Self-Government Depends on Distinct Citizenship and Civic Assimilation
Victor Davis Hanson argues that American self-government rests on citizenship as a distinct political status, reinforced by assimilation into a common civic culture, a broad economically independent middle class, and national allegiance stronger than ethnic or other group loyalties. He contends that blurred lines between citizenship and residence, large-scale immigration without sufficient incorporation, economic dependency, and identity-based politics are weakening the conditions on which consensual government depends.
Citizenship is the institutional basis of self-government
Victor Hanson treats citizenship as the institution that links political consent, assimilation, economic autonomy, and allegiance to a common national culture. His test for a democracy’s health is not a general declaration that it is endangered, but whether citizenship remains a meaningful and distinct political status: one that gives citizens a particular role in determining their government, taxes, military obligations, and the conditions under which they live.
That premise, Hanson argues, is historically unusual. Across much of roughly 7,000 years of recorded history, he says, people were principally slaves, serfs tied to land, or subjects of rulers. The Greek city-state introduced a different arrangement around 700 BC: a political community in which people could participate in public decisions affecting them. The Greek polites and Roman civis supplied the roots of “political” and “citizenship.”The terms matter because they describe membership in a self-governing polity.
That tradition was intermittent rather than continuous. Hanson traces its decline in Greece after Alexander, its reemergence in Rome, its survival in Byzantium, and later revivals through the Magna Carta, Renaissance, and Enlightenment. Its core principle, in his formulation, is consent: residents of a state can help determine its form of government and the terms under which they are governed. Aristotle’s formulation, as Hanson presents it, joined citizenship to freedom—to “live as you please.”
The present danger, he contends, is that citizenship has become less distinguishable from residence. He lists functions that once separated the two: voting, leaving and returning to the country on one’s own authority, participating in campaigns, holding office, and military service. In his view, holding office may be the only status still fully reserved for citizens, and even that boundary is contested by those who favor permitting noncitizens to hold office.
His examples are meant to illustrate the erosion of those distinctions rather than to stand as the argument itself. Hanson points to military participation by legal resident noncitizens and people who entered illegally, as well as school-board elections in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Francisco that he says permit noncitizens to vote. He recalls seeing a traveler at San Francisco International Airport taken aside after arriving without a passport, despite identifying as a U.S. citizen. Hanson contrasts that incident with what he describes as routine days at the southern border when thousands entered and left without authorization.
He also cites Christopher Steele, whom he describes as a British subject employed through Fusion GPS, the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and ultimately the Hillary Clinton campaign. Hanson says he knows of no penalties Steele faced for what he characterizes as illegal participation in a presidential campaign. The larger point is that a political order cannot rely on citizenship as a source of consent if its practical privileges and obligations no longer clearly attach to it.
Assimilation needs a civic status to attach to
For Hanson, the distinction between citizenship and residency matters because civic incorporation is not automatic. A multiracial, multiethnic democracy requires assimilation, integration, and intermarriage if race is to remain incidental rather than politically essential, he argues. He describes the United States as the only large democracy in history that has been both multiracial and fully democratic while succeeding; India and Brazil, often offered as comparisons, do not qualify in his view because of informal caste systems and racial arrangements that remain central to public life.
The issue is not simply demographic diversity. It is whether people entering the country acquire a common civic vocabulary and a reason to see themselves as members of the same political body. That includes basic knowledge of the Gettysburg Address, the functions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and the broader account of why American citizenship carries obligations as well as benefits.
Hanson uses the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act to illustrate what happens when the practical difference between legal residency and citizenship narrows. He describes the law as offering blanket amnesty through which people unlawfully in the country could obtain citizenship. In his account, 30 percent of those eligible chose citizenship and 70 percent chose green cards. Those who did not pursue citizenship commonly offered two reasons: they saw little practical difference between residency and citizenship, and their children born in the United States would become citizens anyway.
He further maintains that European countries do not automatically confer citizenship simply because a child is born on their soil, describing their systems as requiring citizen parents for automatic citizenship. Whatever the particulars of comparative citizenship law, the implication Hanson draws is straightforward: citizenship loses some of its integrative force when people perceive little reason to seek it.
Hanson places that concern against what he calls an unprecedented scale of foreign-born residence. He puts the total number of people in the United States who were not born there at 55 million, including citizens, legal residents, and people living illegally. He estimates that about 30 million are unlawfully present, with the remainder divided roughly between naturalized citizens and green-card holders, and characterizes the share as larger than major nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigration waves.
His central claim is that incorporation becomes more difficult as the number of newcomers grows relative to the surrounding citizen population. Prior knowledge of English and legal status also matter, he says, but numbers matter most. A resident who is immersed among citizens rather than surrounded principally by people from the same country of origin is more likely to absorb the civic reasons behind the decision to join the United States.
The more a resident is immersed around other citizens, the quicker they assimilate and by a process of osmosis, they learn something about why they wanted to come to America.
