The Dying Citizen

Picture a Roman citizen in the twilight of the Republic, watching as the very foundations of citizenship crumble around him. The parallels to modern America are striking and unsettling. Today, we find ourselves at a crossroads where the ancient ideal of citizenship—that sacred bond between individual and state built on mutual rights and responsibilities—faces unprecedented challenges from multiple directions.

This transformation didn't happen overnight. It represents a decades-long process where American citizenship has been systematically hollowed out by forces both ancient and modern. On one side, we see the return of pre-civilizational patterns: the medieval-style division of society into rich and poor, massive population movements that blur the lines between citizen and resident, and the dangerous revival of tribal loyalties that fragment our common identity. On the other side, a sophisticated elite actively works to transform citizenship itself, believing they can engineer a better system than the one bequeathed by the Founders. Together, these forces are creating what we might call "precitizens" and "postcitizens"—Americans who either cannot or will not embrace the full meaning of constitutional citizenship.

The foundation of American citizenship has always rested on a vibrant middle class—economically independent citizens who could participate meaningfully in democratic governance. This principle traces back to ancient Greece, where the mesoi, or "middle ones," formed the backbone of the world's first democracies. These small farmers and craftsmen possessed enough property to be independent but not so much as to become disconnected from their fellow citizens' concerns.

Today, this crucial middle class is vanishing before our eyes. The statistics paint a stark picture: 58 percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, while the average household carries over $8,000 in credit card debt. Home ownership, once the cornerstone of middle-class life, has become increasingly unattainable. In California's coastal corridor, young families find themselves priced out entirely, creating a medieval-like landscape of tech barons in their hilltop estates overlooking masses of service workers living in cars and trailers.

The causes of this transformation are complex but identifiable. Globalization has hollowed out manufacturing jobs, while regulatory burdens have strangled small businesses. College costs have skyrocketed even as the value of degrees has declined, leaving millions trapped in debt peonage. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve policies have destroyed the returns on savings, forcing middle-class families into risky investments or watching inflation erode their modest nest eggs.

This economic squeeze has profound political consequences. When citizens become dependent on government subsidies or corporate employers for their basic needs, they lose the independence necessary for true citizenship. The result is a new form of peasantry—not the rural serfdom of medieval Europe, but an urban and suburban dependency that is equally corrosive to democratic participation. Without economic autonomy, citizens cannot exercise the kind of independent judgment that constitutional government requires.

The COVID-19 pandemic starkly revealed these class divisions. While laptop-class professionals worked safely from home, essential workers risked their health for modest wages. Lockdown policies devastated small businesses while enriching large corporations and tech giants. The pandemic didn't create these inequalities, but it accelerated and highlighted the emergence of a two-tiered society that bears uncomfortable resemblances to pre-modern class structures.

The distinction between citizen and resident, once clear and meaningful, has become increasingly blurred in modern America. This erosion strikes at the heart of what it means to belong to a political community. Citizenship has always implied a special relationship—a compact between individual and state involving both privileges and duties that mere residency cannot provide.

The transformation began with the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which fundamentally altered the composition of American immigration. What followed was a steady conflation of legal and illegal immigration, culminating in today's reality where an estimated twenty million people reside in America without legal status. Sanctuary cities openly defy federal law, while politicians compete to offer ever-greater benefits to non-citizens, from healthcare to in-state tuition rates.

This situation creates a dangerous precedent: if residency alone confers most of the benefits of citizenship, then citizenship itself becomes meaningless. The careful balance that once encouraged assimilation and integration has been replaced by a system that often rewards those who break immigration laws while penalizing those who follow them. Legal immigrants wait years for processing while illegal immigrants receive immediate access to services and protection from deportation.

The rise of sanctuary cities and states represents perhaps the most visible challenge to this traditional understanding. When local governments refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, they effectively create a parallel system where residency alone confers many of the practical benefits of citizenship. This development reflects a broader philosophical shift toward viewing citizenship as merely one form of human rights rather than a special political relationship.

The consequences extend far beyond immigration policy. When the census counts non-citizens for purposes of congressional representation, it dilutes the voting power of actual citizens. When employers can hire illegal workers at below-market wages, it depresses wages for citizen workers. Most fundamentally, when a nation cannot control who becomes a member of its political community, it loses the ability to maintain the shared values and common culture that citizenship requires.

