Kosmopolitis, Take Two
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Helen Rittelmeyer was disturbed by the hostility to urban life on display in St. Paul at the Republican convention:
I was among those who found it slightly chilling to see America’s Mayor get his William Wordsworth on, and only slightly less chilling when the sentiment was expressed by speakers whose cosmopolitan credentials were less obvious. Has the Republican party really drifted so far towards ruralism? Assuming that conservatives want to frame this election as a question of us versus them, does it have to be that us and them?
What I found more troubling is the ease with which these personifications of Eastern urban elites (e.g., Romney, Giuliani, Thompson–who is today as much of a small-town Tennessee boy as I am the President of Nicaragua) play to the crowd’s dislike of coastal and urban elites. As a political matter, this pandering is simple demographics: even in otherwise fairly conservative states, cities tend to be the stronghold of those with liberal, progressive and centralist politics, as they have been since Bolingbroke and Jefferson inveighed against the corrupting effects of cities on the political order. The GOP’s main target audience does not live in cities, but in rural areas, small towns, suburbs and exurbs. “Red” states are typically less urbanized than “blue” states, which helps to reinforce this pattern of support. One can lament what you could call the populist turn on the right, I suppose, and as the resident anti-democrat I am more sympathetic to this complaint than most, but if it is possible to have an urban conservatism, and I think it is, it is also possible to have an aristocratic populism that respects and takes seriously the interests of rural and small-town America. A mistake that we often make, myself included, is to imagine that all populists are hostile to all forms of elitism and that elitists must necessarily disdain anything that can be dubbed populist. This sort of opposition makes no allowance for Bolingbroke, Jefferson or Jeffersonians, and so does not hold up very well when put to the test. As we see in the case of the phony populists, their deployment of rhetorical anti-elitism is really just a mechanism of diverting attention and advancing the interests of other elites under the cover of defending the very Middle America they are exploiting.
Just as I don’t think anyone can actually be cosmopolitan according to its original meaning, I don’t think “cosmopolitan conservatism” is possible, either, so Ms. Rittelmeyer gets off to something of a bad start when she frames the dispute in terms of cosmopolitanism vs. ruralism. Properly speaking, the cosmopolitan–if such a person could exist for very long without going mad–has no loyalty to any particular polis, and this would include megalopoleis such as L.A., New York and Chicago, and if there are urbanites who have no loyalty to their own city they are simply bad citizens and not world-citizens. If the difference is between mentalities–the broad versus the narrow–it is not at all clear that most urbanites come out looking very good, since there is something quite narrow about disdain for rusticity that has defined urbanites throughout Western history, and it has made them fairly homogenous. Urban conservatism, on the other hand, does not strike me as impossible, but it is likely to be very different and possibly irreconcilable with the conservatism of the places where most self-styled conservatives live. This is a matter of conflicting interests and conflicting habits. The weird display in St. Paul is the result of a party that draws heavily on urbanites for its leadership, but which also still relies heavily on rural, small-town, suburban and exurban people to vote them into power.
The shamelessness of the utterly phony populism of Romney and Giuliani is what is most galling about Republican theatrics, since the same people who will pander to the small-town and suburban voter as the embodiment of American character are busily at work promoting the policies that seek to uproot people and transform their towns beyond all recognition. Phony populism of this sort is another form of condescension, the patronizing sort that treats Middle Americans as pets to be trained and conditioned to respond to the right signals, and what it will never do is allow anything remotely resembling a populist agenda (i.e., an agenda that actually serves the interests of the majority of the people) to gain purchase. What is so discouraging about the promotion of Sarah Palin is that it appears to be an effort to use a small-town American to blind a majority of Republicans to the policies promoted by the GOP that are antithetical to their own interests and it is working.
Filed under: politics
Daniel,
If you’ll forgive my school-girl-like gushing (and, clearly, I work under the assumption that you will), I should like to note that this is probably one of the best — or at least amongst my favorites — of any web-log post that I’ve read (or written) in quite some time. I respect Helen, and generally agree with much of what she says, but the piece to which you refer left me feeling quite uneasy, and your response encapsulates everything that I should have like to said in reply, but could not articulate.
Thank you.
Cheers,
NPO
Nathan, thanks very much for your kind words. I don’t think you’re engaged in gushing, and I am gratified that you found this post so enjoyable. Let me add that I think I understand what she is getting at, and I am sympathetic to a perspective that allows for conservatives who are, like me, pretty much lifelong urbanites, but I don’t want to go down the road that says that urban conservatives have to disrespect or ignore the strong country and Country roots of their own tradition.
A mistake that we often make, myself included, is to imagine that all populists are hostile to all forms of elitism and that elitists must necessarily disdain anything that can be dubbed populist.
Myself included, too. Good point.
Howard
“Properly speaking, the cosmopolitan–if such a person could exist for very long without going mad–has no loyalty to any particular polis, and this would include megalopoleis such as L.A., New York and Chicago, and if there are urbanites who have no loyalty to their own city they are simply bad citizens and not world-citizens.”
