The End of Citizenship. By Michael Lind.
Having converted their own republic into a borderless credit union, Americans have to borrow other people’s national pride …
As war fever swept America, progressives and conservatives joined in denouncing not only the enemy government but also the enemy people and their enemy music, enemy literature, and enemy cuisine. Americans displayed the national flag in every imaginable form and pledged undying hatred of the nation’s foes.
The nation that Americans celebrated was not their own, but rather Ukraine, following the brutal Russian invasion of the former Soviet republic. Liberal Americans who would have thought it vulgar if not fascist to wave the Stars and Stripes took selfies with the blue and gold of Ukraine’s national flag. …
The sudden outburst of vicarious Ukrainian patriotism on the part of many Americans — as well as people in similar North Atlantic democracies — seems like a Freudian “return of the repressed.”
Taught that celebrating their own national traditions is racist and xenophobic, and deprived of opportunities to play a meaningful role in national defense, many Americans and Western Europeans have found an outlet for a lost sense of belonging by borrowing the national pride of another nation.
Our evolution from citizens to serfs of the bureaucracy:
Citizenship in the fullest sense originally involved active participation of citizens …
In practice, the ideal of the amateur, omnicompetent citizen — a member of the militia today, a town or county council member tomorrow and a juror next week — could be realized only in small, relatively undeveloped communities.
The ideal of the self-sufficient family farmer with a musket and a copy of the Constitution on the fireplace mantle was a casualty of economic centralization and modernization. Most Americans are proletarians who live from paycheck to paycheck, and a majority of American workers are employed by firms with more than 500 employees and supervised by salaried corporate bureaucrats.
The ideal of the male citizen-soldier who earns his civil rights by contributing to the defense of the republic survived for a while by being transferred to the colossal modern nation-state, whose citizens, mostly unknown to one another, are united by common culture, institutions, location, or some combination of the three. For a time, the mass national conscript army and its reserves were thought of, however implausibly, as the heir to the local militia. The older tradition of civic republicanism inspired the linkage of military service to government benefits like the GI Bill and other privileges for veterans. That link was all but eliminated by the abolition of the draft in 1973. Today’s American military is a professional force, more like those of premodern European bureaucratic monarchies than frontier militias. …
The positive duties formerly associated with citizenship have gradually been discarded. … In the United States and other Western democracies, it is widely accepted in the 21st century that national citizens have a right to various public goods and welfare services without any need to earn the benefits at all, purely on the basis of their status as citizens of a particular nation-state. …
One by one, then, the requirements and duties historically associated with republican citizenship — such as property ownership, a degree of economic independence, and service in the citizen-military — have dropped away, leaving citizenship finally as a mere right to government welfare, along with just treatment under the law.
Going global by erasing borders — sharing for everyone:
But even this is unsatisfactory to ethical cosmopolitan thinkers. After all, a purely national system of government-guaranteed health care or other national welfare programs benefit only those who happen to be citizens of particular nation-states. In a world characterized by extreme inequality among nations, and not merely within them, this seems unfair. Why should being born on one side of the southwestern border of the United States entitle you to a much better life than being born on the other side? …
Much of the debate about immigration in relatively affluent Western democracies has to do with the effect on national welfare state programs. Populists on the right often fear that their countries are becoming international welfare magnets and worry that they will have to compete with immigrants for government welfare programs, public services, or public housing. With tragic exceptions like Ukraine, most Western nationalists view excessive immigration, or immigration of the wrong kind, as a greater danger than armed invasion. “Fredonia for the Fredonians” has been replaced, in the 21st century, by “Fredonian Health Care for the Fredonians!”
In response, anti-nationalists on the left denounce “welfare chauvinism” — a pejorative term for the all-but-universal practice of limiting a country’s welfare programs to its citizens and, in some cases, legal immigrants. Absent a global government, there is unlikely to be a planetary version of Social Security or Medicare. …
Instead of attempting to replace the system of nation-states, many on the left advocate blurring the borders of nation-states by making illegal immigrants as well as legal immigrants eligible for publicly funded national welfare programs. Aiding in this effort is the tendency of the mainstream press in the United States and other English-speaking countries — which is to say, the elite center-left press — to erase any distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Increasingly, the words “immigrants” or “migrants” are used to describe both authorized and unauthorized immigrants.
The final (?) state of decay:
With the euphemism “undocumented” immigrant, the distinction between citizenship and noncitizenship completely collapses. A foreign national who violates immigration laws by sneaking into the country or overstaying a temporary visa becomes someone “without papers,” reducing citizenship — once an honor to be fought for — to a matter of paperwork, with no moral or political significance.
With the erasure of even the limited and banal definition of citizenship as the right of a citizen of a nation-state to receive welfare benefits that are denied to foreign nationals, we have come — in theory, though not yet in practice — to the erasure of the nation-state and its replacement by something else. Call it the charity-state. …
Nothing could be further from the ancient origins of citizenship in neighbors vowing mutual self-help than the crusading charity-state, whose propagandists dismiss narrow civic or national self-interest as mere selfishness in favor of global humanitarian altruism.
They say “progress,” we say “decay.”
What’s next? What new decadence can the left lead us into?
