Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York, spoke negatively of urban sophistication at the Republican convention.

Intelligence/ROGER COHEN

NEW YORK
Cosmopolitan is a loaded word with a heavy history and never more so, it seems, than when it falls from the lips of Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York.
“I’m sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn’t cosmopolitan enough,” he declared the other day with sneering relish, in an attempt to contrast the worldliness of the Democratic candidate, who has taken his campaign to far-flung Berlin, with the apple-pie virtues of Sarah Palin’s Alaskan refuge of Wasilla (population 9,780).
In his zeal for Palinism, Giuliani’s apparently forgotten the cosmopolitanism of the great city he ran for eight years. To the Big Apple’s international sophistication he now prefers the Republican vice-presidential candidate’s parochialism. She even had to get herself a passport last year for a rare overseas trip!
Sure, politics is about winning. After eight years of the Bush administration, the economy is down, inequality is growing and many people feel poorer. So what’s left to Republicans but to portray Democrats as arty, snobby, fancy, brie-loving types who are proto-Europeans?
Still, I balk at Giuliani’s cosmopolitan jibe. He’s a free-world cheerleader, and New Yorker, so he should be careful about adopting the lexicon of the Soviets, who used “cosmopolitans” (kosmopolity) as a code word in anti-Semitic campaigns. Enemies of Stalin were labeled “rootless cosmopolitans”: everyone knew what that meant and the hideous fate it portended.
No such fate awaits modern-day “cosmopolitans” in the United States, but the connotation of un-American and untrustworthy is there, at least in Republican parlance. The word’s political revival reflects painful economic realities that have made a new American nationalism the refuge of globalization’s many losers.
The central post-cold-war transformation has been the shift from a national to a global division of labor. Because capital can go anywhere to recruit cheap workers, the rich have thrived. Unskilled Americans have not because hundreds of millions of workers in places like Vietnam now compete for their jobs.
These trends do not a happy country make. The divide between the collegeeducated, digitally literate able to exploit the possibilities of globalization and those unversed in Internet culture is stark. Resentment grows; “cosmopolitan” becomes an easy slur to slap on the highly qualified. Today, all but one of America’s 10 least-educated states is solidly Republican.
And who better to attack as cosmopolitan than Obama, the first black nominee, a man with some education in a Muslim country and the nerve to declare, in Berlin, that he’s a “citizen of the world”- As George Will, a conservative columnist wrote, “Obama wanted Berliners to know that he is proudly cosmopolitan.”
Talk of global citizenship has attracted the youth of America to Obama. It’s drawn many others convinced of the world’s interconnectedness. But the backlash is now evident in a tight, Palinized race.
The clash of cosmopolitan and national is not confined to the United States. Jihadism is one reaction to border-hopping cosmopolitanism. Before his next jingoistic pitch, Giuliani should recall that the 9/11 attack was directed at towering symbols of the cosmopolitan. The dust and debris in which he stood contained the vestiges of New York’s many-faceted humanity.