Over at The New York Times, Ross Douthat has a fairly damning piece on so-called cosmopolitans:
Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires real comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. It takes it cue from a Roman playwright’s line that “nothing human is alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds.
The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.”
This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and at as members of a tribe.
They have their own distinctive worldview (basically liberal Christianity without Christ), their own common educational experience, their own shared values and assumptions (social psychologists call these WEIRD — for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), and of course their own outgroups (evangelicals, Little Englanders) to fear, pity and despise.
But the sledgehammer comes toward the end:
They can’t see that the paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools.
The whole thing is worth reading and reflecting on (especially given my own snobbishness).[ref]To be clear, this isn’t a condemnation of actual cosmopolitanism. It is a condemnation of a tribe of elites who have attempted to hijack the word to help boost their own sense of moral superiority.[/ref]