This is the sort of issue that attracts me to paleocon thinking. However, I think you are criticizing a narrowly exclusive form of cosmopolitanism, one which excludes lesser forms of “citizenship” than that of the very largest. The paleocon view would seem to me to be compatible with an inclusive cosmopolitanism which sees our citizenship as a kind of Russian egg, layered from our most intimate relations to our most “cosmic” relationships. The question then becomes one of emphasis. Does one emphasize the outermost layers, or the innermost layers? A Paleocon cosmopolitan would, it seems to me, emphasize the innermost layers of the egg, while not rejecting the outermost layers. He would reject the notion that we are first and forement “citizens of the cosmos”, while accepting that as a secondary matter we are indeed living in an interelated world. The emphasis is upon those relationships which directly impinge upon the individual’s life, which does not, for the most part, even include the national level.
Which is a good reason why the McCain message does not seem to me to be very true to conservatism. His “country first” theme reverses the true order of a conservative’s priorities. One’s country does not come first. Family comes first, and local relationships. Country is something we resort to only when it comes to macro issues of a larger, collective need and interest. Does any sane person actually put “country first”? Only in the most unusual of circumstances. A sane person puts his personal life and community first, and requires a profound rationale and exceptional circumstances to make the kinds of sacrifices that would put country first. I always thought that was one of the “good” things about conservatism, and McCain seems to be rejecting it in favor of a “religion of country” that hardly anyone actually practices or even believes in, except as a form of emotionalism. But that has always been the modus operandi of the scoundrel – making loud proclamations of patriotism while picking the pockets of those who aren’t looking closely enough.
Conradg:
Heh. You’re right – from a certain perspective, “Country First” sounds like a communist manifesto.
[...] Is not Thomas Jefferson supposedly the ideal conservative, the learned man of science and literature who was anti-big government and always looked out for the little guy in American society against the elites? Well, as Daniel Larison points out in today’s Eunomia there is plenty of room out there for an elite populism that reject cosmo snobbery along with phony appeals to the common man from elitists looking for votes. [...]
[...] *Larison’s “Kosmopolitis Take Two”, in response to Helen’s “Does Veneration Really Wither on the Pavements?”, and my thoughts on urban conservatism, aristocratic populism, and the like. [...]
Conradg,
The “Country First” mantra always did strike me as a friendly-faced “Amerika Uber Alles” wrapped up in the culturally familiar. A darkly comedic irony, the ostensible leader of the GOP, the party defined by its anti-collectivist coalition in the Cold War years, has a political persona that most closely resembles the “Socialist/Fascist Man” as envisioned by those ideologies, who lives for the nation, thinks of it as his rescuer and provider, and considers individualism insignificant to the “collective good”.
Who knows how deeply McCain feels this way, but he did display organic hostility to Romney (“I didn’t manage for profit, I led for patriotism.”) , and he constantly says that ultimate happiness is found when you live for “something greater than the self”. This may be true, but coming from a politician with nationalistic tendencies, it sounds like McCain might be tempted to use state power to “suggest” what that “greater thing” should be. Whatever spin you put on it, his political pitch goes beyond vociferous patriotism and into ominously recognizable territory. And “The Base†is eating it up.
I just find it highly disturbing that modern conservatives don’t find this highly disturbing. It lends confirmation to my belief that non-intellectual conservative opposition to foreign authoritarianism was always predicated more on perceiving it as a threat to their cultural identity and less in a principled rejection of collectivism.
Sinclair Lewis was right on the money.
JB,
I’m not sure how much the GOP, even the populist GOP small town sympathizers, actually believe in this “country first” dogma. It seems more to be an emotional appeal used to bash liberals, not something they actually want to put into practice. In other words, “country first” simply means “what’s good for me is good for the country, therefore, let’s do more of the same corrupt, self-serving crap, and say we’re putting country first”. The general hope is that no one will notice what’s that they’re playing three card monte, and there’s no chance of winning. Create a distraction, shuffle out the real queen, and take the money from the rubes. This is a con game, plain and simple, but it works over and over again. The funny thing is, the whole GOP seems to be in on the con, and that’s what holds them together – the smug satisfaction that they can keep playing this game forever, and even when people call them on it they just keep shuffling the cards and creating distractions and patting one another on the back for putting on such a good show.
Now, you’re right that McCain is not much interested in democracy or free enterprise, and holds any occupation other than military conquest to be dishonorable. That’s one point of view, but I can’t understand how conservatives can sign onto it. I thought conservatives considered the profit motive to be a force for good, not evil. I thought they considered the desire for personal autonomy and satisfaction to be the driving force for human transformation. Since when did an endless life of personal sacrifice for the sake of an abstraction called “country” become the goal of human life? Especially when the sacrifices called for is one of interminable war? As you say, this is what fascism and communism are all about, and conservatism is supposed to be utterly opposed to that program. Where is all the conservative outrage at this perversion of the conservative message? Where are the Goldbergian warnings against the rise of fascism? Well, I suppose all these people know it’s actually just a facade, a stage play that no one actually believes in, put on merely to gain some kind of phony PR advantage that will be swept aside once the election is over. Except, perhaps McCain himself really does believe it, and thinks that if elected, he has a mandate to lead us into grand sacrifices on an unprecedented scale? Won’t that be uplifting?