Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) circulated a video of former President Barack Obama using the word “cosmopolitan” after the freshman senator was accused of being anti-Semitic for using the same word during a speech he delivered a week earlier.
“Hmmm. Watch this video of [Obama’s] criticism of ‘international elite’ who are ‘cosmopolitan in their outlook,’” Hawley tweeted on Tuesday. “Will liberal language police hysterically denounce Obama for being anti-Semitic?”
Hawley’s tweet included a segment of 2018 address that Obama delivered at the 16th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg, South Africa. In the clip, Obama is discussing the disproportionate political influence of those with economic clout.
“…this new international elite, the professional class that supports them, differs in important respects from the ruling aristocracies of old,” Obama said at the time. “It includes many who are self-made. It includes champions of meritocracy.”
“Although still mostly white and male, as a group they reflect a diversity of nationalities and ethnicities that would have not existed a hundred years ago,” he continued. “A decent percentage consider themselves liberal in their politics, modern and cosmopolitan in their outlook.”
Hawley received massive criticism from members of the left-wing media for his keynote address at the 2019 National Conservatism Conference on July 16. The speech was a fiery defense of America’s heartland against the global elite; however, the speech was met with accusations of anti-Semitism for the use of the term “cosmopolitan elite.”
“Anyone [with] a Stanford BA in history and a JD from Yale (like Hawley) knows exactly the implications of ‘cosmopolitan.’ Again, not ‘everyone’ knows this. But Hawley must,” journalist James Fallows responded on Twitter, linking a 2017 Public Radio International (PRI) article that contended the word “cosmopolitan” is an “anti-Semitic fighting term” harkening back to Adolf Hitler’s Germany that was “used against Jews by Nazis and Bolsheviks alike.”
Washington Post opinion columnist Max Boot also put forth that Hawley was referring to Jews and Josh Marshall, an editor at Talking Points Memo, contended that the Missouri senator was “contemptuous of American Jewish life.” Former Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Bill Kristol argued that the speech was either “creepy culture-warring” or demagogic dog-whistling.”
“… Hawley, a graduate of Stanford and Yale, doubled down, giving a speech to a conservative group in which he quoted Jewish professors out of context, and lamented to the elitism of the ‘left,’ marked by ‘globalization’ and ‘cosmopolitan consensus,’” Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote. “Many Jewish scholars and activists recognize the speech as a dog whistle to white supremacists, using the same language long affiliated with anti-Semitism.”
Yoram Hazony, the organizer of the National Conservative Conference and a prominent Orthodox Jewish intellectual, immediately came to Hawley’s defense.
“Sorry but ‘cosmopolitan’ is a normal term in political theory, history and other academic disciplines. It means ‘citizen of the world’ and has no anti-Jewish valence,” Hazony said. “[Hawley] used it correctly in his National Conservatism speech.”
Hazony further provided examples of scholarly publications that referred to global citizenship by the term “cosmopolitan,” including the Harvard University Press, the Oxford University Press, and the Cambridge University Press.
“This term, descended from Stoic philosophy, is in common use in educated discourse to mean ‘citizen of the world.’ In common use, it has no anti-Jewish valence,” Hazony continued. “Sen. [Hawley] is, as you emphasize, an educated man. And so it’s not surprising that he used the term ‘cosmopolitan’ exactly correctly in his well-received speech at the National Conservatism Conference.”