Status of Citizens on Constitution Day, 2022

This essay is the third in a trio of blog-postings (8/1/22, 9/1/22, and 9/17/22) analyzing the waxing and waning of historical republics, as has been discussed in Victor Davis Hanson’s outstanding book, The Dying Citizen (Basic Books, 2021).  A republic presupposes citizens, as opposed to individuals existing in a state of nature or as the subjects of an autocracy or oligarchy.  This year’s Constitution Day (September 17, 2022) marks 235 years since the signing, in Philadelphia, of the U.S. Constitution prior to its adoption by the states and its establishment of the U.S. as a republic of citizens.

Before the institution of a republic, Hanson considers individuals to be “pre-citizens.”  In the immediately preceding (9/1/22) blog post, we looked at one type of pre-citizen, the peasant.  In today’s blog post, we examine two additional concepts of pre-citizen: the resident and the tribe member.  We will conclude with an estimate of the status of U.S. citizens on Constitution Day, 2022.

Citizens are members of a civil society who are united for the purpose of forming a republic and making laws.  Following Kant, we observe that the citizen has three characteristics: the lawful freedom to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent; equality with all others before the law; and economic autonomy, or the responsibility for one’s own support as a member of the commonwealth (republic).  Whether in a constitutional convention or as an accumulation of precedent, the people constitute themselves as a state with coercive power in an original contract.  The people thereby give up their external freedom and take it back immediately as members of a republic.

Residents are merely those who live in a particular place, whereas citizens are individuals who have legal rights and duties even if they temporarily live outside the republic granting them citizenship.  Historically, as Hanson writes in his Chapter Two, immigrants arriving in the U.S. were expected to surrender their previous identities (e.g., to forego acting as foreign agents, etc.) and to adopt an American identity out of gratitude for the rights conveyed by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution (i.e., to adopt American values as delineated in the republic’s founding documents).  The existence of this gratitude or adopted set of values - - in a word, this assimilation - - was freely presupposed, for why else would new immigrants have undertaken the arduous journeys required in previous centuries?

New immigrants to the U.S., it was originally thought, had no more reason than anyone else to create factions within the U.S.; in any event, the U.S. was governed by checks and balances countering potential factions.  Eventually, the legal differences between citizens and various types of aliens (from the Latin alienus, meaning foreigner, stranger, or belonging to another country or people) were established in U.S. law; and the U.S. became the world’s oldest functioning constitutional republic of citizens.

Today, Hanson observes, social cohesion (assimilation of immigrants) in the U.S. is challenged by the huge numbers of impoverished, illegal aliens arriving in the U.S. without high school diplomas, fluency in English, or the incentive to assimilate.  It would seem that there is a progressive elite in the U.S. that encourages non-assimilation in order to cultivate a dependent class of clients and future voters.  Hanson offers a flagrant example of such encouragement of non-assimilation on his page 71: In a recent U.S. Presidential primary election, a certain non-Spanish-speaking, third-generation American candidate, who holds a Stanford degree, appealed for pollical support from non-assimilated individuals from Mexico and Latin America.  These non-assimilated individuals were presumably thrilled by that candidate’s consistent use of trilled r’s and of Spanish pronunciations for the buzz-words of identity politics.  Hanson finds (page 75) that huge numbers of immigrants arise from an open-border policy that is consistent with corporate America’s desire for cheap labor and with many politicians’ desires for client-voters.

On his pages 96-97, Hanson finds that open borders are being accepted in popular media and elite institutions as a universal right to emigrate anywhere in the world.  Thus, “we are reverting to the world of the pre-citizen and to a pre-nation mindset,” which is reminiscent of “the latter fifth century AD, when Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Huns freely crossed into Roman lands.”  The U.S. Constitution does not guarantee anyone such a right, and this immense immigration “suggests that citizenship, as defined by the Constitution, in some ways no longer really exists.”

Tribalism, the subject of Hanson’s Chapter Three, is the theory that the divisions of a traditional society are based primarily on kin groups (sets of individuals with blood ties) and their chieftains.  The word tribe derives from the Latin for “three-fold,” referring to the tradition that there were originally three tribes in the Roman state before the advent of one unified citizenry in the Roman Republic.  As Hanson remarks on his page 100, “Rome gave us the word natio (nation) to reflect the revolutionary idea that the free citizens of a state did not all have to look the same way … [in order] to enjoy the same rights.”  In other words, the Roman Republic rejected tribalism.

