Chapitre 1
The Citizen Under Siege: How America's Constitutional Foundation is Eroding
In an age of polarized politics and eroding national identity, Victor Davis Hanson's "The Dying Citizen" arrives as both warning and wake-up call. This provocative examination of American citizenship has become required reading among political theorists and constitutional scholars, with figures from Ben Shapiro to Condoleezza Rice citing its insights. The book's central premise-that citizenship itself faces extinction through multiple converging threats-resonates deeply in a nation struggling to define what binds us together. As citizenship continues to fade from our collective consciousness, Hanson asks a question that should haunt us all: What happens when the concept that founded Western democracy disappears entirely?
Chapitre 2
The Ancient Roots of Modern Citizenship
The concept of citizenship wasn't born in Philadelphia in 1787 but in Athens nearly 2,500 years earlier. Kant defined it as enjoying "lawful freedom" by obeying only laws to which one has consented, "civil equality" where no person can bind another without reciprocity, and "civil independence" where rights derive from commonwealth membership, not another's whim. Citizens owe their existence to their own rights, not to the caprices of others.
These ideals weren't fully realized in Europe until parliamentary democracies replaced communist regimes in the early 1990s. American citizenship, however, has long meant following only laws authorized by elected representatives-not edicts from unelected regulators, college administrators, or mayors who selectively enforce laws. All citizens deserve equal treatment regardless of background, owing their freedoms to no particular leader or party.
Unlike temporary residents, citizens are rooted within constitutional borders and must honor American traditions, obey its laws, and contribute time, money, and potentially their lives to their exceptional nation. The Constitution guarantees security and liberties, but republics can collapse within a single generation if citizens fail to preserve them.
History reveals that citizenship isn't a story of linear progress. Civilizations experience descents and abrupt implosions, and citizenship can wax, wane, or vanish entirely. Roman republicanism sought to ameliorate the perceived volatility of radical democracy through checks and balances on power, influenced by Sparta's dual legislative assemblies, chief executives, and judicial auditors.
Western constitutional citizenship evolved through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment toward greater rights and inclusion, despite periods of retrenchment. By the twenty-first century, after twenty-five hundred years of evolution, citizenship neared its logical fruition with full emancipation of the poor, women, and minorities. Yet the privileges of Western citizenship are now diluting, with no guarantee democracies must persist.
What's most concerning is that many Americans increasingly blame their founders for past illiberalism while failing to appreciate how close we've come to equality. A 2019 Harris Poll found 92 percent of Americans believe their rights are "under siege," particularly freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, and equal justice-yet many cannot name basic constitutional protections or historical facts.
Chapitre 3
The Twin Threats to American Citizenship
American citizenship faces a dual threat-from below through ignorance and from above through elite manipulation. Many Americans remain indifferent to demographic changes affecting citizenship status, while immigrants often believe mere residency should guarantee citizenship benefits. Meanwhile, elites who understand the Constitution well seek to radically alter it, envisioning it as a global model requiring a vast administrative state.
The result is chaos where some rebrand themselves as "citizens of the world"-a tired idea dating back to Socratic utopianism with no credible blueprint for a transnational state. These toxic forces have brought American citizenship-a 233-year-old idea that has evolved to transcend its origins-to the brink of extinction.
The threats to citizenship can be categorized into two groups: precitizens and postcitizens. Precitizens represent ancient economic, political, and ethnic ideas once thought antithetical to the modern democratic state that are now reappearing. These include the reemergence of peasantry (economic dependence undermining self-governance), the blurring of residency with citizenship (diminishing the privileges of formal citizenship), and the resurgence of tribal identities (undermining national unity).
Postcitizens represent a greater danger-a small American elite who believe the U.S. should conform to European cosmopolitanism rather than remain "exceptional." These postmodernists seek to modify the Constitution to create a direct democracy guaranteeing "equity" through larger government. They include the unelected bureaucracy that has absorbed Congressional power, the "evolutionaries" seeking to dismantle constitutional structures like the Electoral College and Senate filibuster, and the "globalists" who prioritize international norms over American sovereignty.
