The rise of cosmopolitanism and the crisis of liberalism. By Matthew Yglesias

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The rise of cosmopolitanism and the crisis of liberalism

Matthew Yglesias

16 - 20 minutes

Suppose someone proposed the following policy idea: an immediate 35 percent cut in Social Security benefits that would eliminate more than 100 percent of the program’s existing funding gap, with the extra money saved dedicated to highly effective public health programs in poor countries. The programs recommended by GiveWell (where we send 10 percent of your subscription fee — thank you for your support!) save lives for a few thousand bucks a pop and provide some ancillary health benefits. These are very beneficial, cost effective programs, and more funding would save a lot of lives.

This idea would, obviously, be politically catastrophic.

You can’t just cut Social Security benefits and give the money to poor people in Africa. It’s a total nonstarter! And because it’s a nonstarter, the proposal doesn’t really hinge on whether you allocate all of the money cut from Social Security to promoting global public health or split it between reducing the deficit and promoting global public health. Social Security is an incredibly popular program, and taking money away from a popular and highly effective domestic program to give it to foreigners is a wildly politically unsound idea.

On the merits, of course, I don’t think you could deny that the money would do more good if spent on effective programs in poor countries.

There are lots of detailed judgment calls that GiveWell makes that reasonable people could criticize. But it’s hard to dispute that charitable dollars go further in poor countries where the needs are greater and the cost basis of operations is lower. Redistributing economic resources from middle- and working-class Americans to the global poor would improve aggregate average utility. It’s a perfectly defensible idea.

But the fact that it’s defensible on the merits doesn’t mean you could persuade a majority of Americans to do it. And I would worry about even trying, not just because of the impact on electoral politics, but because of the impact on the discourse.

Right now, if I say “giving money to promote rigorously evaluated public health programs in poor countries is an admirable thing to do,” I think most people would be inclined to agree. But if we had a hot button political conversation about cutting Social Security to support Vitamin A supplementation, opponents wouldn’t want to just say “well, I’m selfish so I don’t want to do it.” The backlash would involve people making the claim that Vitamin A supplementation is actually bad. We’ve already seen Marc Andreesen, because he disagrees with some prominent effective altruists about AI safety, promoting absurd theories that helping poor kids avoid malaria is bad.

So what’s the point of this thought experiment?

Well, one point is that while we sometimes have debates about embracing political pragmatism versus taking a principled stand, I find it reassuring to remember that, on some level, almost everyone is pretty pragmatic. I don’t know anyone who thinks politicians should take politically suicidal stances like the one we floated here.

But the other point is that while this is a deliberately extreme and fanciful case, I do think it’s an example of a real phenomenon. Educated people committed to liberal values and pluralism who increasingly dominate left-of-center politics in western countries are also committed to cosmopolitan values. And these values are in tension both with traditional left-of-center class politics and also with the basic strictures of democratic politics.

The current debate around asylum is a case in point. After some first 100 days missteps by Biden, this quickly became one of Republicans’ best issues.

Donald Trump scuttling a perfectly sound immigration compromise in an unusually clumsy manner has gifted Democrats an opportunity to defuse the GOP advantage somewhat. I still wouldn’t advise Democrats to proactively bring this up (it’s an inherently GOP coded issue), but they now have a great answer to questions from the media and the public: “I support the bipartisan border security bill that House Republicans killed on orders from Donald Trump, who wants to create and exploit chaos so he can win and implement the full MAGA agenda of abortion bans, corruption, and raising prescription drug prices.” The border security bill polls very well, and bipartisanship always sounds good. Democrats basically have an immigration escape hatch.

That’s great, but I think a lot of the takes out there about how Democrats can capitalize on this opportunity underrate exactly how right-wing public opinion is on the subject of illegal immigration.

There’s a good Blueprint 2024 memo on the popularity of the border security package and how different individual messages poll. But I think the most important point, the thing everyone thinking about politics needs to assimilate, is from this background question about values:

    By a 59% to 41% margin, voters said border security was more important than “the humane treatment of immigration.” 

That’s a classic wedge issue for Democrats. The vast majority of Joe Biden’s voters care about border security, but they temper that concern with compassion for poor people fleeing dire circumstances. But most Americans reject those values. Fully 43 percent of the electorate says Biden is “far more liberal” than they are on the border (13 percent say he’s somewhat more liberal), while only 35 percent say that Trump is far more conservative than they are.