Likewise, American multiracialism envisions one unified citizenry within the U.S., with one common culture existing in any number of races.  The U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1788, provided for the abolition of the foreign slave trade after 20 years, as well for the infamous “3/5 compromise,” which were necessary both for the unanimous adoption of the Constitution and for the establishment of the former colonies’ common defense.  (Like clockwork, in 1808 Jefferson signed enabling legislation outlawing the foreign slave trade.)  In other words, the U.S. Constitution aims at the ideal of a non-racial citizenship.

Today, however, a new competitor, multiculturalism, is at war with traditional American multiracialism.  Multiculturalism seeks to define the country by many cultures, some of which are mutually antagonistic; and envisions a continual feuding of various races, sects, tribes, and identities for hegemony in an existential fight to control culture and government.

Tribalism, now seen as essentially synonymous with multiculturalism, was until recently regarded as backward, reactionary, and pre-civilizational, marking a road to chaos (Hanson, p. 101).  Examples of disastrous tribalism appear in the Jim-Crow South, the castes of India, the racial laws of fascist states, the apartheid of South Africa, and the warring regions of the former Yugoslavia.

Earlier, Thucydides had argued that tribal people were inherently nomadic and incapable of civilization.  In contrast, the Greek polis replaced blood ties with the offer of rights and duties for citizens.  Various republics waxed and waned over time, yet tribalism never went wholly extinct.  Tribalism has now reappeared as the preferred progressive tool for identification of individuals by race and gender.  Hanson notes (p. 108) that in the 1950’s American campus housing was segregated by race, that in the 1960’s such segregation was banned, but that by the 2020’s segregated living quarters and “safe spaces” have become trendy again.  Multiculturalism is eclipsing multiracialism.

Why, Hanson asks (p. 115), has the theory of race and gender victimization overtaken the Marxist doctrine of class oppression as the main revolutionary creed?  One might speculate that the class of the poor, typically defined as the lowest-income 20% of the U.S. population, is smaller than the class of non-whites, which is around 40% of the U.S. population.  Moreover, upward and downward mobility ensures that the lowest-income 20% are not the same individuals year after year, whereas ethnicity is presumably a fixed characteristic.  Hence, some politicians would expect to find at least twice as many clients if race and gender are the defining categories of victimization instead of income level.

“Marginalized groups” are defined as sets of individuals supposedly victimized today due to the behavior of some others’ ancestors in the remote past.  Multiculturalism, or tribalism, results in individuals within “marginalized groups” now being treated unequally (preferentially) at the expense of individuals within officially non-marginalized groups in a perverse, Orwellian rendition of equality and fairness.  For example, Hanson points out (pp. 131-132) that the “chief diversity and inclusion officer” in a major city fired a prominent, white city employee in 2017 on the basis of race, because it was deemed necessary to “uplift our identities and our separate ethnicities in order to instill a sense of pride and community and support for one another.”  Thus, we see that tribalism is a way to give social preferences to individuals based on superficial appearance rather than on merit or the legal treatment of citizens.

Conclusion: Throughout history, republics have waxed and waned (see the 8/1/22 blog posting).  The U.S. Republic and its citizens are now under duress, based on three metrics that Hanson has presented: First, a bimodal distribution of peasants and masters has largely replaced an economically autonomous middle class via unfair trade and ruinous debt (see the 9/1/22 blog posting).  Second, open borders, combined with patron-politicians and client-voters, have replaced the ideal of assimilated citizens with the fact of “mere residents.”  Third, a retribalization of society has occurred, in which superficial appearance has largely replaced merit and the legal rights of citizens.  Based upon this evidence, it would seem (to the current reviewer) that the prognosis for U.S. citizens and their republic on this Constitution Day is for a future that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as its ruling class attempts to retain power.  There is always the possibility, however, that U.S. citizens might discover a previously unknown, modern-day Horatius at their bridge into the future, a Horatius who might ward off attackers and prolong the tenuous existence of the U.S. Republic.

The Peasant as a Type of Pre-Citizen

One month ago on this website, we began a discussion of the historical waxing and waning of republics, which is the subject of Victor Davis Hanson’s excellent book, The Dying Citizen (Basic Books, 2021).  Hanson references Kantian political theory before proceeding to focus on U.S. citizens.  