Chapitre 4
The New Feudalism: How Economic Dependency Undermines Citizenship
California's transformation into a neo-feudal society exemplifies how economic dependency undermines citizenship. Half of all births in California are paid for by Medi-Cal, with 30 percent of those births to mothers without legal immigration status. The San Ysidro border crossing between Tijuana and San Diego processes seventy million crossings annually, contributing to California's alarming poverty rates. This massive flow of people has created unprecedented pressures on public services, housing, and wages in border communities.
This has created two distinct Californias: a sophisticated, heavily regulated coastal elite alongside an impoverished interior populated largely by immigrants with limited ability or desire to navigate the state's complex regulations. In coastal areas like Silicon Valley and West Los Angeles, median home prices exceed $1 million, while interior regions like the Central Valley face widespread poverty and unemployment rates often double the national average. Over half of immigrant households receive public assistance including healthcare, food, housing, and education subsidies. In some counties, nearly 70% of schoolchildren qualify for free lunch programs.
The economic stratification is stark and growing. Tech executives and entertainment industry leaders occupy gated communities while service workers commute hours from affordable inland areas. This economic model-impoverishing the middle class, importing foreign poor, concentrating wealth among elites, and maintaining one-party governance-threatens to spread nationwide. Similar patterns are emerging in other high-cost coastal regions like New York, Seattle, and Boston.
Without a vibrant middle class, society bifurcates into masters and peasants. Economic autonomy has always underpinned self-governance-citizens who depend on government for basic needs cannot exercise independent judgment in civic matters. The American founding vision assumed citizens would own property, run businesses, or practice trades that provided economic independence. Historical examples from ancient Rome to medieval Europe demonstrate how concentrated wealth and mass dependency inevitably lead to political dysfunction.
What's particularly troubling is how this dependency serves the interests of both political extremes. Corporate interests gain cheap, compliant labor while progressive politicians gain dependent voters. Major employers actively lobby for expanded immigration while simultaneously supporting regulations that make it harder for small businesses to compete. The middle class, traditionally the backbone of citizenship, gets squeezed from both directions through rising costs, stagnant wages, and declining opportunities for business ownership and property acquisition. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where economic independence becomes increasingly difficult to achieve or maintain.
The implications for democratic governance are profound. As more citizens rely on government support for basic needs, their ability to serve as independent voices in the political process diminishes. This dependency extends beyond direct welfare, encompassing subsidized housing, healthcare, education, and various tax credits that many middle-class families now require to maintain their standard of living.
Chapitre 5
When Residency Trumps Citizenship
The distinction between resident and citizen has fundamental importance. "Resident" derives from Latin residere ("to sit down or settle"), denoting the concrete fact of living in a particular place. "Citizen," however, indicates a privileged status with rights predicated on responsibilities, not merely location.
Traditionally, an American resident could be a subject of any foreign nation living within U.S. boundaries, while citizens enjoyed constitutional protections worldwide. These distinctions once encompassed voting, holding office, military service, and welfare eligibility. Today, they've collapsed to little more than eligibility for elected office and permission of entry and exit-distinctions that continue to erode.
America was founded on an implicit bargain: immigrants were welcomed into an underpopulated nation needing labor, while newcomers were expected to surrender prior identities and adopt American ones. The Founders emphasized unity and homogeneity, fearing that unassimilated interests might foment European-style discord or civil war.
The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act) marked the first radical change in American immigration policy. It eliminated meritocratic criteria based on education and skills, instead prioritizing family unification. While Democrats had assured Southern colleagues that neither numbers nor origins would change significantly, they almost immediately did. By 2017, only 7% of legal immigrants came from Europe, with the vast majority from Africa (11%), Asia (38%), and Latin America (44%).
The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (Simpson-Mazzoli) represented the next major shift, offering amnesty to millions while failing to establish effective enforcement mechanisms. Illegal immigration subsequently soared from five million to potentially twenty million today.
The politics of illegal immigration reveals a tacit alliance between seemingly opposed interests. Corporate America sought cheap labor without unionization, while progressives either welcomed a politically useful new demographic or believed America should help the foreign poor through open borders.
