The birth, benefits & burden of Western citizenship

The birth, benefits & burden of Western citizenship

On recent challenges to Western citizenship.

 

by Victor Davis Hanson

The New Criterion, January, 2022

What happens to a society when the pernicious ideas of an elite filter down to the masses, and the proverbial people sense the foundations of their own citizenship crumbling? When crime spikes, infrastructure erodes, airliners lack fuel to reach their destinations, borders become irrelevant, tribalism returns, and Americans lose confidence in their own elections and the wisdom of their Constitution, the most likely ultimate cause of such apparent systems collapse can be traced to an erosion of citizenship.

 

The assault on American citizenship

 

The current American national malaise and dread of collective decline display a variety of symptoms. One is a sense that the middle class is weakening. Another is that America’s southern border is becoming meaningless. Citizens also fear that woke identity politics are fueling a recrudescent precivilizational tribalism that threatens to endanger their lives and unwind the nation.

 

More formally, a vast and growing body of unelected functionaries now exercises more power over citizens than do elected officials. Credentialed elites across the professions are actively seeking to enfeeble or discard significant elements of the Constitution and the accompanying customs and traditions of nearly two and a half centuries. Self-described overseers wish to subordinate national interests and sovereignty to a higher globalist cultural allegiance and authority. All these diverse challenges still share a common denominator in the systematic destruction of what used to be called American citizenship.

 

Take the middle class, the traditional linchpin of consensual government. Until recently, middle-class Americans had suffered from decades of stagnant incomes, even as the country at large was affluent as never before. Middle-class and poor students now owe $1.7 trillion in aggregate college debt. That staggering sum is an indictment of the pernicious marriage of federal government subsidies of and guarantees to higher education. That nexus has indentured an entire generation without providing them in return the civic education and common skills and knowledge so necessary for active and vigilant citizenship. And most observers concede that these unfortunate debts simply cannot be paid back by those who incurred them.

 

 

The percentage of Americans owning homes—the modern equivalent of the founding ideal of land-owning and empowered citizens—is again declining. The average net worth of Americans at retirement is also plunging. About 40 percent of American adults can only make minimum payments on their mounting credit-card debt. Such stagnation occurs at the moment the federal government is borrowing trillions of dollars for the greatest array of redistributive entitlements in its history.

 

 

Once middle-class viability erodes, an ever-expanding government is asked to subsidize Americans in vain attempts to provide some of the entitlements that citizens once confidently earned themselves.

 

 

All these statistics have consequences for the nation as a whole. The ages at which Americans marry, have their first child, or buy a home have risen to new highs. American fertility rates reach new modern lows. The native-born population of the United States shrinks and ages. In circular fashion, once middle-class viability erodes, an ever-expanding government is asked to subsidize Americans in vain attempts to provide some of the entitlements that citizens once confidently earned themselves.

 

The result is the very government-induced dependency about which the nineteenth-century Americanophile Alexis de Tocqueville once warned: an ennui of prolonged adolescence replacing the pride and dynamism of the self-reliant citizen. From the time of Aristotle, political scientists have warned that consensual government cannot endure without the majority of the population transcending the dependency, volatility, and subservience of the poor, while also circumscribing the reach of an entitled, self-interested, and often disdainful elite. In a reductionist sense, the middle-class citizens, unlike the aristocracy and plutocracy, do not seek to win profitable government concessions. And unlike the poor, they do not depend on state redistributions.

 

Equally important for democracy is a sense of place, a common landscape in which American citizens are free and feel secure to craft their own culture and protect their laws and customs—without constant foreign threats, demographic pressures, and migratory challenges. What is true of America is true globally: Western civilization is at the crossroads. Without demarcated and fixed borders, citizenship becomes impossible. It devolves into a slew of contradictory and warring castes of alien residents, guest workers, and migrating tribes, each demanding the privileges of the legal citizen while claiming exemptions from his responsibilities. Citizenship’s values become diluted when no one knows precisely where the frontier ends or begins, and thus whether a particular farm, hamlet, or town is or is not protected by and responsible for a consensual government. A cacophony of languages confuses national allegiances, and overtaxed social services are the inevitable result when millions migrate across an open border and compound their first illegal act with a second of residing in a foreign country without permission.