Section 46 of Kant’s Metaphysical Elements of Justice [Metaphysische Anfangsgruende der Rechtslehre], which is a subset of his Metaphysics of Morals [Die Metaphysik der Sitten], defines citizens as the members of civil society who are united for the purpose of forming a republic and making laws.  The citizen has three characteristics: the lawful freedom to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent; equality with all others before the law; and civil independence, or the responsibility for the provision of his own support as a member of the commonwealth.  Proceeding from the presupposition that a citizen must be sufficiently muscular in order to wield the tools of war and commerce, thereby becoming “materially invested” in the success of the state; Kant finds that people such as apprentices, servants, minors, and women, etc., may be designated as “fellow comrades of the state,” but not as voters or citizens - - at least not in the year 1797.

It is to be emphasized that there are three basic characteristics of a Kantian citizen: freedom to choose one’s republic and vote for its laws, equality before the law, and economic autonomy.

In Section 47 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant introduces the notion that the act by means of which the people constitute themselves as a state (a civil society with coercive power) is the original contract.  (One assumes that “the people constituting themselves” may be a one-time constitutional convention, an accumulation of historical precedents, or some combination thereof.)  The people give up their external freedom and take it back immediately as members of a commonwealth (republic).  An individual, as a “pre-citizen,” abandons his wild, lawless freedom (the Hobbesian “perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceases only in death”) in order to find his freedom as a law-abiding citizen.  

One notes here a certain, ever-present danger of equivocation on the term “pre-citizen.”  First, that term may refer to hypothetical or quasi-mythical individuals lost in the mists of time, some of whom are said to have participated in a legendary constitutional convention or to have memorialized certain political precedents.  Alternately, that term may refer to a definite population from which were drawn certain known individuals who participated in an actual constitutional convention.  Finally, that term may refer to contemporary, erstwhile citizens who have lost their previously inalienable rights due to a revolution against a previously established republic.

According to Hanson, there are three types of pre-citizens: peasants, “mere residents,” and tribes.  Today, the concept of peasant focuses primarily not on an originally agrarian type of work, but rather on an abject subservience and lack of upward mobility.  In the third blog posting in this series (8/1/22, 9/1/22, and 9/17/22), the concepts of “mere residents” (individuals purporting to have the rights of citizenship without the corresponding duties) and of tribes (individuals purporting to have social preferences based on superficial appearance rather than on legal merit) will be discussed.

In the Kantian analysis of citizenship, it would seem to follow that if the constitution of a republic is corrupted by physical violence or by an Orwellian redefinition of terms; then erstwhile citizens will be divided de facto into one or another of two new classes: either a newly subjugated, non-free, unequal, and dependent class of “pre-citizens,” analogous to the “head count” of ancient Rome and sorely in need of a new constitutional convention; or a newly privileged ruling class of “post-citizens,” by which is meant a class of overlords who rule as unelected bureaucrats, evolving-document theorists, and economic globalists.

The thesis has often been advanced that a republic and its citizens depend on the existence of a middle class that can moderate some occasional political storms.  (Hanson notes on his pages 22-23 that this idea dates back to the ancient Greeks, who doubted the reliability of the poor, who could not afford weapons; as well as the zeal of the rich, who were too indolent to defend their polis.)  Failing such a middle-class defense, a republic can easily bifurcate into a new class of contemporary pre-citizens who lose the enforceability of their rights, however recently deemed to have been inalienable; and into a new class of post-citizens who gain overlordship via purported expertise in public administration, in flexible legal interpretation, and in beneficent economic redistribution.  

Kant’s third criterion for citizenship, namely, that citizens be civilly independent (economically autonomous) is violated in case the middle class does not have the material resources to resist encroachments against its freedoms.  If a middle class sees declining economic circumstances and ruinous debt (think: unfair trade and trillions of dollars of student-loan debt); then the corresponding republic wanes, its citizens move away and/or die off, and a bimodal distribution of peasants and masters arises.  In this case, Hanson writes on his page 15, “the function of government is not to ensure liberty but to subsidize the poor [in order] to avoid revolution and to exempt the wealthy” from adverse outcomes of government policy.  The wealthy then “reciprocate by enriching and empowering the governing classes.”

