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.