“The world-city means cosmopolitanism instead of home.” — Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
Every republic breaks on this question: home or horizon. Rome fell when its citizens ceased to be rooted; America risks the same fracture as its elites belong everywhere and its people belong only to their towns. The division between cosmopolitan and provincial is not just a cultural preference or political posture. It is an orientation of life, a decision about where one belongs, and therefore where one owes loyalty.
Every civilization must answer this question: is life organized by home or by horizon, by loyalty to the local or openness to the world? America’s fracture cannot be understood without reckoning with this divide. The future of the republic depends on whether these orientations can be reconciled, whether Americans can recover a balance between rootedness and reach.
This axis, cosmopolitan and provincial, is as decisive as any economic bracket or cultural preference. It explains who belongs where, who commands authority, and how civilizations rise or fall.
Orientation as Class
Economic class explains wealth. Social class explains status. Cultural class explains taste. But orientation explains loyalty, the axis along which whole peoples organize themselves.
Cosmopolitans see themselves as citizens of the world. They move through airports as easily as neighborhoods, speak in the idioms of global culture, and draw their authority from networks rather than roots. Their identity is abstracted: professional, transnational, symbolic.
Provincials see themselves as citizens of place. Their lives are rooted in local institutions , schools, churches, town halls. Their identities are inherited, embodied, continuous. They draw strength from loyalty rather than mobility.
Neither orientation is reducible to geography. A cosmopolitan may live in Omaha if his loyalty is to multinational finance. A provincial may live in Manhattan if his loyalties are parish, block, and borough. What matters is not where one sleeps, but where one stands.
This axis of orientation is not new. It has structured civilizations since antiquity. But in America, it has become decisive, because the balance between home and horizon has broken.
The Cosmopolitan Class
Cosmopolitanism is as old as empire. The Stoics declared themselves citizens of the cosmos. Athenian merchants spanned the Mediterranean. Roman elites prided themselves on Greek culture as much as Roman law. To be cosmopolitan was to live in the currents of exchange, to belong to more than one world.
The Enlightenment revived this impulse. Kant dreamed of “perpetual peace” through cosmopolitan law. Adam Smith saw commerce as a solvent of conflict. Thomas Paine declared, “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
Today, cosmopolitanism is the creed of the global elite. It lives in Davos and the World Economic Forum, in the Ivy League and Oxbridge, in hedge funds, consultancies, and NGOs. It is embodied in the professional who glides from Boston to London to Singapore, whose friendships and loyalties span continents more easily than counties.
Strengths. Cosmopolitanism brings adaptability, fluency, and innovation. It coordinates across frontiers, absorbs shocks, and harnesses diversity. It thrives in networks where agility matters more than tradition.
Weaknesses. Cosmopolitanism easily decays into deracination, loss of rootedness. Elites may be connected everywhere yet accountable nowhere. They may build value across the globe while abandoning their neighbors. Christopher Lasch, in The Revolt of the Elites, captured this vividly:
“The elites, who define the issues and set the terms of debate, have lost touch with the common people. Their ties to the places in which they live are weak or nonexistent. They have become tourists in their own countries.”
The Provincial Class
If cosmopolitanism is as old as empire, provincial loyalty is as old as the village. The Spartan farmer, the Roman smallholder, the English yeoman, the American town-meeting citizen, all embody the provincial orientation. They live by rootedness. Their wealth may be modest, their reach limited, but their loyalty is deep.
Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, saw this as the strength of the republic. He marveled at New England townships, where ordinary citizens governed themselves, and at civic associations that made self-rule a habit. For Tocqueville, provincial loyalty was the ballast of democracy.
Strengths. Provincial life sustains continuity. It transmits culture across generations. It grounds people in responsibility, duty, and sacrifice. It tempers abstraction with reality. Simone Weil, in The Need for Roots, put it starkly:
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
Weaknesses. Provincialism risks parochialism. It can harden into suspicion, insularity, hostility to outsiders. It may mistake loyalty for stagnation. Yet without it, no republic endures. Rootless elites may manage systems, but they cannot inspire sacrifice. A nation must be worth dying for, and only the provincial orientation makes that possible. Without loyalty, politics becomes manipulation.
The American Divide
For much of its history, America fused both orientations. Its WASP elite combined rooted Protestant provincialism with Atlantic cosmopolitanism. They were grounded in Boston or Philadelphia congregations, yet oriented outward toward Europe. E. Digby Baltzell called them “the Protestant Establishment,” and they balanced home and horizon.
That balance is gone. Today, cosmopolitan and provincial exist in pure form, without mediation.
Cosmopolitan elites inhabit global cities: New York, San Francisco, Washington, Boston. They work in finance, law, tech, media. Their loyalty is to network, not neighbor. They read The Economist, stream HBO Max, and fly international business class.
Provincial America inhabits small towns, suburbs, and declining industrial cities. They are bound by church, school, sports, and local business. They distrust institutions beyond the county. They live in continuity more than in mobility.
The 2016 and 2020 elections revealed this fracture starkly: cosmopolitan centers versus provincial heartlands, airports versus parishes. The divide is not reducible to wealth: a wealthy rancher may be provincial, a debt-burdened graduate student cosmopolitan. The line is loyalty, not income.
This divide explains much of America’s paralysis. Cosmopolitans see provincials as backward, dangerous, unfit for modernity. Provincials see cosmopolitans as arrogant, rootless, disloyal. Each orientation interprets the other as vice, rarely as virtue.