Perhaps no force threatens American citizenship more directly than the revival of tribal thinking. The great achievement of Western civilization was the gradual replacement of blood-and-soil loyalties with civic bonds based on shared principles and common citizenship. America took this ideal further than any nation in history, creating a country where people of all backgrounds could become fully American through assimilation and shared commitment to constitutional values.

This achievement is now under systematic attack. Identity politics has revived the ancient practice of sorting people into tribal categories based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other immutable characteristics. What began as an effort to remedy past discrimination has evolved into a comprehensive system that makes tribal identity primary and citizenship secondary. Universities now offer segregated dormitories and graduation ceremonies, while corporations and government agencies implement hiring and promotion systems based explicitly on racial and ethnic quotas.

The intellectual foundations of this tribal revival can be traced to cultural Marxists who, frustrated by the failure of class-based revolution in prosperous America, turned to race and gender as more reliable sources of grievance and division. Unlike economic class, which Americans can transcend through hard work and opportunity, racial and ethnic categories are presented as permanent and defining. This creates exactly the kind of permanent factional divisions that the Founders feared would destroy republican government.

The practical implementation of this ideology has proceeded through a vast apparatus of diversity training, affirmative action programs, and institutional policies designed to ensure "equity" rather than equality. Universities routinely segregate students by race for orientation programs and graduation ceremonies. Corporations hire "diversity officers" whose job is to monitor and enforce group-based thinking. Government agencies explicitly consider race and gender in hiring and contracting decisions, often in direct violation of the constitutional principle of equal protection under law.

The results are predictable and destructive. When people are taught to see themselves primarily as members of racial or ethnic tribes rather than as American citizens, they lose the common ground necessary for democratic deliberation. Politics becomes a zero-sum competition between groups rather than a search for the common good. Worse still, the emphasis on tribal identity encourages Americans to see their fellow citizens as oppressors or competitors rather than as partners in the great experiment of self-government.

While ancient forces of peasantry, migration, and tribalism threaten citizenship from below, a more sophisticated danger emerges from above: the rise of an unelected administrative state that has usurped many of the powers once reserved to elected officials. This vast bureaucracy, comprising 2.7 million federal employees across 450 agencies, now creates more binding rules each year than Congress passes laws.

The scope of bureaucratic power is breathtaking. Environmental Protection Agency officials can redefine "navigable waters" to include temporary puddles on private property. IRS agents can target conservative groups for special scrutiny during election years. FBI directors can launch investigations into presidential campaigns based on opposition research funded by political opponents. In each case, unelected officials exercise what amounts to legislative, executive, and judicial power combined.

This concentration of power in unelected hands represents a fundamental violation of the separation of powers that protects citizen liberty. When bureaucrats can make rules, enforce them, and judge violations of them, citizens have no recourse through the normal democratic process. The regulatory state has become a kind of shadow government, operating according to its own priorities and protected from popular accountability by civil service rules and bureaucratic complexity.

The Trump presidency revealed just how far this bureaucratic independence has advanced. Career officials openly boasted of their "resistance" to elected leadership, leaking classified information and slow-walking presidential directives they disagreed with. Former CIA officials praised the "deep state" as a check on democratic excess, apparently unaware of the contradiction between their position and constitutional government. When unelected officials believe they have the right to override the decisions of elected leaders, citizenship itself becomes meaningless.

Federal agencies now issue approximately 3,000 new regulations each year, compared to roughly 300 laws passed by Congress. These regulations carry the force of law and can impose criminal penalties, yet they are written by unelected bureaucrats who serve indefinite terms and operate largely beyond public scrutiny. The Federal Register, which publishes these regulations, now runs to over 80,000 pages annually—a volume that no citizen, and few elected officials, could possibly master.

Beyond the bureaucratic resistance to popular will lies a more fundamental challenge: a progressive elite that views the Constitution itself as an obstacle to be overcome rather than a framework to be preserved. These "evolutionaries" argue that the Founders' eighteenth-century framework cannot address twenty-first-century challenges and must be systematically transformed or replaced.

