Trump’s invasion of LA—which will no doubt be replicated in other cities—is part of a bigger war he has been waging for a long time: a war against cosmopolitanism.
A cosmopolitan is a citizen of the world. “Cosmopolitans share the conviction that everybody matters, which entails moral obligations to everybody,” said Kwame Anthony Appiah, the eminent philosopher and author of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. The book, published in 2008, is ever more relevant, with over 120 million people forced from home somewhere in the world and needing refuge somewhere else.
[Cosmopolitans] also stress recognizing that this belief doesn’t mean that everybody has to live the same kind of life . . . Having a sense of universal respect doesn’t mean wanting all people to be the same. . . . The cosmopolitans among us are glad that the other people are doing their own thing. We don’t want them to be forced to do our own thing.
Stalin used the term “rootless cosmopolitanism” as an antisemitic slur, implying that Jews are disloyal to the nation because their real loyalty is to their own “race.” In the US during World War II Japanese Americans were accused of “dual loyalty”—and detained as enemy aliens; during McCarthyism the same charge was brought against Jews, who were allegedly bound to Israel. (Jews must now prove their allegiance to the Netanyahu government in order to be considered patriotic Americans.)
Appiah, the son of a Black Ghanaian father and a white British mother, was educated in Africa, Britain, and Europe, and now lives in the U.S. with his husband. He is a born cosmopolitan, but he is not rootless. Instead, he advocates “rooted cosmopolitanism.”
Some cosmopolitans, especially historically, have opposed the local. They rejected all local loyalties for loyalty to the cosmos, to humanity. This stance ignores a very important ethical truth: a decent human life must embrace certain forms of partiality.
Appiah gives the example of parents and children. Parents should not hurt other people’s children or ignore them if they’re in need, of course. But it’s good and right to feel special love and responsibility to one’s own children. Rooted cosmopolitans are attached to a community—political, religious, artistic, geographic— and care for it, both in feeling and in deed. At the same time they are part of and responsible to the universal human community.
Pretty much everyone feels attached to some community. It’s common to brag about your town coming together during a flood or a fire; the residents of the recently inundated Kerr County, Texas, keep telling the press they’re believers in God, as if that made them especially responsive to the tragedies and needs of their neighbors. But, Appiah suggests, helping your neighbors is natural; it’s like loving your children. Rebecca Solnit also wrote about this phenomenon, “disaster communities,” which never fail to materialize. The test comes when the emergency is over. When does the feeling of Us revert to, even require, the exclusion of Them?
Trump hates cities because city people are cosmopolitan by circumstance and preference. In the city, you live every day with people who speak different languages, like different foods, or raise their kids differently from you. City life requires tolerance of difference. Spend ten minutes in the New York subway and you’ll know what I mean.
In a recent PBS/Marist poll on attitudes toward immigration and mass deportation, almost two-thirds of respondents believed “openness” to people from all over the world is essential to the nation’s identity (up from 57% in October). But urbanites were more likely to value openness than rural people. The pollster pointed out, rather obviously, that people who live with immigrants are more sympathetic to immigrants than those who don’t.
As the ICE raids have escalated, rooted cosmopolitanism has been movingly on display in immigrant-rich cities like Los Angeles and at immigration courts around the country, where people not in danger of deportation are risking their bodies and freedom in defense of people who are. They are defending the family on the third floor of their building, the guy with the food truck, the moms and dads of their children’s classmates. There is no need to pretend their neighbors are the same as they are in order to consider them part of the same community. A cosmopolitan cares about immigrants in both ways—as the same and as different. Another word for this is solidarity.
Solidarity enrages the ICE agents, which is why they are brutalizing anyone who protests the raids or simply asks them why they are throwing a person to the ground and beating him when he is not resisting arrest. The Intercept yesterday ran an important piece documenting this pattern of extreme brutality, with numerous videos.
Trump is not so much intolerant of difference as unable to believe that anyone unlike him is real. His incuriosity is total. He eats only hamburgers, drinks only Coke. He likes his wives “exotic,” but European and white. He imagines himself a great diplomat—he looked into Putin’s eyes and understood him instantly—but has no next move when push does not work in response to shove.
Born in the unchic outer borough of Queens, Trump was unable to crack even the most narcissistic of “communities,” Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Lacking all social graces, even the masquerade of companionship, he was dismissed as a buffoon and rejected as an arriviste. And while he wanted to be part of New York society, he never wanted to be part of New York. From discriminating against tenants of color in his father’s buildings to taking out a full-page ad calling for the execution of the already-exonerated Central Park Five, Trump is the anti-New Yorker.
And if the young socialist Ugandan-Indian mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani encapsulates everything great about New York, Trump’s pledge to denaturalize and deport him says everything about Trump’s attitude toward New York, and all cities, and to all they stand for.
A rooted cosmopolitan is a member of a community and a citizen of the world. Trump will never be either.
Really meaningful article today. So well said, thank you!