An estimated twenty million foreign residents currently remain in the United States illegally. Over the present fiscal year, nearly two million foreign nationals are forecast to enter the United States without legal authorization. Most will likely cross the wide-open southern border unvaccinated and untested for covid-19, while Americans are warned that their government may go door-to-door to roust them out for inoculations. Yet without borders, we return to the scenarios of the Dark Ages of tribal migrations, when entire shadow populations vied with citizens for claims on the land, without any desire to acquire the language, customs, and traditions of their hosts.

 

Citizenship’s values become diluted when no one knows precisely where the frontier ends or begins, and thus whether a particular farm, hamlet, or town is or is not protected by and responsible for a consensual government.

 

America’s once-successful melting-pot approach to integrating, assimilating, and intermarrying legal immigrants has not been so much replaced by a “salad-bowl” alternative of primary allegiance to separate identities as it has been by sheer chaos. Millions of immigrants vote with their feet for better lives in the United States. Yet their American hosts increasingly have little idea why that is so, and none about how these migrants might rapidly become fellow citizens. The current faddish term of the moment—“woke”—is simply a new word for the ancient idea of tribalism, of destroying a citizenry’s common affinities and primary loyalties to a consensual government and replacing them with elemental kin ties and prejudices based on superficial appearances, shared languages, or religious zealotries.

 

Such tribalism—the incendiary stuff of ancient empires, as well as the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Rwanda—supersedes mere hyphenated names and identity politics. Race, not class, is considered the more immutable demarcation and therefore becomes a desirable and useful divide.

 

Certainly, the civil rights–era dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.—our character, not the color of our skin, is what matters—is increasingly challenged by a new reactionary wokist creed that to fight bad discrimination, one must embrace good discrimination. Or to put it another way, to curb racial obsessions, one must first become obsessed with racial differences. Few reflect that a large multiracial democracy is history’s rare, fragile, and volatile artifact, or that until recently America was about the only nation in history that had even tried such an ambitious project.

 

The diminution of the middle class, the porousness of our borders, and the proliferation of the dangerous idea that race is essential, not incidental, to who we are—all these occur almost innately. It is as if America itself is reverting to a premodern, precivilizational region, or a territory of peasants and residents, rather than a modern, industrial nation of empowered citizens whom the free world relies upon.

 

Yet, simultaneously, there are more deliberate and coordinated efforts of elites to curb or replace citizenship. Call them the postmodern bookends to our premodern forces of civic erosion. The unelected bureaucrats at the state and local levels now number in the millions. Recent scandals, controversies, and incompetencies within the alphabet soup of federal bureaucracies—at the cdc, nih, irs, doj, dod, fbi, and cia—share one common feature. Unelected but powerful federal employees often have infringed upon the rights of citizens to be free from government surveillance, from government hounding, from government warping of their private tax information, from government appropriation of constitutional freedoms, from bureaucratic alterations in their elections, and from infringement of their constitutional protections.

 

All these challenges to democracy are not new but a part of all historical governments. They were even common during the vast growth of the ancient Athenian bureaucracy, in the various governments residing at Versailles, and in both the czarist and Soviet Kremlin. Yet consensual societies, by their very equality-minded social and economic ambitions, are the most prone to creating an always growing bureaucratic state of “helpers.” All democracies and republics eventually suffer the appropriation of power by the unelected in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government. When one functionary has the combined power to make laws through edicts, then to adjudicate whether they are legitimate, and finally to enforce them with the power of the state, then there is no longer a free and consensual government.

 

Aside from the insidious unelected bureaucrats, there are more systematic and deliberate revolutionaries who seek to alter citizenship as envisioned by the founders. These are often supposedly the nation’s best and brightest legal minds, social activists, and elected officials. Yet the revolutionary progressives breezily talk of ending the 233-year-old Electoral College, the 180-year-old Senate filibuster, the 150-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court, and the sixty-year tradition of a fifty-state union—all revolutionary changes predicated on the hope of a vice president breaking a fifty–fifty tie in the Senate. These are merely the first agendas of those who also now question why senators are not proportionally elected as are those congresspeople in the House of Representatives and state legislatures, or why Supreme Court justices are not subject to periodic referenda as is true of many state appeals-court justices, or why ranked-choice voting is not used uniformly in federal elections as it was recently, for example, in the Democratic Party primaries for the New York mayoral race.

 

Common to all these multifaceted attacks on the way America has been governed is the leftist idea that our customs and laws never had any legitimacy, whether constitutional or legislative, given they did not result in an equality of result. Rather they supposedly reflect an endemic failure of government to ensure “equity”—the radical egalitarian idea of mandated equivalence that overrides all individual differences in ability, talent, energy, luck, and character.

