(Please also see and share: Debbie Downer progressives aren't helping)
The rise of cosmopolitanism and the crisis of liberalism
How much can a democracy ask voters to care about non-citizens?
excerpts:
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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.
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