In New York in the run-up to UN Week, this mistrust had hung over a number of dinners, salons, panel discussions, and board meetings in preparation for the upcoming confabs. At these occasions, the question being asked was: Why do they hate us? The “they” were the rootless cosmopolitans’ less-rarefied fellow citizens, who in one place after another were gravitating to nationalism, demagogy, and resentful exclusion—and rejecting some of the elites’ most cherished beliefs: borderlessness, market cures for all diseases, inevitable technological progress, benign technocratic stewardship. Some of
...more