When residency and citizenship become indistinguishable, citizenship itself erodes into meaninglessness. The word "utopia" derives from Greek "ou topos" (no place), not "eu topos" (good place)-when residents and citizens are equally Americans, America itself becomes a fantasy, a no-place or dystopia.
Chapitre 6
The Resurgence of Tribal Identity
Tribalism represents mankind's default state-a precivilizational condition where blood ties supersede national allegiance. Ancient historians like Thucydides critiqued tribal peoples as "nomadic" and "without commerce," unable to build "large cities" or achieve "greatness" because they lacked the stability that comes from constitutional government.
The Greek innovation of politeia (constitutional government) offered citizens rights based on transcendent ideas rather than clan affiliations. In Athens, Cleisthenes reorganized society away from tribal divisions toward geographical and political units that suppressed clan identities, creating a novel democratic ethos.
America's progressive turn toward identity politics represents a reactionary regression to concepts that ancient societies recognized as obstacles to representative government. This retribalization embraces the same tribal divisions that led to mass genocide under German fascism and Soviet totalitarianism.
Few countries have successfully united diverse tribes without imperial coercion. The Italian Roman Republic lasted 800 years, while its multiracial successor empire endured barely two centuries after granting equal citizenship to all. Large empires like the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Soviet used force or rigid ideologies to control ethnic factions.
America has proven exceptional in defining citizens by shared values rather than appearances. The melting-pot ethos of e pluribus unum blended diverse peoples through assimilation and intermarriage-unlike the Spanish colonial model that barred non-Spanish Europeans and non-Catholics from their New World territories.
Growing up in a predominantly Mexican American town, I witnessed playground tribalism firsthand. Years later, I cofounded a classical language program at CSU Fresno where tribal affiliations disappeared when studying Greek classics. Students united across racial lines through intellectual pursuit rather than background. This common pursuit extended beyond the classroom. Students dated, married, and befriended across racial lines, developing a sense of shared ancestry regardless of racial background.
The opposite of multiculturalism isn't just multiracialism but true citizenship that diminishes ethnic identification. The Old South's fixation on race masked its failure to foster a viable middle class, creating a society of plantation elites, enslaved blacks, and impoverished whites. This serves as a warning that our growing racial tribalism diverts attention from our failing middle class. Class commonalities unite races while race creates stubborn, dangerous divisions.
Chapitre 7
The Administrative State's Assault on Citizenship
The "deep state" represents a "state within a state"-not a secret cabal but a natural alliance of those who see themselves as permanent custodians of American power, often displaying disdain for elected officials and the citizens who vote them in. By 2019, some 450 federal agencies employed 2.7 million bureaucrats, with the Federal Register containing 175,496 pages across 235 volumes.
This administrative state dangerously consolidates the constitutionally separate powers of executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Regulators can create rules, judge violations, and enforce punishments without electoral accountability. The separation of powers was designed specifically to prevent such consolidation, based on the pessimistic view that officials inevitably seek to expand their authority under the guise of public good.
The EPA's 2015 Clean Water Rule exemplifies bureaucratic overreach, extending protection of "navigable waters" to include even temporary standing water on private property and irrigation ditches. Farmers faced anxiety that environmental officials might test muddy water in dry ditches after storms to determine if they were "polluting inland waterways." Such regulations disproportionately burden working-class Americans while reflecting the values of elites who can more easily absorb the economic consequences of their rules.
Trump's presidency became a test case of administrative overreach as career bureaucrats embedded in government agencies actively worked to undermine his administration. Unlike previous conservative critics who focused on bureaucratic waste, Trump directly challenged the administrative state's power to curtail citizens' freedoms. After Trump's inauguration, federal employees organized workshops on "civil disobedience" and consulted with Obama appointees about slowing work to obstruct the new administration's directives.