Their targets are familiar: the Electoral College, which they claim gives unfair advantage to rural states; the Senate, which provides equal representation regardless of population; the Second Amendment, which they see as a relic of a bygone era; and the Supreme Court, which they would pack with additional justices to ensure progressive outcomes. Each of these institutions was designed to protect minority rights and prevent the tyranny of the majority, but progressives now see them as obstacles to their vision of direct democracy.

The intellectual foundation of this revolutionary project rests on the belief that human nature has evolved since the Founding era and that constitutional limitations designed for an earlier age now prevent necessary progress toward equality and social justice. Progressives argue that the Founders' concerns about faction and majority tyranny were products of their time and that modern Americans can be trusted with more direct democratic power.

Rather than seeking formal amendments through the prescribed democratic process, political elites have instead promoted the idea of a "living Constitution" that evolves with the times—which in practice means that it can be made to say whatever contemporary majorities or judicial activists want it to say. Several states have joined a "National Popular Vote" compact that would effectively nullify the Electoral College without the inconvenience of a constitutional amendment.

This view fundamentally misunderstands both the nature of the Constitution and the realities of human nature. The Founders designed a system of checks and balances precisely because they understood that human nature does not change and that concentrated power will always be abused. Their framework was intended not to prevent change but to ensure that change occurs through deliberation and consensus rather than through the raw exercise of majority power.

The final threat to American citizenship comes from those who would dissolve it entirely into a broader global identity. These cosmopolitan elites, comfortable moving between New York, London, and Davos, see national citizenship as a parochial relic that prevents the emergence of a truly global community. They advocate for international governance structures that would supersede national sovereignty and for immigration policies that would effectively erase the distinction between citizen and non-citizen.

This globalist vision appeals particularly to wealthy Americans who can afford to live anywhere and who benefit from global labor markets and international trade. For them, American citizenship is less a source of identity and obligation than a convenient passport that facilitates their global lifestyle. They see no contradiction between advocating for open borders and living in gated communities, or between supporting global governance and sending their children to elite private schools.

The practical effect of globalist policies is to hollow out the meaning of citizenship for ordinary Americans while preserving its benefits for the elite. When international trade agreements override domestic labor protections, American workers lose the economic independence that citizenship requires. When international organizations claim authority over American domestic policy, American voters lose the political sovereignty that citizenship promises. When global migration makes citizenship just one identity among many, Americans lose the shared culture that citizenship depends upon.

The rise of China as a global power has exposed the naivety of the globalist vision. Rather than becoming more like the West as it became more prosperous, China has used its economic integration with the global economy to advance distinctly Chinese interests. American companies that do business in China find themselves subject to Chinese censorship and political pressure. American universities that accept Chinese students and funding find themselves constrained in what they can say about Chinese policies.

The globalist project ultimately rests on the belief that national differences are artificial and that all humans share enough in common to form a single political community. This ignores both the practical difficulties of governing across vast cultural differences and the deep human need for particular loyalties and local attachments. The result is not global citizenship but the destruction of citizenship altogether, leaving individuals atomized and powerless before global forces they cannot control or influence.

The story told throughout this analysis is ultimately about the tension between two visions of human political organization. On one side stands the vision of the Founders: a republic of citizens bound together by shared principles and mutual obligations, governing themselves through elected representatives constrained by constitutional limits. On the other side stands a newer vision: a managed democracy where expert administrators and global elites make the important decisions while ordinary people are reduced to consumers and clients of the state.

The forces threatening citizenship today—economic dependency, mass migration, tribal fragmentation, bureaucratic rule, constitutional revolution, and global governance—all serve to reduce the citizen from a sovereign participant in self-government to a subject dependent on the benevolence of his betters. This transformation represents not progress but regression to older forms of political organization based on hierarchy and dependence rather than equality and self-rule.

Yet the story need not end in defeat. The principles of constitutional citizenship retain their power to inspire and unite Americans across all the artificial divisions that threaten to fragment us. The path forward requires rekindling the economic independence that makes citizenship possible, reasserting the borders that define political community, and recommitting to the shared values that transcend tribal loyalties. Most importantly, it requires citizens who understand that their liberty depends not on the benevolence of experts but on their own willingness to participate actively in the hard work of self-government. The choice between citizenship and subjection remains ours to make.