 

The First Amendment has long been under assault by social-media monopolies and on campuses. Various schools of “critical legal theory” now argue that law enforcement, arrest, and prosecution should be selectively predicated on social, economic, and racial criteria rather than on legal statutes. When mayors, governors, and police chiefs cannot stop the mounting epidemic of inner-city violence, they blame the Second Amendment. Yet illegal, unregistered, and often stolen handguns or edged weapons—not so-called assault weapons—account for over ninety percent of all murders. On campus, constitutionally protected due process of those accused is selectively applied, depending on the political nature of the charge. Crying “hate speech” or “sexual assault” so often results in the suspension of all constitutional guardrails, as campus administrators vie to signal their rightousness as judge, jury, and punisher. In some sense, progressives now fear and loathe the First Amendment as much as they traditionally despised the Second.

 

There are other elite challenges to American citizenship. No nation has a longer history of uniquely stable constitutional government than the United States, not the ancient civilization of China, not Russia, not one in Europe. Yet economic globalization is now often conflated with envisioned global political harmonization, as if the natural expansion of quasi-free-market capitalism ensured the worldwide adoption of constitutional governments and thus like-minded national tesserae in a one-world mosaic.

 

No nation has a longer history of uniquely stable constitutional government than the United States, not the ancient civilization of China, not Russia, not one in Europe.

 

Our current Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, invited a so-called “racism expert” from the often-illiberal United Nations to audit America’s allegedly spotty record on race and equity. International commercial accords are predicated not on symmetry, but persist in operating under the sclerotic assumptions that unfair free trade with America was necessary for nations to reboot a stagnant post-war world. Global and Westernized elites at Davos currently talk of a future “Great Reset” in which nations adopt top-down reforms of their economies, determine their energy use according to transnational norms, and adopt global guidelines on everything from corporate governance to reparatory diversity policies.

 

Civic education, ancient American customs, and popular shared traditions are rejected as toxic because they are not perfect. Few acknowledge that the glue that held together an otherwise chaotic, unruly, and once-tribal America was composed of shared national and religious holidays, our collective respect for American icons, emblems, and traditions, and the appreciation of the reasons why most immigrants head for the United States while few Americans leave for homes elsewhere.

 

In sum, without a popular allegiance to a viable middle class, a defined and shared space with secure borders, and a common identity of being an American that transcends our particular tribes, there can be no citizenship. Nor can citizenship survive if our elites entrust its maintenance and protection to the millions who are unelected and unaudited but often invisible and powerful. Citizenship also will disappear if a few seek to alter the Constitution or change time-tried customs and traditions for ephemeral political advantage. And the American idea of governance and its ancient traditions will fade if forcibly synchronized with global trends.

 

Strangely, Americans often assume that their inheritance as citizens—entitling them to vote and hold office, to enjoy free expression, and to have freedoms protected by a 233-year-old Constitution—is commonplace, both now and in the past. Yet citizenship in a consensual society is not even the global norm today. Only about half the world’s individual nations even claim to be constitutional republics or democracies. And citizens were even rarer in the past.

 

 

The origins of Western citizenship

 

Civilization—as distinct from citizens and citizenship—began prominently seven thousand years ago with the birth of settled, urban, and stratified populations in the Near East and Mesopotamia. Intensive, irrigated agriculture allowed surpluses of labor and capital to be diverted to building cities, forming organized militaries, and establishing laws. Two millennia later, even more complex civilizations birthed still more sophisticated cultures in India, China, the Nile Valley of Egypt, on Crete, and throughout the Aegean. All these cultures mastered monumental temple-building, sophisticated record-keeping, and highly developed art.

 

Yet none of the first civilized dynasties and monarchies had any notion of citizenship, at least as we might now describe it. Subjects, peasants, and serfs could not vote on the laws they were subject to. Nor could they elect their own officials or audit their rulers. Free speech and autonomous courts, judges, and juries simply did not exist. The ability to craft monumental cities depended mostly on the coercive organization of labor and farming.

