Two Tribes?

It’s becoming a cliché that the emerging debate in politics both over here and in Europe is between those who look to the past and their ‘tribe’, and those who look outwards, the globalists, splendid sorts, building the radiant, multicultural future.

And it’s a cliché that Ross Douthat takes apart in this piece for the New York Times:

Describing the division this way has one great flaw. It gives the elite side of the debate (the side that does most of the describing) too much credit for being truly cosmopolitan. Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own…

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 act 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… and of course their own outgroups (evangelicals, Little Englanders) to fear, pity and despise. And like any tribal cohort they seek comfort and familiarity: From London to Paris to New York, each Western “global city” (like each “global university”) is increasingly interchangeable, so that wherever the citizen of the world travels he already feels at home.

As Douthat concedes, there’s nothing particularly wrong with that. We’re a tribal species, but..

…[it’s] a problem that our tribe of self-styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly as a tribe: because that means our leaders can’t see themselves the way the Brexiteers and Trumpistas and Marine Le Pen voters see them.

And not only people like them. Scroll back to 1965 and we see none other than General de Gaulle describing the European Commission as “an aréopage technocratique, apatride et irresponsible,” a technocratic, stateless, and irresponsible Areopagus (a reference to the governing council of ancient Athens). The current mess has been a long time in the making, its outline visible to anyone willing to face it.

Back to Douthat:

[This tribe] can’t see that what feels diverse on the inside can still seem like an aristocracy to the excluded, who look at cities like London and see, as Peter Mandler wrote for Dissent after the Brexit vote, “a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations

Indeed elite tribalism is actively encouraged by the technologies of globalization, the ease of travel and communication. Distance and separation force encounter and immersion, which is why the age of empire made cosmopolitans as well as chauvinists — sometimes out of the same people. (There is more genuine cosmopolitanism in Rudyard Kipling and T. E. Lawrence and Richard Francis Burton than in a hundred Davos sessions.)

…They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world.

And when that caste seems either malign or incompetent (let’s talk about the euro…), it can find itself in a very vulnerable position indeed, a vulnerability made all the more acute by its inability either to understand itself or those pushing back against it.