Professors With TDS Retreat to Davos

The enclave in the Alps in which the President went to the World Economic Forum is apparently something like Aspen and draws the same type of people. “Much like the secret infrastructure of money and power that makes the world go round, the Swiss Alps were imposing but nearly invisible as the world’s financial, political and intellectual leaders gathered in Davos,” Molly Ball reported on the Time magazine website on January 25, 2018. “An epic 6-ft. snowstorm had snarled the Jan. 22 opening of the World Economic Forum.”

“The bestowing of humanitarian awards on Cate Blanchett and Elton John had to be delayed by half an hour as the world’s VIPs slipped and slid and simmered in hours of stopped traffic.” At Davos, a couple of professors shared their thoughts on our chief executive with Ball:

• “Last year was panic mode–a sense of ‘They’re coming after us,’” Jan-Werner Müller, a Princeton political scientist, said.

• “I don’t agree with Trump, but I believe in listening to people you disagree with,” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker said. Nevertheless, in advance of the president’s appearance, Pinker stated, “We know what he’s probably going to say ‘Davos Man, screw you.’”

• “If you’re American now, you have to answer the question, Why is democracy a good idea if it brings you to this?” Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian, asks. Moreover, he equates the election of Donald Trump with an American eclipse: “I spend a lot of my life in Europe, and what I see is that the Europeans have moved on. America no longer matters.” But he doesn’t say where they’ve moved on to. Evidently, they left no forwarding address.

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