 

There is striking engineering brilliance evident in the pyramids at Giza (ca. 2600 B.C.), the Cretan palaces at Knossos and Phaistos (ca. 1600 B.C.), and the tholos tombs at Mycenae (ca. 1400 B.C.). But these centrally planned civilizations were largely organized from the palace by monarchs and theocrats. Even among those who were not legally defined as slaves, there was little idea that those who farmed or fought for a Mycenaean king, Egyptian pharaoh, or Cretan lord had any say over how, when, or why. Writing, as in the law code of Hammurabi (ca 1750 B.C.) or the Linear B inventories from Mycenae (ca. 1450 B.C.), was mostly confined to administrative edicts and the inscribed res gestae of the rulers. It is salutary to study these early preclassical civilizations, as well as those in China and India, and marvel at their scientific progress and their development of written scripts, but none of them evolved into what we would now call a constitutional or consensual system.

 

Citizenship proper arrived late in history, and at first only among a small number of people in the isolated valleys of rugged Greece.

 

Note that Western citizenship rarely had much, if anything, to do with race. Elsewhere to the north and west, poverty and tribalism predominated among Germanic and Gallic tribes. Most of present-day Europe was then sparsely populated, the haunts of warring tribes from the Atlantic to modern-day Ukraine. Descriptions of such “white” peoples in Caesar’s Gallic Wars and Tacitus’s Germania, while sometimes romantically condescending, are mostly Roman ethnocentric deprecations of tribal savagery beyond the Alps, Danube, and Rhine. “Freedom” (Freiheit) is a word of Germanic origin that originally reflected a natural wildness rather than the ability to retain liberties within a complex and often urban environment. Migrating tribal peoples could do as they pleased only because of an often-empty countryside—and not due to the later impulse of libertas in classical citizens to be free from the overreach of a ubiquitous state. Civilization’s more difficult task, then, was to define and protect a citizen’s rights within a stationary, literate, and complex society.

 

Citizenship proper, however, arrived late in history, and at first only among a small number of people in the isolated valleys of rugged Greece. After the final collapse of the Mycenaean Greek palatial civilizations in the twelfth century B.C., and the gradual ascendence out of the four centuries of the subsequent depopulated Greek Dark Ages, something quite strange in history appeared in eighth-century Greece. A novel idea of a more decentralized and consensual civilization emerged among some 1,500 small Greek city-states or poleis. Despite periodic dalliances with authoritarianism, the tyrants, strongmen, aristocrats, and monarchs in these communities were increasingly forced to share governance with a broader emerging land-owning class.

 

Why such a singular and unprecedented change? We are not sure. But population growth; increased emphases on intensively farmed grains, grapes, and olives; the rise of armored infantrymen or hoplites; and the well-protected and isolated valleys blessed with a Mediterranean climate all seemed to combine and become force multipliers of a growing agrarian middle group.

 

These emerging citizens were intent on protecting their newfound private property from confiscation and curbing burdensome taxes. The reality that residents could congregate most of the year outdoors in good weather facilitated frequent mass assemblies of most of the voting population, in a way impossible, for example, in northern Europe.

 

Unlike the subjects and serfs of prior dynasties, the city-states invented the idea that at least half the residents who owned small farms had the unique right to say what they wished. They won the privilege to elect their own officials and to vote on their taxes, budgets, and when to go to war. Their equal seats in outdoor assemblies were mirror images of their slots in the infantry phalanx. Both reflected the agrarian grid of small farms outside of town. The city-state ethos reflected natural equality rather than a top-down enforced equity.

 

Unlike the subjects and serfs of prior dynasties, the city-states invented the idea that at least half the residents who owned small farms had the unique right to say what they wished.

 

This new economic autonomy fostered political independence. City-states of stationary peoples insisted on demarcated borders—often marked by formal boundary stones in addition to natural rivers and mountain ranges. Inside them, unique laws, customs, and traditions united the citizenry of the particular polis for generations. Borders made Thebans distinct from their Athenian neighbors, and both from the vale of the Spartans. Borders encouraged civic solidarity and security. Ancient familial loyalties slowly atrophied once a defined space had united disparate tribes. The Greeks relegated their pre-city-state past to vestigial chauvinistic myths and replaced such clannish bonds by shared fealty to constitutional states.

 

Statesmen were wary of popular pushbacks if they changed civic rules for temporary advantage. Unelected officials were necessary, but when they grew too numerous and intrusive were blasted by comic dramatists and rhetoricians. No one comes off worse in Aristophanes’ comedies than the lifelong politician or busybody bureaucrat. Enlightened Socratic philosophers of the more sophisticated and wealthy city-states talked of Greeks grandly as “citizens of the world” (“cosmopolitans”) well beyond the Aegean. But rarely were these dreamers given the reins of government to reify their sketchy utopianism. Philosopher kings remained the stuff of Plato’s utopianism.