What's most alarming about modern bureaucratic overreach is the radical shift in progressive attitudes. Where the media once vigilantly monitored FBI and CIA abuses, they now rationalize them, seeing government power as a positive means of bypassing opposition to progressive agendas. During Watergate, journalists distrusted the permanent Washington bureaucracy; during Trump, they distrusted those who questioned it.
Chapitre 8
Constitutional Erosion by the "Evolutionaries"
"Evolutionaries" seek to fundamentally alter the Constitution and founding documents, believing them outdated for the 21st century. Unlike the French Revolution with its emphasis on equality and fraternity, the American Revolution prioritized personal freedom and liberty from both government oppression and mob rule. This foundational idea of citizen control over government is waning as reformists seek unconstitutional means to render the Constitution inert.
Modern efforts to redefine citizenship extend beyond formal amendments, with courts, the administrative state, and executive orders all attempting to modernize the Constitution. These efforts increasingly question why "old white men of a bygone age" should impose their values on a diverse 21st-century nation. Rather than adding amendments through traditional channels requiring three-quarters of states, progressives seek structural changes from admitting new states to redefining presidential elections.
Progressives have intensified efforts to abolish the Electoral College, particularly after George W. Bush (2000) and Donald Trump (2016) won presidencies without popular vote majorities. The Electoral College forces candidates to campaign beyond major cities in places like Cody, Wyoming; Carson City, Nevada; or Lincoln, Nebraska-preserving rural values essential to republican government. Without it, millions of rural citizens would become second-class, as candidates could reach millions of urban voters efficiently while dispersed rural audiences would require vastly more campaign time.
Beyond Electoral College opposition, progressives have targeted other constitutional structures they view as obstacles to radical democratization. The Senate filibuster-a 180-year tradition requiring sixty votes to end debate-has become a particular focus. At John Lewis's funeral in 2020, Obama condemned it as a "Jim Crow relic" that should be eliminated, despite having defended and used it himself when politically convenient.
Progressives once championed the First Amendment but now target it for revision. When social media companies like Twitter ban users like President Trump while allowing others like Antifa organizers to remain, they raise constitutional questions similar to 1960s debates about businesses denying service. The problem intensifies when monopolistic tech giants like Amazon, Apple and Google collude to shut down competitors like Parler.
Chapitre 9
Globalism: The Transnational Assault on Citizenship
Globalism represents the next threat to American citizenship, as many elites see themselves as universalists rather than uniquely American. These globalists, often America's wealthiest and most credentialed, view their citizenship as incidental rather than essential, seeking to align American values with international norms.
Globalism isn't new but cyclical throughout history. Ancient Rome's expansion eventually granted citizenship to all free residents across its vast two-million-square-mile empire through Caracalla's edict in AD 212, though this didn't ensure adoption of Roman values or responsibilities. Despite initial uniformity in language, architecture, and governance, this globalized Roman world fragmented by AD 500 under pressure from various tribes and migrants.
Modern globalization dilutes citizenship through the "law of limited good"-every extension of citizenship's benefits to distant others diminishes its value for the original citizens. When American companies outsource jobs, American workers suffer. When elites invest heavily in China, they're less likely to criticize Chinese authoritarianism. The more America extends its resources globally, the fewer remain for its citizens.
The World Economic Forum at Davos exemplifies modern globalism's contradictions. These three thousand invitation-only elites-"Davos Men and Women"-share wealth, education, and cosmopolitan values that transcend national loyalties. While discussing global poverty, climate change, and inequality, they remain insensitive to how their policies affect the middle classes and poor of their own countries.
Globalists have created a distorted narrative where opposition to their agenda is falsely equated with bigotry and extremism. This divisive rhetoric masks how America has split into two camps: coastal elites who benefit from globalization and working-class Americans whose livelihoods have been sacrificed.
The cognitive elites-politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, tech executives, and academics-prosper from managing the global system while assuming foreign populations cannot replicate their skills. Meanwhile, those who work with their hands-factory workers, manufacturers, miners-find themselves rendered redundant as their jobs move overseas where labor is cheaper and regulations fewer.
