The Dying Citizen

What makes a citizen different from a subject, a tribesman, or a consumer? Victor Davis Hanson argues that citizenship is the rarest and most fragile political construct in human history. It is not merely a legal status but a moral, economic, and civic compact. You inherit this achievement, but also the risk: republics collapse when citizens forget the habits that sustain them. The book as a whole is a tour from classical antiquity to twenty-first century America, revealing how civic trust, institutional restraints, economic middleness, and shared national culture build—and can quickly unravel—the idea of the citizen.

From Tribe to Citizen

In pre-political societies, human beings bound together by blood, not law. Hanson reminds you that the Greek polis was revolutionary because it forged identity through citizenship rather than clan. Cleisthenes reorganized Athenian life to replace tribal loyalty with civic duty, inaugurating the world's first political equality among free individuals. Rome refined this through the civis Romanus—the citizen-soldier bound by shared duty and law. For both cultures, citizenship demanded property, arms, and service; political freedom rested on economic independence and public virtue.

The American founders consciously extended that tradition. They combined ancient ideas of the self-reliant smallholder (Aristotle’s mesoi) with Enlightenment notions of rights and consent. The resulting Constitution, with its careful balance of powers and guarantees of speech, assembly, and due process, made citizenship both universal and conditional: anyone could rise to it, but only if all respected laws, duties, and the integrity of institutions. Hanson’s central thesis is that these preconditions—material security, civic education, and legal equality—are now eroding.

Modern Drift: Comfort and Amnesia

As prosperity spreads, self-restraint weakens. Hanson observes that long periods of peace and wealth can soften civic fiber: prosperous citizens start to see government as caretaker, not instrument. In the extreme, that mentality reverts to tribal or client-based dependence. It is a cycle familiar from antiquity—Athens after the Peloponnesian War, Rome after Augustus, and modern democracies when bureaucracy and entitlement replace voluntary action. The very freedoms that citizens enjoy tempt them to neglect the behaviors that freedom requires. (Alexis de Tocqueville made a similar observation in Democracy in America.)

Themes of Decline and Resistance

Across the book’s sections, Hanson tracks how citizenship decays under converging pressures: erosion of the middle class, unchecked immigration and the blurring of legal categories, tribal identity politics, bureaucratic autonomy, and elite reinterpretations of the Constitution. Each of these functions like a solvent, dissolving the cultural adhesive that holds a republic together. He warns that rights endure only when attached to explicit duties, that the rule of law survives only when applied impartially, and that equality of opportunity turns hollow when policymaking elites substitute their own progressive morality for democratic consent.

Yet this is not a lament alone. Hanson also gestures toward renewal. Citizenship can be rebuilt through education that conveys a common civic story, economic policies that restore middleness, and political courage that reins in bureaucratic and corporate overreach. Above all, it requires personal agency—citizens taking back responsibility for their institutions. By blending history with contemporary critique, the book becomes less prophecy of decline than manual for revival.

Core Idea

Citizenship is not self-sustaining. It is a rare inheritance requiring constant maintenance—economic balance, civic virtue, institutional restraint, and cultural cohesion. Lose those and a republic quickly becomes a hierarchy of dependents and rulers.

By tracing the continuity from classical civitas to modern America, Hanson offers a single sobering conclusion: free people do not lose liberty from invasion but from internal forgetfulness. The citizen’s task is to remember—to know the laws, to keep faith with institutions, and to guard the civic and moral boundaries that make freedom work.

A republic depends on its middle class, not just as an economic group but as a moral center. Hanson revives Aristotle’s argument that the mesoi—those neither rich nor poor—anchor moderation and civic health. In the modern United States, that balancing class is shrinking. Rising debt, stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, and educational inflation are forging what he calls a new peasantry: citizens technically free but materially dependent on creditors or government programs.

Classical Lessons

For Athens and Republican Rome, small property ownership meant independence; freemen who owned tools or land could resist both oligarchic and populist coercion. Hanson draws the parallel to postwar America, when affordable homes and family businesses created civic stakeholders. Autarkeia—self-sufficiency—was once the natural training ground of citizens. Lose that, and politics slides toward patronage and dependence. The collapse of middleness thus portends a shift from citizens to clients.