 

By the late sixth and early fifth century, the result was a spate of monumental temple building, an expansion of the Panhellenic Games, the canonization of epic and lyric poetry, the emergence of natural philosophy, and the beginnings of drama, history, and sophisticated scientific inquiry. The fragile Hellenic achievement of citizenship was brilliantly defended and enhanced at the battles of Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea, in the face of the successive invasions of the overwhelming forces of the transcontinental Persian Empire. It turned out that citizens who could determine their own fate could also fight more effectively than those who could not.

 

In such a diverse geography as Greece there were, of course, exceptions to the city-state model—as there are today with nations outside the West. The large, rich plains of Thessaly and Macedonia clung to Dark Age horse cultures of monarchy and hereditary aristocracies rather than pursuing intensive homestead farming.

 

Sparta solved the dilemma of its growing population and finite land by conquering the fertile plains of nearby Messenia and much of Laconia—and reducing their populations to serfdom to produce food under coercion. Sparta’s atypical but vaunted infantry largely grew out of an internal police force necessary to monitor a large population of restive helot serfs and indentured food producers. And the more the crack security forces of Sparta scoured the southern Peloponnese to put down internal unrest, the more they were away from home—and the more the legendary but tenuous Spartan fertility was endangered.

 

Soon, however, there arose concerns over combining consensual government with free markets and private property—paradoxes all too familiar to us moderns. Century-long political debates arose in the abstract among the philosophers such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle and often led to civic strife, graphically recorded by the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon.

 

Challenges to early Western citizenship

 

How, citizens argued, can a society retain the ideal of equality when natural differences in individual talent and industry, bad luck, or varying degrees of health all work against equality of result? Was freedom then always at war with an unnatural equality of result that required undue state force to sustain it? Was it then better to have the citizens roughly equal in perpetuity but equally less prosperous and less free?

 

As broad-based oligarchies began in many regions to evolve into democracies, where property qualifications eroded, more radical assemblies became untethered from past customs and constitutional parameters. Plato joked that the vote at Athens would eventually be extended to the animals of the polis who could logically complain that otherwise they were, unfairly, less equal than others.

 

When officials are elected, and laws and policies are made by majority votes, the Greeks wondered, who are the adults in the room that remind hoi polloi to save money for the future? Can anyone ever remind democratic voters that there is no paternal abstract “they” to take responsibility other than themselves? And when a democratic people without constitutional guardrails votes to do what it wishes on any given day—enslave or kill the Melians, send a democratic fleet to attack democratic Syracuse, or execute the admirals at Arginusae recently responsible for a stunning naval victory—is that a reflection of popular will or mob frenzy?

 

Citizens of democracies damned landed oligarchies as inevitably corrupted by rich insiders, with too many outsiders left out of power. Landed traditionalists in turn retorted that those unstable democracies pandered to the appetites of a supposedly ignorant mob and were capable of anything—and everything—at any time. Rome eventually felt it could solve these Hellenic dilemmas by fashioning a compromise, a representative republic of elected officials who would craft laws rather than allow mercurial citizens to vote directly on policies. The Roman Republic borrowed freely from the more conservative Spartan and Cretan constitutions in establishing checks and balances among what we call now the legislative, judicial, and executive branches.

 

Citizens of democracies damned landed oligarchies as inevitably corrupted by rich insiders, with too many outsiders left out of power.

 

As Romans studied the supposed abuses of Athenian democracy, they became energized to check the popular abuse of power. They settled on two consuls rather than one yearly chief executive and allowed tribunes of the “people” to exercise “veto” power over the wealthy and aristocratic Roman Senate. Most importantly, Rome initially saw that their system naturally required material prosperity and broad security to enable the time-consuming chores of self-governance. Early on Romans mastered the challenges of creating networks in all types of weather, leading to brilliantly engineered roads, aqueducts, and drainage canals to bring in clean water and dispose of sewage, as well as urban police and fire departments, and laws conducive to commerce. The material success of the Romans and the longevity of both their republic and empire had a profound effect on later generations of statesmen in the West, who more often emulated the pragmaticism of Roman governance than the volatility of the radically democratic Athenian model. The American founders assumed likewise that consensual government could not exist without a prosperous citizenry that in turn requires the sanctity of private property and the opportunity offered by a free-market economy.

