It was Harvard professor Samuel Huntington who first hurled the epithet "Davos Man" at the new elites, railing against "gold-collar workers" with no use for the nation state, and divorced from organic societies rooted in tradition.

He warned of a cosmopolitan superclass of 20 million people, with interests diverging ever further from the anthropology of the parish. This rootless supra-culture was cornering the gains of the global economy, and capturing ideological power. "They have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations," he wrote.

The Telegraph London