Up@dawn 2.0

Sunday, August 25, 2019

What cosmopolitans really want

Why Do Politicians Blame ‘Cosmopolitans’ for Local Problems?
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
Aug. 21, 2019

The real divide in this country isn’t town versus country, red versus blue or MAGA versus Resistance — at least not according to Josh Hawley, the new junior senator from Missouri. In a keynote address to the National Conservatism Conference last month, he declared that “the great divide of our time” was between the “cosmopolitan elite” and everyone else.

Hawley is 39, our youngest senator, a rising Republican star. He’s a brilliantly credentialed member of the overclass (Stanford, Yale Law, a Supreme Court clerkship) who speaks for “the great American middle.” In video from the event he looks, well, presidential — the crisp white shirt set off by the navy suit, the royal blue tie snug in the spread collar, the words perfectly cadenced. “For years,” he told conferees at the Washington Ritz-Carlton, “the politics of both left and right have been informed by a political consensus that reflects the interests not of the American middle but of a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities.” This class, he explained, “lives in the United States, but they identify as ‘citizens of the world,’ ” and “their primary loyalty is to the global community.” They chase profits without concern for country, creating an economy that leaves Middle America “with flat wages, with lost jobs.”

Hawley used the C-word as a cudgel: “the cosmopolitan elite,” “the cosmopolitan consensus,” “the cosmopolitan economy,” the “cosmopolitan agenda.” For some viewers, the diatribe brought up bad memories from the era of Stalin and Hitler; the word circulates, too, in contemporary alt-right circles. The Missouri chapter of the Anti-Defamation League asked Hawley to watch his language.

And yet the terms of Hawley’s argument can be found across the political mainstream. In an address last year, Barack Obama described a new business elite that was “cosmopolitan” in outlook, and insulated from the pain it inflicted on “particular people in particular communities.” Bernie Sanders has for years railed against plutocrats whose avarice shows “very little concern for our country.” Elizabeth Warren, in a debate last month, said the “giant, multinational corporations” determining our trade policy “have no patriotism — if they can save a nickel by moving a job to Mexico, they’ll do it in a heartbeat.”

Nor do you have to be American to see a globalist menace. The “yellow vest” protesters in France have taken aim at an internationalized class with an airy indifference to hardship chez nous. (The elites “talk about the end of the world, while we talk about the end of the month,” one told a journalist.) In 2016 Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain said tartly, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

The word “cosmopolitan” dates to ancient Greece — “citizen of the world” is its literal meaning — but cosmopolitanism was turned into an influential philosophy by the Roman Stoics of the first and second centuries. It shaped early Christianity. (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free ...,” Galatians says.) It was what led Marcus Aurelius to see no clash between loyalty to Rome and loyalty to humanity: “My city and my country, insofar as I am Antoninus, is Rome; insofar as I am a human being, it is the world.” We could have multiple identities, it suggested; we could think that everybody matters and that we have special obligations to those who depend on our care and whose care we depend on. As Cicero, an earlier cosmopolitan, saw it: “Human fellowship will be best served if we treat most kindly those to whom we are most closely connected.”

Ordinary people now live in a world in which many of us are closely connected to people in other countries. Many of us were born in one country, make our livelihood in a second, are married to someone from a third. I should know: My sisters’ progeny have parents or grandparents from England, Ghana, Namibia, Nigeria, Norway and Russia. At the same time, many of the biggest threats we face are global — climate change, pandemics, you name it — and require global action. A cosmopolitanism of aspiration has become one of necessity. The ethical challenges this raises, unmissable in the new millennium, were the subject of a book I published a dozen years ago.

The cosmopolitanism Hawley invoked was a very different beast: a double-headed Kraken that brought together targets of the left (heartless capitalists) and the right (Olympian eggheads), as if Goldman Sachs had merged with the Modern Language Association. But he did so by the sort of selective quotation that could make this Republican senator sound like a member of the Squad. Actual cosmopolitans typically agree that cosmopolitanism works best when it’s rooted. Hawley knows he can be a good Missourian and still be a good American. So what’s to stop us from conceiving ourselves as both citizens of our country and of the wider world? “America is not going to become the rest of the world,” Hawley declared. “And the rest of the world is not going to become America.” But that’s not a point against cosmopolitanism; it’s a precondition of it. Cosmopolitans value cross-cultural encounters, which would be pointless if everywhere was the same.

Despite efforts to blame some cosmopolitan mind-set for the problems of economic inequality, actual cosmopolitan leanings, among actual people, don’t pull in that direction. Being a cosmopolitan doesn’t tell you whether you should favor “free trade” or “fair trade.” Those decisions involve an assessment of their likely consequences — but you’re not being very cosmopolitan if you’re indifferent to those consequences, including suffering at home. Globalization and labor mobility have been greatly beneficial to the United States and the world, but these forces produce winners and losers. Political leaders’ failure to direct some of the enormous winnings toward helping those who lost out wasn’t cosmopolitan; it was un-cosmopolitan.

When politicians invoke divides, they usually talk about bridging them. Yet Hawley’s call was to defeat the cosmopolitans, lest they keep ravaging the American middle — those “manning the fire department and coaching the Little League” — in the pursuit of riches, or possibly tenure. It was hard to forget that his critique came amid another acrid battle over who counts as a real American, extending to chants of “send them back.” This caste of ambiguous loyalties he was conjuring: Maybe they weren’t real Americans, either? His address brought moneybags, mavens and migrants together in a cabal of un-American activities, a classic populist fantasy. “It’s time we ended this cosmopolitan experiment,” he told the Ritz-Carlton crowd. Watching his closing invocation of “hearth and home,” I had another thought: Isn’t it time we began it? nyt mag

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