Residents may understand concretely that they chose to leave one country for another, Hanson suggests, without yet possessing an abstract account of the political community they have joined. Assimilation supplies that account. It turns a decision to reside in America into an understanding of why one wishes to become part of its civic order.
Consent depends on citizens who are economically independent
Hanson’s second condition for self-government is a large and autonomous middle class. He uses “peasantry” not as a description of rural life but as a condition of dependency: people who are not viable, independent members of the middle class and instead depend on government, wealthy patrons, creditors, or other powers.
He dates the relevant globalization period roughly from 1990 to 1910, during which he says middle-class real wages gradually diminished before stabilizing around 2016 and then gaining purchasing power. The benefits and costs, in his account, were distributed according to the kind of work people did.
Professionals in high technology, law, corporations, academia, and writing—particularly in the bi-coastal corridors where Hanson locates capital and universities—gained access to a consumer base, clientele, or audience of billions rather than hundreds of millions. Workers in assembly, manufacturing, mining, timber, agriculture, and other muscular or extractive occupations faced a different reality. If their labor could be outsourced or offshored, Hanson says, it was. He identifies the decline of the Rust Belt as a consequence.
The civic problem is not inequality in the abstract but dependence. Hanson says about half of Americans die with less than $10,000 in net worth and that roughly 40 percent carry credit-card debt when they die. He offers those figures to show a population with limited reserves and continuing obligations. High credit-card rates, he suggests, reflect not only deliberate default but also debts that remain unpaid when people die with no meaningful estate.
His historical model comes from Aristotle’s Politics and its discussion of the mesoi, or middle people. In the Greek city-state, Hanson describes them as independent landholding citizen-soldiers with plots of roughly 10 acres—something he compares to “40 acres and a mule” in later American language. They farmed their own land, bought and maintained heavy armor, and fought as hoplites in a phalanx whose effectiveness depended on mutual discipline.
Aerial archaeological surveys of Greek colonies, Hanson says, show gridlike farm plots, often about 10 acres each. The arrangement joined military, economic, and political life: citizens held property, occupied places in assemblies, and formed the militia. He does not present this as a prescription for enforced equality. Landholding could expand or contract according to skill and circumstance. What mattered was the presence of a broad middle group independent enough not to be ruled through dependency from below or concentrated privilege from above.
That independence is what protects a consensual order from its familiar distortions: ochlocracy, or rule by the mob; plutocracy, rule by the wealthy; aristocracy, rule by the well-born; and oligarchy, rule by a narrow elite. Hanson acknowledges that locating the origins of consensual government in the middle class may be a chauvinistic proposition. Still, he maintains that self-government requires citizens with enough economic independence to exercise judgment without being subordinated to patrons, creditors, state dependence, or elite wealth.
A commonwealth cannot be a federation of tribes
Hanson’s final condition is that civic allegiance must override tribal allegiance. The Latin tribus, he notes, originally referred to one of three ethnic divisions in the early Roman state; its later usage broadened to mean an ethnic group. The word’s English association with Native American history, he argues, obscures its much older origins.
Victor Hanson draws on Thucydides’ account of a world before the city-state, when people were organized through groups defined by shared appearance, religion, kinship, or inherited connection. Thucydides used a different term, genos, but Hanson sees the same political problem: a person’s first loyalty lay with a particular group rather than with a common political order.
In his reading, Solon’s Athens supplied the critical institutional change. The achievement was not the disappearance of inherited identities but their subordination to what Hanson calls an “artificial” allegiance to the commonwealth. People could vote and hold office as Athenians rather than as representatives of competing ethnic or kin groups. That transformation was radical precisely because it made consensual government possible.
The tribes had to be broken up and people’s allegiance had to be transformed to the state.
Hanson sees the United States moving in the other direction. He invokes Theodore Roosevelt’s objection to “hyphenated America,” meaning a culture in which people grant first loyalty to the identity that precedes “American.” In its current form, he argues, the tendency includes examining small fractions of DNA ancestry to claim affiliation with groups understood to carry political advantages or disadvantages.
He argues that comparable incentives have operated under very different racial systems. In an earlier era, particularly in the South, some people sought to establish or “pass” as white to obtain advantages within a racial order. Hanson cites the film Pinky as an example of that recurrent theme. Today, he contends, some people exaggerate or construct a nonwhite identity to seek benefits associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion or affirmative action.
Drawing on 22 years teaching in the California State University system, Hanson says he encountered students overstating ethnic backgrounds in admissions applications while helping send roughly 60 students to Ivy League schools. His most memorable example was a high-achieving student from Egypt who identified as African American and responded, when challenged, that Egypt is in Africa. Hanson compares that episode to Zohran Mamdani, whom he says identified as African American in a college application because he came from Uganda, though Hanson says he did not fit the university’s meaning of the category.
These examples support a broader concern about politics organized through caucuses, competing identity claims, and perceived group entitlements. Hanson sees that arrangement as producing fractionation and sectarianism, both of which he considers historically hostile to consensual societies. A common national identity, in his argument, need not erase differences among citizens. It establishes the political allegiance that must ultimately take priority over them.