 

Other contradictions of earlier Greek citizenship posed similar dilemmas for republican Romans. Who could be a citizen? Did citizenship require one to look Roman, to be native-born, or to speak Latin? The Romans eventually concluded that the Greek city-states had become ossified and static, never developing into a Panhellenic nation, because they lacked the mechanisms to incorporate and assimilate talented resident aliens, who often were more industrious than natives. Romans learned to be more inclusive by assimilating non-Romans and then non-Italians as citizens. By the third century A.D., Roman emperors and those in the ruling classes were occasionally not even native Latin speakers.

 

Rome had transformed the idea of citizenship into more of a creed of common values and traditions than a requirement of similar ethnicity and appearance. Civis romanus sum, “I am a Roman citizen,” as Cicero pointed out in the waning republic, soon became a badge of honor and a guarantee of privilege throughout the Mediterranean. Citizenship, not just the look of being Italian, was what gained respect and concessions. And yet, as the empire grew and aged, and non-Romans wished for the protections of Roman citizenship without its responsibilities, the population regressed to regionalism, sectarianism, and ultimately tribalism. What had once brought success unwound and in opposite fashion ensured decline.

 

Rome had transformed the idea of citizenship into more of a creed of common values and traditions than a requirement of similar ethnicity and appearance.

 

Unlike other imperial efforts, originally Roman culture and civilization had spread in ways that superseded its deadly legions. Romanity initially sought to assimilate and integrate conquered Gauls, Spaniards, North Africans, Asians, and eastern Europeans, who acknowledged that their newfound privileges of clean water and sanitation, the legal rights of habeas corpus, and protections from tribal violence were at least no worse than their own indigenous alternatives.

 

Yet more paradoxes arose as the Roman Republic transmogrified into world government. Within an integrated intracontinental economy, Romans reached unprecedented levels of affluence. But how then were citizens to retain their ancient agrarian virtues and respect for materially poorer past generations, central to republican government, when material paradise seemed in reach on earth?

 

Free markets had not just accommodated the burdens of consensual government but unfortunately spawned a pernicious luxus—what today we might call luxury to the point of decadence. Read Petronius’s brilliant first-century A.D. satirical novel The Satyricon to sense how the spiritual descendants of once-hardy rural Italians had fallen into gluttony, sexual debauchery, ennui, and sloth on the Bay of Naples. Roman luxus is presented as the catalyst of decline in the late-republican and early imperial literature of Catullus, Tacitus, and Suetonius, as well. The eventual answers to this dilemma of the deleterious dividends from an efficient global economy and stable governance were sometimes thought to be found in imported religious sects, most prominently a radically new Christian idea of the Sermon-on-the-Mount virtues of abstinence and poverty—or at least the idea of not fully indulging the appetites when to do so was both legal and materially easy.

 

Slavery was endemic to all ancient societies and exists in hushed pockets today in areas in Africa and Asia. The Islamic world enslaved as many Africans as did Westerners, who throughout the Mediterranean and eastern Europe were themselves often enslaved by Islamic Ottoman armies and Mediterranean pirates and buccaneers. Prior Greek debates over chattel slavey and its contradictions for a supposedly consensual society of free citizens were never resolved, at least in the sense of a singular Western end to what was universal throughout the world.

 

In the Western Roman Empire, the insidious and pernicious system of slavery persisted against occasional criticism, perhaps because it was never fully identified with race rather than with the endemic misfortunes of war or birth, and, equally, because the idea of leisure was seen as a necessary requisite of participatory government and civic education. That is, there was no state investment in the pseudoscience of racial superiority and thus, paradoxically, no embarrassment when slaves so often proved smarter and more industrious than their masters and thus more deserving of citizenship. Meanwhile, enslavement for some was self-servingly defined as necessary for the enhancement of freedom for others. Roman slave owners might shrug that they kept slaves because they had the power and desire to do so—and needed no supporting dogmas of either their own ethnic superiority or of natural servile inferiority. When anyone in theory could become a slave, slavery then became an equal-opportunity hazard. And by the same token, a potter in Athens who frequented the ecclesiae and law courts did so on the assurance that his slave was busy at work.

 

Throughout classical antiquity, there was a constant class war between the haves and have-nots, resulting frequently in horrifically violent revolutions. But the idea that government was created by citizens and thus could be adapted to enhance the opportunities of the oppressed, and the notion that free markets and private property made those inside the boundaries of a city-state or republic more prosperous than those outside, tended for a thousand years to prevent civilizational suicide.