Economic Erosion

Modern metrics bear out the trend: most Americans have limited savings, while student debt has passed $1.6 trillion. Home ownership, which peaked at 70 percent, has fallen; education and health costs have exploded. Hanson illustrates this through his own California example—a house once affordable to teachers now priced beyond reach even for professionals. This 'feudalization of suburbia,' he argues, delays adulthood, suppresses family formation, and shrinks civic participation. Citizens who cannot imagine owning or building anything valuable tend to disengage or become dependent voters.

Cultural Consequences

Losing a confident middle leaves a polarized nation of wealthy elites—the 'clerisy'—and dependent masses. The elite earn prestige through advocacy of redistributive causes, often while insulating themselves from consequences via tax shelters, private schools, and global mobility. The poor receive state compassion; the middle pays the bill. Advertisements like the “Life of Julia” and “Pajama Boy” campaigns, Hanson notes, portray adulthood as perpetual bureaucratic care, not autonomy. Dependency begins to appear virtuous, self-reliance obsolete.

Warning

When the middle class ceases to be a culture of independence, the republic loses its political ballast. Power shifts upward to technocrats and downward to clients; neither sustains citizenship.

Hanson’s prescription mirrors his diagnosis: policies that restore productive work, rebuild small-scale property ownership, and encourage civic responsibility. Without a self-supporting majority, democracy becomes a staged contest between patronal elites and petitioning dependents—the very social order that citizenship first abolished.

Citizenship also depends on boundaries—both physical and moral. Hanson distinguishes residency from belonging: anyone can live within a border, but only citizens consent to the constitutional compact that defines a nation’s rights and duties. Modern U.S. immigration policies, especially after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act and the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli amnesty, blurred that distinction, encouraging large-scale entry without assimilation and weakening enforcement. The result, Hanson warns, is a slow dilution of civic coherence.

Law and Demography

The 1965 reform’s abolition of national quotas expanded immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, reshaping the American population. While diversity itself is neutral, the simultaneous erosion of assimilation—refusal to teach shared civics or English fluency—produces separate cultural blocs rather than an integrated citizenry. Add in sanctuary policies that defy federal law, and you gain political and fiscal contradictions: states benefit from counting noncitizens in congressional reapportionment, while local taxpayers absorb schooling and welfare costs.

Language and Elites

Hanson shows how rhetoric numbs legal clarity. 'Illegal alien' became 'undocumented immigrant,' then simply 'migrant.' Corporate employers favor cheap labor; political activists gain new constituencies; religious and academic elites moralize enforcement as cruelty. The alignment of interests ensures that laws are ignored even as political virtue-signaling increases. (Note: Hanson acknowledges humanitarian motives but insists that sustainable compassion depends on legality and assimilation.)

Citizenship and Representation

Counting residents rather than citizens in the U.S. census shifts political power. States with larger noncitizen populations gain congressional seats and electoral votes, effectively amplifying the influence of jurisdictions that refuse federal enforcement. For Hanson, this is not xenophobia but constitutional realism: the legitimacy of democracy rests on equal voting rights and duty-bearing citizens, not on the presence of passive residents. A polity that confuses the two undermines its own sovereignty.

The underlying principle echoes Rome’s experience. When Roman citizenship extended too easily to subjects uninterested in Roman norms, cohesion dissolved. The modern parallel is cultural rather than imperial: if American identity becomes merely geographic rather than civic, the republic weakens from within. Citizenship – like any law-based membership – persists only if borders, duties, and shared values are maintained.

From universities to politics, Hanson finds the reemergence of tribalism—the oldest rival of citizenship. The polis originally united individuals by law, not lineage. Yet modern movements organized around race, ethnicity, or religion attempt to reverse that civic miracle. When identity eclipses principle, citizens become members of rival tribes negotiating entitlements rather than participants in a shared deliberation.