The Clash of Virtues
Cosmopolitans and provincials embody different virtues.
Cosmopolitan virtues: tolerance, adaptability, innovation. They thrive on mobility, risk, and change.
Provincial virtues: loyalty, faith, continuity. They thrive on rootedness, duty, and sacrifice.
Civilization needs both. Without cosmopolitan reach, societies stagnate. Without provincial loyalty, they hollow out.
But when one orientation dominates without the other, distortion follows. Cosmopolitanism without responsibility becomes predatory. It extracts value globally without stewardship locally. It produces a managerial class loyal to nothing but its own circulation. Provincialism without openness becomes xenophobic. It walls itself off, fearing difference, suspicious of all outsiders.
The task of statesmanship is to balance these orientations. The danger is not one side or the other. It is imbalance. Rome fell when cosmopolitan empire devoured provincial base. Britain declined when its imperial elite detached from local responsibility. America risks both errors at once.
Civilizational Stakes
Spengler saw the pattern: civilizations move from cultural unity to civilizational exhaustion when elites become cosmopolitan and masses provincial. “The world-city means cosmopolitanism instead of home,” he wrote. Breadth replaces depth; reach replaces rootedness. It is not a mark of renewal but of decadence.
Rome illustrates the danger. In the Republic, smallholders formed the backbone: farming, fighting, voting. Conquest enriched elites and displaced farmers. Citizenship hollowed out. Bread and circuses replaced civic duty. Cosmopolitan empire devoured provincial republic. Its citizens no longer identified with its fate.
Britain illustrates it again. In the 19th century, its aristocracy remained tied to land and community even as it ruled the seas. But by the 20th, its elites drifted cosmopolitan. The trenches of the First World War shattered confidence. The empire became powerful but hollow, sustained by inertia rather than loyalty. The empire staggered into decline.
America shows the pattern. Its elites today are more global than national, more loyal to networks than to neighborhoods. They fly from New York to London to Davos with as much ease as from Boston to Des Moines. Meanwhile, provincial America feels abandoned, its institutions hollowed, its loyalties mocked. The fracture widens.
Toward Reconciliation
The divide cannot be erased. But it can be reconciled. A republic cannot survive on one orientation alone. It needs both. Renewal requires synthesis. The rooted loyalty of the provincial and the creative reach of the cosmopolitan.
What would this look like?
Re-root the elites. Cosmopolitans must be bound again to place. Philanthropy should not only fund Ivy League centers but rebuild town schools. Corporations must not only optimize global portfolios but reinvest in the communities they occupy. Citizenship must mean more than taxation.
Open the provinces. Provincials must be connected to universal truths. Religion, philosophy, and science must be taught as bridges between the local and the global. A farmer in Iowa can grasp Augustine as well as a student in Cambridge. Provincial education can be rigorous without being parochial.
Build institutions of encounter. Town-gown divides must be narrowed. Universities cannot wall themselves off from their towns. Towns cannot treat universities as alien fortresses. Shared civic projects, libraries, festivals, public debates, can restore common ground.
Form a steward class. The republic needs stewards: men and women rooted in place but open to the world, able to translate between home and horizon. This was once the role of WASPs; it must be reborn in new form.
A Call to Action
If reconciliation does not happen, the consequences are clear. Cosmopolitan elites will drift further into abstraction, managing a nation they no longer inhabit. Provincials will harden into suspicion, rejecting a republic they no longer trust. The fracture will deepen until the very idea of common life collapses.
But collapse is not inevitable. America still holds both orientations. The task is to synthesize, not to destroy. For individuals, this means deliberate cultivation:
The cosmopolitan must practice loyalty to place. Buy land, join a parish, serve in local office.
The provincial must practice openness to universal truths. Read beyond borders, encounter foreign thought, balance loyalty with learning.
For institutions, this means rebalancing:
Universities must serve their towns, not just the globe.
Corporations must invest in their communities, not only shareholders.
Government must rebuild shared spaces, not just administer systems.
The task is urgent. The republic cannot endure with only airports or only parishes. Cosmopolitan and provincial are not lifestyle choices but civilizational orientations. To choose only one is to choose decline. To balance both is to choose renewal.
In Sum
Class is not only about wealth or taste but about where one belongs. The cosmopolitan–provincial divide is not a culture war but a civilizational fault line. One side looks outward, one inward. One seeks horizon, one clings to home. Both embody virtues; both harbor dangers. A republic requires balance, or it will not endure.
In the first essay, we mapped the architecture of class, economic, social, cultural, and orientational. In the second, we saw the hollowing of the middle that once held the republic together. In the third, we traced the collapse of cultural aspiration, as the ladder of taste snapped between highbrow refinement and lowbrow spectacle. Here, we confront the deepest fracture: the choice between root and reach, between home and horizon.
History is unambiguous. Rome lost its balance and became empire. Britain lost its balance and became dependency. America stands at the same threshold. Yet decline is not destiny.
The steward class of the future must unite these orientations. It must be cosmopolitan enough to engage the world, provincial enough to remain loyal to home. It must translate refinement into common culture and re-anchor elites in responsibility. Without such stewards, America will fracture into placeless elites and resentful provinces. With them, it may yet find renewal, not by erasing class, but by ordering it.
The next essay turns to another axis of fracture: symbolic and practical. One class manipulates abstractions; the other sustains material life. The gulf between the clerisy and the craftsmen is as dangerous as the divide between cosmopolitan and provincial. To understand it is to glimpse not only how America works, but whether it will continue to work at all.