Larry Summers’ “How to embrace nationalism responsibly” op-ed, cited in my previous post, contains the following elemental axiom:
A new approach has to begin from the idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximize the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good.
That such a basic idea (i.e., the primary role of government is to protect the interests of its citizenry, not the interests of non-citizens) is deemed ‘new’ by the elite demonstrates just how pervasive the ethos of cosmopolitanism has strangled debate.