Cultural Regression

He traces how campus culture institutionalizes this regression: racially segregated graduations, ethnic dorms, and ideological 'safe spaces' that celebrate difference over dialogue. Organizations such as MEChA and La Raza, he observes, channel affirmational politics that once would have been seen as separatist. Even elite voices like Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s 'wise Latina' remark reveal the slippery move from egalitarianism to essentialism. What began as inclusion becomes stratification.

Politics of Victimhood

Hanson calls the phenomenon 'progressive tribalism': privileged elites advancing group grievance ideologies that often entrench division. Affirmative action and reparations, while framed as justice, risk enshrining permanent categories of guilt and innocence. The result is a new hierarchy that subverts individual merit. Once equal law is replaced by group adjudication, citizenship morphs into quota-based protectionism—the very injustice earlier civil rights movements fought to end.

Civic Warning

Every time law bends to tribal exemptions, the republic moves closer to the pre-civic world of partial justice and perpetual grievance.

For Hanson, the cure remains classical: emphasize shared civic literacy, one public language, and equal application of law. Only when individuals see themselves primarily as citizens, not as members of embedded clans, can a polity sustain freedom without war of factions. Citizenship is not colorblind because it ignores difference—it is colorblind because it subordinates difference to shared obligation.

The next threat Hanson details is bureaucratic: the rise of a permanent administrative machinery that governs beyond voter reach. From 450 federal agencies to a million-page Federal Register, unelected officials now write, enforce, and judge their own regulations—functions once divided among Congress, the presidency, and courts. Hanson argues that this 'deep state' not only wastes resources but rewrites the relationship between citizen and government.

Mechanisms of Drift

Executive agencies routinely use rulemaking to expand authority. The Clean Water Rule and the Raisin Administrative Committee’s seizures of farmers’ produce exemplify bureaucratic reach. More alarming, politicized enforcement—such as the IRS targeting conservative nonprofits or intelligence agencies abusing surveillance mandates—shows how administration merges with activism. Inspector General reports on FISA errors confirm this drift toward selective legality.

Consequences for Citizenship

When citizens cannot discipline government through elections, sovereignty inverts. Bureaucrats become aristocrats of process, interpreting the public will as something to be managed rather than obeyed. Media and academia often side with technocrats, conflating expertise with legitimacy. Hanson likens this to late-imperial Rome, where administrators outlasted emperors and local self-rule vanished.

Lesson

Expertise without accountability is monarchy by diploma. Citizens must insist on sunlight—audits, oversight, and legislative reassertion—or lose self-government by neglect.

For Hanson, republican restoration means rebalancing: simplify regulation, enforce clear laws through elected channels, and strip agencies of quasi-legislative powers. Otherwise, administrative permanence becomes the tomb of citizenship, where votes change little and obedience replaces participation.

Hanson identifies an ideological companion to bureaucracy: the 'Evolutionaries'—elites who seek to modernize or reinterpret the Constitution without formal amendment. Professors, jurists, and activists, they claim that eighteenth-century structures no longer fit twenty-first-century priorities. The result is governance by reinterpretation: courts and executives remodel institutions while bypassing citizen consent.

Informal Constitutional Change

Instead of Article V amendments, modern reformers use agencies, executive orders, and judicial rulings to reinvent rights and procedures. Hanson’s examples include attempts to abolish the Electoral College through state compacts, expand the Supreme Court, and nullify Senate filibusters. Similarly, postwar presidents conducted wars by authorization rather than declaration and signed 'executive agreements' like the Paris Climate Accord to avoid Senate ratification. Each shortcut weakens checks and balances and normalizes circumvention.

The Senate and Judiciary as Battlegrounds

Debates over representation expose the same impulse. Critics call the Senate undemocratic for valuing states equally, ignoring that the Founders designed precisely that asymmetry to protect small states. Removing the filibuster or packing the Court grants transitory majorities unchecked rule, erasing the stability needed for long-term civic trust. Hanson revisits FDR’s failed 1937 court-packing plan and recent Democratic proposals, warning that such acts politicize the judiciary beyond repair.

Key Warning

When constitutional procedures become obstacles rather than safeguards, elites start legislating by reinterpretation. The cost is steady disenfranchisement of citizens and degradation of the rule of law.

