When former Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani indicted the Democratic party for being too “cosmopolitan” at the Republican National Convention, I lost feeling in the left half of my body, then collapsed on the floor.  After regaining consciousness and mobility, I did a few dictionary searches for the word cosmopolitan.  I was quite sure that I had missed an important definition change, because Giuliani used the word so pejoratively:

“I’m sorry that Wasilla, Alaska isn’t ‘cosmopolitan’ enough for Barack Obama…(moderate to heavy cackling like a vampire).”

Wikipedia, my non-biblical source of transhistorical Truth, confirmed that I did not take a Rip Van Winkle-like nap and that the word still implies the belief in a “single moral human community”.  The original Greek etymology of the word, taken directly, describes a person who believes they are a “citizen of the universe”.  Diogenes (G.O.P. Translation: Sinner) first invoked the idea of cosmopolitanism when he argued against a nationalist conception of the self.  He contended that identity politics, the foundation of nationalism, unnecessarily divided people and overtly denied the simple equality of all human beings.  Immanuel Kant (G.O.P. Translation: Nazi) later used the idea when he attemped to describe what a “perpetual peace” would look like on the international scale.  For Kant, cosmopolitanism expressed the idea of a mental space where people could co-exist without killing each other for shiny rocks and the right to say, “Fuck me?! Fuck you!”  He imagined a federation of republics, not democracies, for fear of stupid people taking over and ruining all of the hard work of the intelligensia (see page 487 of the Oxford English Dictionary for the definition of the word ‘foresight’).  Even though their territories and citizens were divided by name, Kant believed that universal disarmament and diplomacy under the guise of cosmpolitian thought could put an end to violent international conflict.  Martha Nussbaum, professor at the University of Chicago, home of the Fightin’ C++ Programmers, is the most prolific contemporary advocate of cosmopolitanism in her studies of international relations.  She sees an important place for the belief in a singular morality amidst the sectarian violence of the post-modern world.

So, what am I talking about and why is it relevant to the 2008 presidential election?  In this second installment of “The Issues at Hand”, I demonstrate the fortitude to follow through on my promise to address each important issue of the campaign. This, of course, stands in contrast to that piece of shit Sufjan Stevens, who, despite whatever claims he makes, clearly isn’t going to write a folk album for all fifty states.  [This entirely separate topic brings up a lot of questions like, what the fuck would be on the “Idaho” album? How many songs about potatos is too many? Could he write a song for Sarah Palin’s minor in political science at that state’s flagship “”””university””””? How many quotation marks does it take to get a point across?]  The issue that I’ve decided to take on revolves around the question of American hegemony – to what extent should the United States continue to forcibly assert its military and cultural dominance on the international community/shitstorm?  The above comment by Giuliani highlights the anti-cosmopolitanism that defined the Republican National Convention and enumerates the conservative commitment to coercively projecting American power abroad.  This is unacceptable.

The rhetoric of the RNC on the issue of a guiding framework for foreign policy, most notably the chants of “USA! USA! USA!”, securely places them in the camp of malignant nationalism.  What is most important to them is that the citizens that reside within the historically arbitrary borders that define the United States have it better than anyone else.  The constituency of the Republican Party, or, more accurately, its “con-stitch-ency”, believes that America must possess the best of everything at the expense of others.  Historically, this makes sense – after World War II, the US was handed a massively powerful place on the international stage that allowed it to define the norms and institutions that govern global politics and economics.  This was very helpful for the American standard of living and now we have it better than just about anyone.  The downside is that when you play the game of relative power, it is zero-sum and someone else must lose.  Enough people have lost enough in the world that now people are rising up against us (see wonderfully stupid post-9/11 books like “Why They Hate Us”).  Dividing up the world into “us” and “them”, as the object of Walther’s man-crush, Pink Floyd, sang, is the fundamental anti-cosmopolitian project.  Unfortunately, Karl Rove a.k.a “The Architect” a.k.a. “Angry Because He Was A Fat Fuck That Girls Wouldn’t Give A Reach-Around To” knows that nationalism is the best way to win an election and has once again engineered a campaign to make the vote about “patriotism” and “military service”.  I’m starting to realize that without wars, there wouldn’t be any military service for Republican candidates to use as an excuse for a patriotic qualification.  Oscar Wilde said, “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious,” (and my mother said “The Rock” wasn’t educational) and that is precisely what flag-waving nationalist conservatives are – vicious.  They don’t want innovation in energy policy, because that would engage us in a non-zero-sum game. If you can keep getting more of something with renewable energy, that means you can’t take something from someone else.  You can’t own the wind or the Sun and that fucks the Republican understanding of private property without proper lubrication.

If the Republicans want to deny the equality of all human beings and their belonging to a single moral community, then they will continue to construct self-fulfilling prophecies of violent conflict throughout the world.  If politics is phrased as a conflict between “us” and “them”, then the anti-cosmopolitans will get their wars.  American hegemony is not what the world needs more of – what our foreign policy needs is to put an end to games of relative power that deny other people critical resources for survival and basic prosperity.  Agricultural subsidies, unfair trade agreements, and attempts to stifle growth in countries like China and India will only be met with more resentment and the perception of “enemy”.  Conservatives get so angry at their “enemies” without realizing that we are the ones who are making that declaration first.  They are our enemies because everything we do on the international stage, save a few token gestures and sincere philanthropy, tells them that the American Dream comes at the expense of the Human Dream.  Cosmopolitianism, Rudy, is everything that people should believe in, particularly in these increasingly anxious times.  But, then again, you should know that.  You lived with two gay guys and their pet Shih-Tzu, dressed in drag, and marched in gay pride parades down the streets of that quaint old town, New York City. I hope you choke on a pretzel. (Just kidding Carnivore, don’t invoke a rendition protocol and send Treadstone after me.)