What is America? In No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, Mitt Romney writes: "I am one of those who believes America is destined to remain, as it has been since the birth of the republic, the brightest hope of the world." A mouthpiece for unbridled national cheerleading, Romney's two books, No Apology and Believe in America, tell us that only a strong America can make the world safer and more prosperous.
Living temporarily in St George, Utah, a wealthy, predominately Mormon community, I got to absorb Mormon thinking firsthand like soaking in the southwest sun. According to Mormon holy writ, the US constitution is inspired by Christian divinity, and God chose the US to play an exceptional role in human events. Or, "Mormons sort of have an extra chromosome," when it comes to American exceptionalism, as US senator Mike Lee, Republican from Utah and a Mormon, puts it.
Why, then, does Romney squirrel so much unspecified money abroad?
The outrage crescendoing over Romney's overseas holdings dangerously misses a salient point. In conspiratorial default mode, his critics slam him for avoiding US taxes. But that is only half the problem. The totality of the problem is that Mitt Romney's tax dodging presents a double-dealing, self-serving vision of globalization exploited by elites at the average American's expense.
So the question arises to Romney: are you an American exceptionalist or a bona fide globalist? The tens of millions of dollars Romney shelters from US taxes, from Ireland to Switzerland to Bermuda, likewise disguises an underexposed tension, that between "American exceptionalism" and "cosmopolitanism", between what I call "patriot-Americans" and "post-Americans".
According to political lore, patriot-Americans keep the country humming. They occupy "these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America", as Sarah Palin gushed in North Carolina on the 2008 campaign trail, thanking the "hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation".
"Post-Americans", meanwhile, include the ranks of urbane elites, jetting between New York and London and Singapore between Face the Nation and late-night bites of sashimi. They're post-national. They're post-American. Their political outlook, personal affinities, and cultural tastes are often no more aligned with an American's than, say, a German's or a Singaporean's. This doesn't mean they're anti-American. It just means that they've become citizens of the world and don't view themselves as having a primary allegiance or a sense of patriotic solidarity with their own countrymen.
For patriot-Americans, there is a special bond and duty to their nation and its citizens first, before anything or anyone else. And for post-Americans, it's the reverse: how post-Americans value humans takes precedence over the national origin of those humans. And so, "patriot-Americans" view geographic borders as tangible markers carrying intrinsic, unshakable national value. But "post-Americans" view borders as awkward anachronisms that interfere with the flow of human, intellectual, and financial capital.
Most Americans do not think of themselves as "global citizens". Only 30% of Americans consider themselves "more of a global citizen than an American citizen", while 47% of Hispanic Americans consider themselves "more of a global citizen". And only 24% of white Americans consider themselves "more of a global citizen than an American citizen", in an unpublished study by the GfK Roper Group in 2007
The patriot- and post-American worldviews skirmish ever more fiercely, as America winnows down two global wars and recalibrates itself after a triumphant American century. The tenet of Romney's foreign policy? "An American Century".
And so, Romney's tax dodging gives us a toxic whiplash of cosmopolitan business calculation amidst his jingoist proselytizing. All the anti-global rhetoric – "securing America's borders", bashing the IMF, demeaning the UN – espoused in much of Romney's foreign policy positions and campaign personnel dissipates in his personal gain.
If Romney supports undocumented global tax shelters, could he be persuaded to support a path to citizenship for undocumented workers? If he supports flexible tax havens, does he support flexible, unfettered trade, an open highway from Mexico through the US and up to Canada, commonly espoused as the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), purporting greater co-operation and information sharing?
Romney's offshore accounts demand that any reasonable person wonder: what does the Republican nominee really thinks about globalized labor, immigration reform, the transparency of international law, co-operative global efforts to combat climate change, and the viability of international institutions. Romney is two-stepping his American Exceptionalism with his offshore tax dodging. He lavishes commonsense, cosmopolitan practicality to his own enrichment, while subjecting the rest of us to a punishingly rigid worldview.
Where would this leave us under a Romney presidency? Would we benefit from the data-crunching, pragmatism of the France-loving, French-speaking, urbane, globe-trotting, one-time management consultant? Or would we be subject to an ideologically-driven, double-standard positioning of a conservative, America-first elite?
Romney's offshore tax shelters recall the antics of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who renounced his US citizenship and bailed to tax-free Singapore, just in time to save tens of millions of dollars from tax responsibility during the Facebook IPO. Scheming already to keep his cake and eat it too, Saverin contends his rebuke of America had no financial motivation.
"This had nothing to do with taxes," Saverin told the New York Times. "I was born in Brazil, I was an American citizen for about 10 years. I thought of myself as a global citizen." Well, good riddance. For the better part of that decade, working-class kids were spit out into the Middle East as cannon fodder, while this global tax dodger nests overseas.
Romney's hypocrisy furthers the divide between an elite cosmopolitan class –privately invested abroad and ambivalent over this country's public resources – versus great swaths of this country, worried about opportunity on our shores. A cosmopolitan elite is abandoning wholesale a collective ethic and commitment to this country, its rules, and its citizens. This cosmopolitan elite can pursue its private self-interest, all the while espousing patriot sing-song, shifting the money and plying the knowhow to abandon US military service, public classrooms, Social Security, national parks, and all that matter.
The latent fury over Romney's tax shelters is that his brand of elites are leveraging and exploiting globalization in ways that leave the rest of us high and dry. Believe in America, bank in the Cayman Islands.