The rise of cosmopolitanism and the crisis of liberalism

How much can a democracy ask voters to care about non-citizens?

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.

You can’t just cut Social Security benefits and give the money to poor people in Africa. It’s a total nonstarter! And because it’s a nonstarter, the proposal doesn’t really hinge on whether you allocate all of the money cut from Social Security to promoting global public health or split it between reducing the deficit and promoting global public health. Social Security is an incredibly popular program, and taking money away from a popular and highly effective domestic program to give it to foreigners is a wildly politically unsound idea.

On the merits, of course, I don’t think you could deny that the money would do more good if spent on effective programs in poor countries.

There are lots of detailed judgment calls that GiveWell makes that reasonable people could criticize. But it’s hard to dispute that charitable dollars go further in poor countries where the needs are greater and the cost basis of operations is lower. Redistributing economic resources from middle- and working-class Americans to the global poor would improve aggregate average utility. It’s a perfectly defensible idea.

But the fact that it’s defensible on the merits doesn’t mean you could persuade a majority of Americans to do it. And I would worry about even trying, not just because of the impact on electoral politics, but because of the impact on the discourse.

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.

So what’s the point of this thought experiment?

Well, one point is that while we sometimes have debates about embracing political pragmatism versus taking a principled stand, I find it reassuring to remember that, on some level, almost everyone is pretty pragmatic. I don’t know anyone who thinks politicians should take politically suicidal stances like the one we floated here.

But the other point is that while this is a deliberately extreme and fanciful case, I do think it’s an example of a real phenomenon. Educated people committed to liberal values and pluralism who increasingly dominate left-of-center politics in western countries are also committed to cosmopolitan values. And these values are in tension both with traditional left-of-center class politics and also with the basic strictures of democratic politics.