistency. Yet it’s still interesting to watch their ideological fig leaves blow about in the gusts of political turbulence. Every year since the financial crash give or take a year or two talking about only that and their wholly innocent part in it, the Davos crowd have spent a lot of time talking about equality. The answers are generally found at the level of the individual — a bit more philanthropy from the rich, a bit more aspiration from the poor, chuck in some technological innovation (could we build an app to tell Bangladeshi fishermen where the fish have moved since the typhoon? Let’s get on it, folks! Iterate!) and the task is in hand.
They are rarely confronted, internally, with the basic building blocks of equality: that before you embark on any programmes of micro-investment packages for shack entrepreneurs you have to consider whether wages are high enough for workers to feed themselves, and their families, and also pay rent. Where that isn’t the case, any conversation that isn’t about wages — and therefore isn’t about unionisation, outsourcing, shareholder value maximisation, the distribution of profit between capital and labour, the gap between CEO and average pay, and actually, more as a coda, higher rate tax (wouldn’t it be novel if earnings at the top weren’t so high that their taxation could have a determining effect on the economy at large?) — is diversionary.
Even externally, protest against their deliberate and self-satisfied myopia is kept to a minimum, compared to, say, the crowds that once gathered outside meetings of the G8. To have a gathering surrounded by snow, only really accessible by helicopter, and liberated of the need for protection, is probably the most intelligent move the international elite have ever made. Fairly or unfairly, when you can only meet behind barbed wire and jauntily dressed Swiss policemen, it makes you look as if you’re up to no good.
This year, however, Labour’s John McDonnell arrived, to put the attendants “on notice”. They couldn’t distribute upwards forever. People had begun to realise. His speech itself was blunt and sounded a bit like your uncle, unaccountably in a room with the leading lights of British football, complaining that the high wages and attendant ticket costs were pricing out the fans. You couldn’t disagree with his point, but the sheer incongruity of seeing him make it was nerve-shredding, as if they’d invited him in at the apotheosis of their triumph to laugh at afterwards, maybe throw some pies.
Yet something lingered that should unsettle Davos man: the unstoppable egalitarian language is meeting immovable forces. Whether in the shape of Trump, busting his way into acceptance, racism and all, or McDonnell, insistently rejecting the trickle-down principles by which a belief in equality and a dizzying concentration of wealth can be held in equipoise, the foremost institutions of modern capitalism are being confronted with their own contradictions.
The trajectory is shared with last week’s revelations about the Presidents Club that powerful men talked a great boardroom game about gender equality then met for an annual chuckle over it, surrounded by women they’d paid to dress as the instruments of their pleasure.
This cannot have arrived as fresh news to any insiders; it is doubtful that it came as a huge surprise to anyone on the newspaper that broke the story. What it represents is not so much a discovery as the end of a code of silence around a hypocrisy so well known that it previously would have sounded naive to mention.
In the immediate panic following the announcement of the emperors’ nakedness, they’re liable to take solace in the commentators who insist that, on the contrary, their clothes are quite visible, or a Trump figure, telling them clothes don’t matter. Nothing, from the grope-and-tell expose to the arrival of a Marxist at the temple of the market, is the end of the story; but the power of the financiers’ narrative lay in a graceful aversion of our eyes, away from the gaps between what they said and what they did. We have lost our tact, and might thereby rediscover our power.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist.