On his pages 40-42, Hanson points out that the contemporary U.S. middle class foresees very limited possibilities for long-term employment and family formation; and a much greater likelihood of becoming peasants resembling their rural predecessors in having few options.  However, some problematic options do exist: Hanson writes of two recent, government-sponsored advertisements for ameliorating individual helplessness via public largess.  First, the Pajama Boy (2010), an Obamacare supporter, portrays a young man who appears self-assured and at ease while pitching Obamacare despite wearing a child’s red-plaid pajamas.  This advertisement, Hanson finds, is an inadvertent confirmation of de Tocqueville’s warning about the connection between government subsidies and eternal childishness.  Second, the Life of Julia (2012) is the story of a woman reflecting back on her satisfying lifetime of harvesting public payments and accommodations, all the while oblivious to the looming financial problems of the Social Security system.  Neither the Pajama Boy nor Julia offer a real solution to the contemporary violation of Kant’s third criterion for citizenship.

In sharp distinction to Julia’s lifetime reflections on her dependency, Hanson (on his page 60) can reflect back on his “free-range” childhood in Fresno County, California, and see something completely different: He and his siblings could wander unsupervised over miles of rural countryside as the children of free citizens in a stable Republic.  By today, however, that Republic - - a least in its previous incarnation - - has already fallen; because its citizens, having run afoul of Kant’s third criterion for citizenship, have for the most part gone bankrupt, moved away, and are dying out.  Indeed, allowing children so to roam the countryside today would be considered as a form of child abuse because of ubiquitous gangs, untethered fighting dogs, and illegal, toxic trash dumps.  The Republic that we see today does indeed seem largely to have achieved the bimodal distribution of peasants and masters that Hanson has described.

Waxing and Waning Republics and Their Citizens

The democracy of ancient Athens managed, in effect, to vote itself out of existence via military misjudgments during the Peloponnesian War.  The Roman Republic had a mostly unwritten tradition (constitution) of limitations upon its democratic assemblies; but the Gracchi brothers, while serving as tribunes, undermined those limitations by imposing various costly policies: Land redistribution in the country, cheap grain in the cities, shovel-ready infrastructure jobs for the unemployed, and overseas colonies for the landless.  Opposition to these policies initiated a new tradition of political violence culminating in the collapse of the Roman Republic and the institution of the Roman Empire.

In the subsequent Western tradition, there is a history of kings, oligarchs, tyrants, or democratic assemblies presiding over populations of subjects, clients, persons of indefinite servitude, or citizens, etc.  (This listing is not meant to be exhaustive.)  To the extent that democracies and republics have track records of fairly miraculous creation and ultimate collapse, one expects any given population occasionally to transition between a more-democratic status and a less-democratic status.  Indeed, an analytic industry for ranking democracies has sprung up online.  In other words, democracies and republics wax and wane.

Kings, oligarchs, and tyrants typically seize power and assign populations to subordinate status.  Successful democratic uprisings or constitutional conventions are relatively rare and assign populations to the status of citizen.  It would seem that a relatively leisured class - - of independent means, if not of wealth - - must first exist and take the lead in forming a republic before an entire population can assume its role as citizens.  Theorists typically assume that a republic is maintained in existence by all its citizens.

If, as Benjamin Franklin said, the U.S. Constitutional Convention “gave you a Republic, if you can keep it”; and if a class of independent U.S. citizens is necessary for the maintenance of the U.S. as a republic; then any factors that degrade and depopulate the class of independent U.S. citizens also undermines the Republic established among them. This is the current writer’s formulation of the concern expressed by the author Victor Davis Hanson in his excellent book, The Dying Citizen (Basic Books, 2021).  In the Introduction to his book, Hanson mentions the theory of democracy as expounded by Kant in Teil I of his Die Metaphysik der Sitten.  (This Part I is also known in English as The Metaphysical Elements of Justice.)  This blog posting summarizes Kant’s work in this regard.

We note at once that the U.S. Constitutional Convention occurred in 1787, whereas Kant’s analyses of “perpetual peace” and “metaphysical elements of justice” appeared in 1795 and 1797, respectively.  These political developments seem to have developed in parallel from a common Zeitgeist.

