Cosmopolitanism

In response to my assertion that “The United States was founded fairly explicitly on a set of liberal ideals—pragmatic egalitarian cosmopolitan individualism is the American creed and the progressive movement is largely about trying to make those ideals a reality,” commenter Brahma wrote: “This sounds like something that a libertarian snarler like Matt Welch or perhaps Will Wilkonson could have written it. Do progressives have to be ‘cosmopolitan?’”

Two levels of response. One is that while Will Wilkinson and I have very different judgments about important matters of public policy, in terms of very abstract ideas about values we do in fact have similar views. Second, of course I can’t force progressives to be cosmopolitan but I think cosmopolitanism is integral to the liberal worldview and that the best strands of thinking in the progressive coalition in contemporary America reflect that cosmopolitanism. But I should clarify that by “cosmopolitan” I mean on the level of values not on the level of lifestyles. A cosmopolitan politics is about taking seriously the idea that the welfare of Chinese people is as objectively important as the welfare of Americans. Cosmopolitan lifestyle is more about knowing where to find authentic Sichuan-style cooking. There’s a contingent empirical relationship between the two in that people with cosmopolitan lifestyles are personally comfortable with the “different” and thus perhaps more likely to understand the moral issues correctly, but it’s perfectly possible to enjoy travel and also be a nationalist troglodyte in your political views or to be a fairly parochial American who also (perhaps inspired by the strong cosmopolitan strand in Christianity) donates to international charities.

The American political tradition is, I think, a cosmopolitan one in a way you can see clearly expressed in our founding documents. We start by positing a set of universalistic principles and assert that the purpose of founding our state is to instantiate those principles in practice. Thus whatever nationalistic claims we make are supposed to follow from our success at implementing a cosmopolitan value system. In practice, of course, this often isn’t how it works at all—we have plenty of ugly nationalism in our history and more than our fair share of racism—but that is the formal structure of our basic rhetoric about ourselves.