Hanson’s argument is not nostalgic but practical: reform should occur through transparent, legal amendment—not through moral urgency or administrative stealth. Otherwise, institutions lose legitimacy, and the shared civic covenant dissolves into partisan engineering. Constitutional continuity is therefore not antiquated restraint but the vital memory that keeps self-government coherent.

Free speech defines the citizen more than any privilege, yet it too has become conditional. Hanson chronicles how universities, advocacy groups, and big tech corporations—once defenders of expression—now restrict it through soft censorship. The paradox: moral certainty and algorithmic control threaten dissent more effectively than old-fashioned censorship laws.

Campus Orthodoxy

On campus, diversity statements function as ideological screening tools. Applicants must affirm fashionable dogmas to be employable. Hanson compares them to Cold War loyalty oaths, noting that today’s are subtler because they disguise conformity as virtue. A scholar who defines diversity intellectually rather than racially may be downgraded. Thus intellectual pluralism—the oxygen of universities—suffocates in the name of inclusion.

Civil Liberties and Double Standards

The transformation of the ACLU mirrors this problem. Once staunch defenders of unpopular speech, the organization began choosing clients based on ideological sympathy after 2016, signaling that rights have become partisan tools. Hanson interprets this drift as a warning: when protection of principle yields to protection of tribe, civil freedom becomes selective.

Tech Monopolies and Control of Platforms

Beyond campuses, Silicon Valley monopolies now mediate public discourse. The coordinated deplatforming of Parler by Amazon, Google, and Apple exemplifies private suppression. 'Freedom of speech, not of reach' is the slogan—but if a handful of digital gatekeepers determine reach, practical speech freedom evaporates. Hanson asks you to imagine the Founders’ republic where one company controls all pamphlets. Regulation, antitrust action, and legal clarity are needed to restore open dialogue.

The broader lesson: citizenship presumes a public square accessible to all views. When technological or institutional elites control who may speak, they redefine citizenship as permission rather than right. Preserving liberty therefore requires not only the First Amendment’s restraint on government but parallel vigilance against private monopolies that manage expression as if it were property, not principle.

The book closes by tying abstract warnings to concrete shocks. Globalism—the belief that prosperity and morality transcend borders—has enriched elites but strained citizens. The pandemic of 2020 exposed how fragile this arrangement is. Dependence on Chinese supply chains, inconsistent global institutions like the WHO, and domestic lockdown policies highlighted what happens when political and economic power detach from local accountability.

Economic and Moral Globalism

Hanson critiques the 'Davos Man' ethos: transnational executives and philanthropists who speak of global justice while outsourcing national solidarity. The NBA’s silence on Chinese repression after Daryl Morey’s Hong Kong tweet, and figures like Michael Bloomberg or Bill Gates defending China’s record, reveal how profit conditions morality. Cosmopolitan virtue, he concludes, often masks material self-interest. (Compare this to Christopher Lasch’s critique in The Revolt of the Elites.)

Pandemic Governance and Inequality

Lockdowns created a lopsided economy: small businesses shuttered while digital giants expanded, symbolized by the huge wealth gains of Jeff Bezos during the crisis. Bureaucratic inconsistency—allowing big-box stores to operate while closing local shops—alienated ordinary citizens and legitimized selective enforcement. Protests that flouted restrictions without consequence further eroded trust in equal law. Emergencies, Hanson warns, become accelerants of inequality and excuses for executive fiat.

Institutional and Civic Fallout

Emergency powers, mail-in voting expansions, and post-election turmoil demonstrated how stress compresses constitutional norms. Judicial and bureaucratic improvisation replaced legislative procedure, leading to suspicion and riot. The republic survived, but visibly shaken. 2020 thus becomes Hanson’s case study in fragility: plague, protest, and polarization exposing the moral exhaustion of citizenship.

His conclusion circles back to the classical lesson: external crises reveal internal weakness. Only citizens—self-reliant yet cooperative, skeptical yet law-abiding—can steady the republic. Global networks, bureaucratic management, or moral elites cannot substitute for that civic competence. The year 2020 proved it: when systems falter, the only bulwark left is the citizen’s own virtue and participation.