The notion that Trump, if he took office, would be willing and perhaps even eager to do something horrifying in the name of border security is part of his electoral appeal.

The idea of a more judicious, balanced approach appeals to me. But this is not what most Americans want, because they place essentially no value on the interests of foreigners. I think this also helps explain the popularity of conspiracy theories related to border security. Most Americans are clannish and nationalistic and don’t care about the humane treatment of people from elsewhere. But they also are aware, rationally, that these are our fellow human beings and publicly stating that you’re totally indifferent to their welfare is a low-status thing to say. So if you can instead accuse people with more cosmopolitan values of perpetrating a scheme to import voters or carry out a “great replacement,” you can make your own views seem more defensible. It’s a telling sign of a guilty conscience.

But it doesn’t change the fact that, at the end of the day, when forced to choose between a candidate they suspect will be cruel to asylum-seekers and one who’ll try to balance order with humanity, a majority of the public prefers cruelty.

I opened with the Social Security point, because on the topic of the domestic welfare state versus foreign aid, basically everyone has acclimated themselves to an “America First” approach. When people talk about aid to Ukraine, they do, of course, talk about the plight of Ukrainians, but they are aware that asking Americans to spend money to help Ukrainians is a tough sell — so they make the case that Ukrainian personnel plus American weapons versus Russian personnel plus Russian weapons is a good deal for the United States. But also they’re also not proposing sacrificing any existing domestic programs for the sake of aiding Ukraine.

That wouldn’t fly, just as our efforts to sanction Russia have been deliberately designed to avoid spiking global oil prices.

With immigration, though, it’s different. In both the United States and many other countries, a large and politically influential minority of the country has tried to take a stand on behalf of humane treatment of foreigners seeking asylum. Historically, that kind of cosmopolitanism was not closely correlated with other political opinions. Ronald Reagan was to Donald Trump’s right on a large number of policy issues, but he not only did a major amnesty bill for undocumented immigrants, he was relatively welcoming of refugees.

George W. Bush took up the cause of HIV/AIDS in Africa and created the PEPFAR program with the backing of a bipartisan majority in congress.

PEPFAR is quintessential elite-driven, inside-game policymaking. You could never win a high-profile public argument about how we should help poor people in Africa. That’s why now that Bush is off the scene and it’s no longer a personal priority of anyone important in Republican Party politics, the program is mired in the larger abortion discourse dynamics.

But membership in the cosmopolitan minority is increasingly correlated with other issue positions. The kind of Bush-style politics where Christian commitments drive traditionalist notions of sex and gender, but also universalist beliefs about human value is going out of style. Increasingly, the cosmopolitan-minded people are just the secular people who are also on the left on other issues. This is all part of the larger process of education polarization — politics in western countries increasingly pits the business class not against a labor union left, but against what Thomas Piketty calls the “Brahmin left” of educated professionals and social service providers. Those are the people who are mostly likely to be cosmopolitan, and that’s created a mutually reenforcing cycle in which politics increasingly aligns around views of immigration rather than views of Medicare.

And to an extent, that’s fine. Politics has to be about something, so why shouldn’t it be about immigration? But one problem, as the Voter Study Group shows, is that educational attainment is pretty strongly correlated with ideas about democracy.

Educated liberals generally like Joe Biden and are naturally tempted to judge procedural issues in his favor. But we also, I think, sincerely believe it would be bad to have an unconstrained dictator-like figure. And not purely because we are high-minded people! My view of human history is that the dictator version of Biden would end up delivering bad stuff and that liberal democracy is a genuinely good system. But lots of Trump voters sincerely don’t see it that way. They believe a hyper-empowered champion of their values would slay their enemies and either don’t see or don’t care that, in practice, authoritarianism means looting and corruption.

David Frum wrote a piece in 2019 that really bugged me, titled “If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.”

His point was that if you decide it’s constitutive of liberalism to espouse humanitarian values toward foreigners seeking refuge, then ultimately, the mass public will decide that means they need to reject liberalism. So if you want to save liberalism, you’d better come up with some other theory.

I did not like this idea. I found it to be a bitter pill to swallow, in part because I find the right-wing attitude toward this question of border security to be really irrational and weird.

Over the long weekend, we went to visit Kate’s family in Kerr County, Texas. That’s a very conservative place where everyone is very tough on crime. And I sincerely don’t have a problem with that; I’m a relatively law-and-order person. At the same time, it’s not like there is zero crime in Kerr County. Nor is it the case that 100 percent of the people committing crimes there are arrested.