In Section 44 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant states that the necessity of public lawful coercion is not empirical but rests on an a priori idea of reason, namely, that even if we imagine mankind before the institution of government to be entirely congenial and good-natured; individual men, nations, and states can never be certain of being free from future violence, because each man in a state of nature has a right to do what seems to him to be just.  (Note that a nation is a group of people with some commonality of language, history, socio-economic traditions, culture, religion, place of origin, etc.; whereas a state is a group of people under a common, lawful government with coercive power.)  If one wants a system of justice, then one must quit the state of nature and join in a civil society (societas civilis), i.e., a state that recognizes some things (external goods and intrinsic dignity) as one’s own.  Acquisition of things and of rights are only provisional as long as there is no sanction of public law.

In Section 45 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant further describes the state (civitas, sometimes rendered in English as civil state) as the union of a multitude of people under laws of justice.  Every state contains three authorities: The sovereign authority resides in the person of the legislator; the executive authority resides in the person of the ruler (who conforms to the law); and the judicial authority resides in the person of the judge (who decides who is due what in particular cases).

In Section 46 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant discusses the legislative authority and the citizen.  The members of civil society who are united for the purpose of making laws are called citizens (cives).  The citizen has three juridical attributes: First, he has the lawful freedom to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent.  Second, he is equal to all others before the law.  Third, he is civilly independent, owing his existence and support, not to someone else’s arbitrary will but rather to his own rights and industry as a member of the commonwealth.

Kant thinks that “fitness for voting is a prerequisite of being a citizen.”  Apprentices, servants, minors, and women - - on Kant’s view in 1797 - - are examples of dependent persons who are not themselves citizens and who do not have a right to vote, because they are not materially invested in the success of the state.  People without the right to vote may be designated as “fellow comrades of the state,” but not as citizens.  The presupposition seems to be that a citizen must be sufficiently muscular in order to wield the tools or war and commerce.  Hence, even the most enlightened, Kantian thought endorsed the concept of “material investment” as a prerequisite for voting and citizenship.

In Section 47 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant introduces the notion that the act by means of which the people constitute themselves as a state is the original contract.  The people give up their external freedom and take it back immediately as members of a commonwealth.  An individual abandons his wild, lawless freedom in order to find freedom within lawful dependency.

In the next blog posting we will summarize V. D. Hanson’s discussion of the contemporary waning of a U.S. citizenry overwhelmed by population groups once thought to be inimical to a republic: peasants, residents (as in “mere residents”), and tribes.

Structural Racism, Identity Politics, and Re-tribalization

For those interested in the flourishing of the United States in a historically recognizable form, despite adverse criticisms under the headings of “structural racism” and “identity politics”; and despite an implied imperative for a “re-tribalization of society”; a single page from the Opinions section of a recent day’s print edition of the Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, September 7, 2021) is of considerable interest. 

William McGurn remarks in his article, The Real Structural Racism, that if ever there were a structure impairing the success of African-American students, then it would be the public schools in major cities of the U.S.  In the most recent results (2019) of the National Assessment of Educational Progress for 27 U.S. urban school districts - - from Boston to Los Angeles - - none of these school districts can say that a majority of its black eighth graders are proficient in either math or reading.  Detroit’s results are worst of all, showing a 4% proficiency in math and a 5% proficiency in reading.  The highest proficiency in math (24%) was achieved in Charlotte, while the highest proficiency in reading (20%) was achieved in Boston.  Meanwhile, the most richly supported public schools spent from $16,543 per student (Seattle) to $28,004 per student (New York City).

There is no mention of cinematography in McGurn’s article, but we note in passing that a recent popular film, Hidden Figures, chronicled a very talented trio of high-achieving black female workers in the highly technical NASA programs (“Space Race”) of the 1960’s.  (The filmmaker took some liberties with historical facts, but those liberties seem not to invalidate the focus of the film.)  This trio of technical workers was doubly blessed, being not only talented but also coming from solid family backgrounds.  Seeing the universal in the particular, as we are wont to do whenever appropriate, there is no good reason not to expect high scores in math and reading among contemporary black eighth graders who live in solid family backgrounds conducive to the completion of homework.

McGurn notes that some progressives, embarrassed by the meager educational results for black eighth graders, have shifted their focus to getting rid of the achievement tests that expose this failure.  Once free of irksome tests for eighth and twelfth graders, it is proposed that future reliance on race-based college admissions can disguise academic deficiencies.  As various courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, consider suits stemming from race-based college admissions, McGurn suggests that the key question to consider is: Do school failures at the eighth (and subsequent) grade levels justify rigging college admissions to exclude some high-achieving students in favor of other applicants whose acceptance, due to “social-promotion,” will devalue college degrees?