 

The rebirth of citizenship

 

Given all these successes, why then did this classical experiment with citizenship come to an end in the West with the deterioration of Rome, though it persisted in various strains in the East at Constantinople?

 

The decline and extinction of the classical world is a long story. But the answer that later Western political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Locke, Montesquieu, Gibbon, and perhaps our own founders, took from the end of classical antiquity was that it is never easy for citizens to govern themselves unless they are well-informed, civically involved, unified, and prepared to fight enemies abroad while at home working to preserve ancestral values and shared traditions.

 

It is not sustainable to create a vibrant free market unless the winners share some of their largesse through private civic investment, philanthropy, and liturgies.

 

It is not sustainable to create a vibrant free market unless the winners share some of their largesse through private civic investment, philanthropy, and liturgies—and conduct themselves outwardly in spirit as if they were still of the middle class. It is not easy for such consensual governments to defend themselves when a cacophony of voices seeks to borrow and spend now, rather than to invest and save for later crises—whether Athens’s fourth-century B.C. fight over shorting military expenditures while swelling the Theoric Fund that subsidized public entertainment and festivals, or America’s accrual of nearly $30 trillion in debt at a time of spiraling entitlements and waning defense readiness. Declining fertility, a debased currency, a politically weaponized military, an ignorant and indifferent citizenry, and resurgent tribalism were often cited by Roman contemporaries as the catalysts of Western decline once the ancient virtues were forgotten. Affluence, then, as the Roman poet Catullus warned, could be a greater threat to consensual governance than poverty.

 

So, citizenship was for a time mostly lost after the end of classical antiquity. The ensuing poverty, insecurity, and depopulation of the European Dark Ages conspired to make it nearly impossible to resurrect. Yet centuries after Rome, empowered citizens gradually reappeared sporadically in medieval Britain, Renaissance Italy, the western and northern Europe of the Enlightenment, and among the colonies of North America—always amid more numerous tribal, autocratic, and dynastic enemies.

 

The American founders knew well the classical origins of their experiment with a constitutional republic—and its long, episodic, and checkered history—which served them well in their own revolutionary era. They worried about existential challenges all around. The rich too often felt they were wealthy because of superior breeding or divine blessings, and thus deserved exemptions found under monarchies and hereditary dynasties. Meanwhile, tribalists insisted that natural affinities lie first with those whom they looked most like. Clerks and scribes assumed that their intimacy with the gears and levels of government should give them the right to ignore the will of the people.

 

Too many abstract moralists whined that since constitutional government proved not perfect, it was simply no good.

 

Theocrats lectured that the divine should rule on Earth as well as in Heaven, while utopians felt their superior systems of governance could be stretched thin across the globe. The West has suffered all such challenges to citizenship during Hellenistic and Roman imperial times, the post-Roman Dark Ages, the Inquisition, the Napoleonic Wars, the two global conflagrations of the world wars, the carnage of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and an often-chaotic current world.

 

Almost alone, the new American Constitution sought ways to ensure that the small property–owning, commonsensical classes remained the bulwark of the new nation. In emulation of the success of the classical world, Americans built into their new system of governance innate ways to change and question the status quo, in the singular Western tradition of self-criticism and reexamination.

 

For all the subsequent dislocations of the vast frontier expansion, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Depression, the suffrage and civil rights movements, and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, America did not just endure, but became the freest, wealthiest, and most powerful nation in the history of civilization. Key to that miracle were the resiliency of American citizens and the rights and responsibilities entailed in that citizenship.

 

Americans are correctly confident people that enjoy the oldest continuous democracy on the planet, one that is the foundation for the wealthiest, most free, and most secure nation in history. But with such power and privilege ought to come not just responsibilities, but humility and some anxiety over the fact that our experiment is not the normal custom of the current world and never was in the past.

 

The enemies of citizenship are usually more numerous than its friends. And no democracy or republic survives if its participants come to believe that it always will, without need of collective sacrifice, tolerance of dissent, constant reinvestment in the middle classes—and knowledge and forbearance of their own past.

 

 

Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of The Second World Wars (Basic Books). He is The New Criterion’s Visiting Critic for the 2021–22 season and the 2018 recipient of the Edmund Burke award.

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 40 Number 5, on page 4