The fact that a non-zero quantity of cocaine is bought and sold every day in Texas doesn’t mean that Texas has legalized cocaine or that Gregg Abbott “refuses to enforce the cocaine laws” or anything remotely resembling that.

But selling cocaine is lucrative, and it is genuinely challenging as a matter of logistics to prevent people from doing things that make them money. That’s especially true because Texas, like any other jurisdiction, has limited resources available for enforcing the laws against selling cocaine and various other competing demands on those resources. Texas also has some considerations for the privacy interests and procedural rights of its residents that have to be weighed against the efficacy of cocaine enforcement.

When it comes to immigration, though, conservatives tend to act as if any shortfall from 100 percent compliance with the rules equals “open borders,” and that the only possible reason one could have for a non-fanatical attitude about this is a secret desire to “replace” the American people.

To me, it’s a bit nutty.

But this is where the Social Security thought experiment helped me see what Frum was saying — that idea is so obviously a non-starter that nobody pushes for it, and if they did, it would be a kind of right-wing provocation to own the libs. I could imagine Tyler Cowen or some other smart libertarian writing about this as a way to criticize the idea of the welfare state. And conversely, I could even tell you from college political philosophy classes where to go to get an official defense of the proposition that it’s okay to prioritize domestic over global redistribution, even though the global poor are poorer. That’s John Rawls’ view as outlined in “The Law of Peoples,” and he further argues in “Political Liberalism” that this should hold true as your political philosophy, even if in your personal worldview you are a cosmopolitan consequentialist. Just as we ask a Muslim or a Mormon to set aside their religious convictions about alcohol and try to formulate policy ideas about booze grounded in secular public reason, we should ask cosmopolitans to come to the table with arguments grounded in the public reason of national interest.

One thing I’ve changed my mind on over the years is I used to be the kind of person who looked askance at “billionaire philanthropy” as a kind of poor alternative to democratic politics. But I now think there are lots of things — like helping the neediest people in the world — that you can’t reasonably expect democratic politics to accomplish, and it’s appropriate to count on private charitable undertakings to fulfill some of those values.

None of this means that cruelty to immigrants is actually a good or defensible idea!

Even in retrospect, I’m not sure whether this was a good choice, but in “One Billion Americans,” I tried to play it straight and make a national interest case for more openness to immigration and outline the parameters of the specific kinds of openness I thought might fulfill that. I didn’t do a lot of meta-commentary about the nature of immigration politics or cosmopolitan versus particularist moral visions. I thought that rather than talking about how it would be desirable to do the thing, I should just do the thing.

But I did not achieve my dream of writing a best-seller or fundamentally altering the trajectory of American immigration politics, so now I’ll go meta.

With the exception of a relatively brief span between 1924 and 1964, the United States has historically had high levels of immigration. This has benefitted the people who had the opportunity to immigrate. But it has also been extremely beneficial to the United States of America. It is not a coincidence that we have 10 times the population of Canada — that’s a downstream consequence of migration policy decisions. We have a smaller landmass than Canada and could, theoretically, have a smaller population. That version of America would be poorer, militarily weaker, and not nearly such a dominant player in global culture. That country would not have been able to intervene decisively in the Second World War, it would not have been able to anchor the “free world” in the Cold War, and it would not be the lynchpin of contemporary efforts to contain Russia and China.

The fact that large numbers of people continue to want to move to the United States is a major advantage for this country and a huge opportunity for its native-born citizens.

What’s true (and here’s the pill for the left to swallow) is that to maximize that opportunity, you do need to exert a high degree of formal control over who comes here. But what’s also true (and here’s the pill for the right) is that a strong aesthetic preference for stasis and ethnic homogeneity is economically and geopolitically costly and will make the country weaker and poorer. When you have people saying things like “give me back the demographics of 1985 and keep them that way, I’ll give you 50% of my net worth” they are indulging in the sadly not-new tradition of letting racism blind them to opportunity. The outcomes of a patriotic, interest-based case for immigration are going to be much better for both the United States and for the global poor than the outcomes of prioritizing humanitarian considerations and losing to insular nationalists. But liberals are operating from a credibility hole here, in the face of a mass public that is genuinely very unsympathetic to humanitarianism qua humanitarianism.

We need to take seriously the idea that the fight for democracy entails some deference to majoritarian values, and that fully equating liberalism and cosmopolitanism will spell the end of liberalism.