Chapitre 10
The Crisis of 2020 and Beyond
Until March 2020, debates about citizenship primarily centered on policy discussions and theoretical frameworks. However, the arrival of COVID-19 transformed these debates into urgent matters of survival and civil liberties. The nationwide shutdown created unprecedented economic disruption, devastating small businesses and middle-class families while tech giants and large corporations saw their profits soar. Mom-and-pop shops, restaurants, and local retailers faced permanent closure while Amazon's market value increased by hundreds of billions. This dramatic wealth transfer accelerated existing inequality trends, with the top 1% of Americans gaining over $1 trillion in wealth during the pandemic.
Immigration policies underwent significant changes as border enforcement mechanisms weakened considerably. Democratic presidential candidates proposed sweeping immigration reforms, including pathways to citizenship for millions of undocumented residents. Meanwhile, racial tensions reached a boiling point following several high-profile incidents, culminating in nationwide protests that often superseded public health guidelines about mass gatherings. Cities across America experienced sustained civil unrest, leading to billions in property damage and fundamentally challenging existing law enforcement structures.
The public health response revealed deep institutional problems. Dr. Anthony Fauci and other health officials issued frequently changing and sometimes contradictory guidance on masks, social distancing, and vaccination targets. Their later acknowledgment of deliberately misleading the public about mask effectiveness and herd immunity thresholds - even if well-intentioned - severely damaged public trust in health institutions. State governors exercised unprecedented emergency powers, initially justifying restrictions as temporary measures to "flatten the curve," but later extending them indefinitely without clear scientific justification or legislative oversight.
The crisis exposed critical vulnerabilities in America's supply chains, particularly regarding China. The discovery that 80% of US pharmaceutical ingredients and medical supplies depended on Chinese manufacturing created serious national security concerns. Chinese state media outlets explicitly weaponized this dependency, with publications like the People's Daily threatening to withhold critical medical supplies and "plunge America into the mighty sea of coronavirus." This threat highlighted the dangers of outsourcing essential production to strategic competitors.
The period from 2017-2019 had seen some restoration of traditional citizenship values through policy reforms and judicial appointments. However, 2020's perfect storm of pandemic, economic collapse, social unrest, and election controversies erased many of these gains. The year ended with historically high levels of political polarization, institutional distrust, and civil discord. As 2021 began, defenders of traditional American citizenship found themselves in a weakened position but more convinced than ever of their cause's importance. The fundamental question became whether the American republic's core principles of self-governance, individual rights, and constitutional limits on power could survive in an era of perpetual crisis and growing authoritarianism.
Chapitre 11
The Path Forward: Reclaiming Citizenship
What does the future hold for American citizenship? The answer depends on whether we can revitalize the middle class, restore border integrity, transcend tribal identities, rein in the administrative state, protect constitutional structures, and balance global engagement with national sovereignty.
Citizenship requires economic independence. Without a thriving middle class, we'll continue devolving into a society of elites and dependents-masters and peasants. This means rebuilding American manufacturing, limiting immigration to sustainable levels, and creating pathways for all citizens to achieve self-sufficiency.
Citizenship requires clear boundaries. The distinction between citizen and resident must be maintained, with citizenship representing not just rights but responsibilities. Assimilation must be encouraged rather than multiculturalism that preserves separate identities.
Citizenship requires national unity. We must transcend tribal identities to forge a common American identity based on shared values rather than racial or ethnic characteristics. This doesn't mean erasing our diverse heritage but rather placing it within a larger framework of American identity.
Citizenship requires constitutional governance. The administrative state must be brought under democratic control, with regulatory powers returned to elected representatives. Constitutional structures like the Electoral College and Senate filibuster must be preserved to maintain the delicate balance between majority rule and minority rights.
Citizenship requires national sovereignty. While engaging with the world, America must prioritize its citizens' interests rather than subordinating them to global governance. Trade, immigration, and foreign policy must serve the American people first.
The path forward isn't easy, but the alternative-the death of citizenship-would mean the end of the American experiment in self-governance. The choice is ours. Will we reclaim our citizenship or surrender it to the forces seeking its destruction? The answer will determine not just America's future but the future of democracy itself.
