https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_alarm_bells_are_ringing_for_american_citizenship.html
The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson
Basic Books, October, 2021
Victor Davis Hanson, the classics scholar and military historian, has written or co-authored two dozen books and many hundreds of articles. His latest book, The Dying Citizen, is a powerful and carefully developed argument for preserving American citizenship, a unique patrimony now under attack in many ways from many sources, and from all appearances, a losing battle.
Hanson provides a history of the concept of citizenship dating back to the Greeks and Romans and makes clear how rare the American experience has been in creating a modern citizenry with both rights and responsibilities. Hanson’s book was mostly written from 2018 through early 2020, and contains a final chapter which updates the impact of the calamitous last year on the citizenship issue, dominated by the coronavirus, racial unrest and a bitterly fought presidential election. Hanson argues that the Trump presidency pushed back against the forces diminishing American citizenship with some modest success from 2017 to 2019, but the events of the past year led to a reversal of those gains, and the prospect of greater threats than existed before.
Hanson’s book contains six primary chapters, each addressing a specific threat to American citizenship, as it was understood in our founding documents, and expanded through political participation for women and races and ethnicities different from the original predominant majority culture.
The first chapter, “Peasants,” maintains that for a people to be self-governing, they must be economically autonomous. In essence, they need to avoid dependency on either the “private wealthy or the state.” A healthy middle class enables economic self-reliance and autonomy. Politicians from both parties are always claiming they are fighting for the middle class, but if they have been doing this, they have been failing on their promises, as evidenced by a hollowing out of much of America as its industrial and manufacturing base faltered, and major parts moved overseas and the failure to replace the lost opportunities with “good jobs with good wages.”
Without a sustainable and thriving middle class, society becomes divided between “modern masters and peasants.” In this circumstance, government assumes a responsibility to subsidize the poor to dampen any possibility of revolution, and exempt the wealthy, who respond by enriching and empowering the governing classes. The current attempt by Democrats in Congress to pass a massive “human infrastructure” bill is part of developing a cradle-to-grave dependency for much of the citizenry (and non-citizens as well) on government welfare programs.
Chapter 2, “Residents,” argues for privileging citizens over non-citizens (residents). Citizens live within “delineated and established borders.” Citizens share values, and they assimilate and integrate into what becomes a national character. But today, many argue for a borderless world, and opening America to the world’s 8 billion people. They ask, “Why should those fortunate enough to have been born here, or been legally allowed to enter under various quotas or other limits, be privileged above those others who would also benefit from living here rather than where they are now living and fleeing?”
The collapse of the American southern border under the current Biden administration was not an accident, but a plan. It fits an ideology that more people moving here, from wherever they may have come, is better for America, since it makes us look more like the rest of the world going forward. Naturally, there is a political dimension to this ideology, since it assumes that when the new residents become citizens at some point, they will align with the political party favoring mass immigration and open borders.
Hanson argues that people will naturally want to move to a country with political rights, a Bill of Rights, economic opportunity, and a generous welfare system to tide them over in the short term or forever. Immigrants don’t see America in the critical fashion of many of its current citizens, but as better than the places they left, but will they accept the responsibility of citizenship, as well as its bounty?