By “identity politics,” the current reviewer understands any process that privileges or penalizes certain individuals in society on some basis other than objective merit, including the property rights that express the wills of meritorious individuals.  Non-meritocratic factors include ethnicity, race, culture, religion, and language.  Any full-scale program of identity politics includes the destruction of the notion of objective merit, leaving one to wonder whether an identity-politics enthusiast would really prefer that the pilot of his next flight be chosen from an ethnic lottery rather than from a pool of competent and tested individuals.

Discussions of identity politics often employ, confusingly, the problematic terms “tribe” and “tribalism.”  A tribe in the ancient Roman Republic (509 to 27 B.C.) was one of the 35 geographically-determined voting blocs of the Roman plebeians in their Council of the Plebs.  However, the plebs defined themselves in opposition to the patricians.  If “identity politics” is to be read into the ancient Roman world, then this reading would seem to be based upon the struggle between plebs and patricians; and not upon any difficulties between tribes, all of whom were plebeian.  Nevertheless, we will take “tribe” to refer to be any grouping of people according to ethnicity, race, culture, language, or religion.

The entire project of reading “identity politics” back into ancient Roman history is problematic: When the armies of Rome first confronted Germanic tribes in the Cimbrian War (113-101 B.C.), the Romans certainly disdained what they saw as the Germans’ inferior culture, religion, and language.  But the (relatively brown) Romans did not disdain the (relatively white) Germans based on skin color; because, as the classical philologist V. D. Hanson has written in his article, Classical patricide, “Whiteness itself was a concept completely unknown to the Greeks and Romans. No such word exists in the classical vocabularies of the ancient world, the supposed font of endemic Western racism.”

In his article, Identity Politics Goes Global, Walter Russell Mead surveys some political trends of the past century or so that reveal identity politics to be destructive in the sense of reducing a nation’s domestic prosperity and stability, as well as its international influence and security.  

Mead notes that many modern African nations inherited geographical boundaries from colonial times, irrespective of historical tribal boundaries.  The post-World War II presupposition among professional diplomats was that tribalism was primitive, atavistic, and ethically tacky.  Modern diplomacy then assumed that any tribe member assigned to a certain, modern-day nation would automatically be pleased to vote alongside the members of all other tribes within that nation.  Hence, there was a wide-spread expectation that tribalism would wane even while allegiance to the rulers within newly defined national boundaries would flourish.  

In defiance of the expectation for the straightforward development of African nations, some of those new nations broke up due to cultural, religious, and language factors.  The citizens of some failed states saw no good reason to be co-governed by members of cultural, religious, and language groupings other than their own.  In Nigeria, the central government has not been able to suppress Christian-Muslim conflict that has led to tens of thousands of deaths.  In South Africa, Zulus have staged a recent insurrection (or at least a quasi-insurrection) in support of a former national leader.  Similar conflicts have arisen in the regions near Ethiopia and Sudan.  Sudan spun off South Sudan in 2011; South Sudan may further split.  English-speakers and French-speakers are battling each other in Cameroon.  Economic development has not overcome tribal differences in these cases.

Mead sees other historical examples of identity politics as well: In Eastern and Central Europe before World War I, increasing education and self-awareness led to nationalistic aspirations among groups within the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires. The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist precipitated World War I.  Today, fierce fighting exists within such countries as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon; and this fighting can be viewed as the result of identity politics.

Mead likewise observes that “many Americans wonder whether a common U.S. identity is strong enough to contain the forces that threaten to splinter the country permanently into hostile racial, religious, and ideological camps.”

The current reviewer observes that “civic religion” and economic development in the U.S. helped to create a melting pot of people who agreed to pursue economic interests; to promote abstract notions of international justice; and to ignore traditionally contentious issues in the realms of culture, religion, and language.  Thus, the U.S. is the unique, centuries-long experiment of creating and maintaining a non-tribal society based on merit.  The current effect of identity politics is to reverse the melting-pot process, to drive wedges between ethnic groups, to override evaluations based on merit, to instill doubt about the results of one’s next airplane trip or surgical procedure, and to re-tribalize society under new bureaucratic leadership.