https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/from-subjects-to-citizens-and-back/
The defining conflict of our era is whether the United States will remain a democratic republic or morph into a high-tech administrative oligarchy. The late Angelo M. Codevilla called this national struggle our “cold civil war.”
Leaders in the commanding heights of our political and cultural institutions openly revile the fundamental principles of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. They repudiate the core concepts of republican citizenship, national borders, and government by consent of the governed. If given their way, the ruling classes will abolish the sovereignty of the American people.
Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Edward J. Erler has fought tirelessly to preserve the American way of life against these corrosive forces. In the opening pages of The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State, Erler explains how elites’ feverish efforts to destroy a duly elected president, Donald Trump, “revealed the extent to which American democracy had, indeed, transmogrified into an oligarchy.” He analyzes this “transmogrification” in terms of three interrelated dynamics: citizenship, immigration, and national sovereignty.
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Erler, a professor of political science emeritus at California State University, San Bernardino, is America’s foremost expert on the ongoing controversy over birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. He rightly argues that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause must be understood in light of the founders’ belief in natural rights, the social compact, and the consent of the governed.
