So I’ve written for another channel my advice for how Republicans in the Senate should scrupulously adhere to constitutional forms and Scalia’s constitutionalism in entering into the battle to replace the irreplaceable justice.

I agree with Pete below that the Republicans have become an ideological disaster.

Tyler Cowen, a very thoughtful and erudite, fairly libertarian economist, reflects on what libertarians should learn from the unexpected rise of Trump. One of his takeaways: True cosmopolitans are hard to find. I guess that’s true, although it depends on what you mean by cosmopolitan.

From a libertarian economist’s view (as I’ve learned from Cowen’s books), a cosmopolitan is a free individual who’s been productive enough to be able to enjoy, from a detached or abstracted and displaced or multicultural point of view, all that the various cultures and peoples of the world have to offer. The foodie Cowen, for example, can enjoy French or Ethiopian food without all the repressive baggage of actually being French or Ethiopian. And it’s true enough, after all, that those people free enough through habits of abstract thinking to be facile role players deploying their technical skills in a wide variety of settings are those most prepared to flourish in the 21st-century global competitive marketplace.

Still, someone might say, that kind of detachment isn’t true cosmopolitanism. To be a genuine citizen of the world, it might be necessary to be a member of a community of philosophers dedicated to pursuing the truth we all share. Or it might be necessary to be a member of the City of God, that loving and relational personal community that includes us all. Or it might be to be a member of a Stoic community of rational and virtuous men and women across time and space who know one another — Pericles, Marcus Aurelius, and Robert E. Lee — as of the same kind. I could go on, but a true cosmopolitan isn’t merely free from relational prejudices to maximize his personal productivity in the service of random personal preferences.

It really is true, I agree, that Trumpism and so forth are, at some level and to some extent, rebellions against the emptiness or irresponsibility of the cosmopolitanism of a merely cognitive elite, one distinguished only by its marvelously unprecedented capacity for almost infinitely productive mental labor. Their kind of faux cosmopolitanism is an experience for a privileged few, one not as accompanied as it should be by corresponding responsibilities.

So one problem with some libertarians is not thinking of citizenship as a real and ennobling human experience. It’s not a problem shared all that much by even Augustinian Christians who don’t think that the political diversity of the City of Man is meant to be displaced by the City of God. Most people find personal fulfillment through love and work in institutions that correspond to the limitations of our existence as embodied animals with relational longings. And those limitations aren’t even limitations exactly; they shape our experiences of who each of us is and what each of us is supposed to do.

Before we can be citizens of the world, someone might say, we must be citizens of a particular country. And in the most truthfully self-conscious cases, each of us will be both. It’s through our particular experiences in a very limited number of places that we get what access we have to the universal truth and the loving personal God.