Cosmopolitans are the *real* bigots

Borgo Cassati, portrait of Captain Sir Richard Burton in his disguise as "Mirza Abdullah of Bushire, a vendor of fine linen, calicoes and muslins", which enabled him to enter the no-go zone of Mecca in 1851-53. Image via somebody's abandoned Pinterest.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, offers his own take ("The Myth of Cosmopolitanism") on the Great Realignment theme introduced this week by James Traub and David Brooks:

NOW that populist rebellions are taking Britain out of the European Union and the Republican Party out of contention for the presidency, perhaps we should speak no more of left and right, liberals and conservatives. From now on the great political battles will be fought between nationalists and internationalists, nativists and globalists. From now on the loyalties that matter will be narrowly tribal — Make America Great Again, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England — or multicultural and cosmopolitan.

If you think there's something going on there where Shakespeare's John of Gaunt (Richard II, act 2 scene 1) is getting presented as Trump with a classy English accent, you're right.

Douthat on what bigots can teach us

Mayor Sadiq Khan of London (newly elected in the "biggest individual mandate in British history") poses for a selfie in a lovely, typical London crowd. Photo by Daily Mail. 

In what seems to be a kind of collateral damage from the Trump campaign, Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, has really gone full troll; there was that crazed column a few weeks ago where he urged us to pay more attention to neo-reactionaries, monarchists, Falangists, and advocates of Empire (cafeteria-style, just picking up on the good ideas and leaving the anti-Semitism in the steam table), and today he's giving us the generalized version, "When the Wrong are Right".

It's all about those Trump voters, of course; the undereducated, underemployed white working class. Douthat accepts the conventional wisdom that those are the people putting Trump ahead in the Republican primary contest, and accepts the premise that they are a bunch of racial bigots, and then asks:

What happens if the bigoted sometimes get things right?

I'd guess for those questions on which bigots are generally right, non-bigots tend to be right too, so that the bigoted view isn't that important. It doesn't make much sense to imagine questions where you'd only be able to get a correct answer from a bigot in the dictionary sense, that is from a

person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially :  one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance

since he or she, being unreasonably prejudiced by definition, is clearly less likely to be right on any particular point where others are wrong than a non-bigot, whose mind is subject to change in the face of evidence. How do you like that Jesuitical logic, Ross?

A question that needs to be re-addressed here is whether the Trump voters really are more or less equivalent to the undereducated, underemployed white working class at all, which a lot of us including me seem to have tacitly accepted without wondering if there's any evidence for it; because Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has done some modeling from exit poll data that calls it into question: