Reclaiming American Citizenship

A Project for the People.

Tonight, at the New World Gala in Washington, American Compass introduced its new project, Reclaiming American Citizenship.

The American experiment is failing. Indicators of rising consumption and celebrations of expanding choice abound, yet ordinary Americans face dwindling opportunities to form strong families and find work that will provide them with stability and security. Our political system has responded by doubling down on the easy comfort of material abundance and the false promises of radical autonomy, which have only narrowed chances of building a good life. Most people struggle even to find the language to explain the problem, though we can sense the country we thought we knew, and the future we want for ourselves and our children, slipping away. We feel unmoored, disoriented, weighed down—searching for a better national path that we have no idea how to find and are told does not exist.

Why aren’t we satisfied with more stuff, better technology, and fewer constraints than anyone in human history? Because alongside economic growth and improved living standards, we have suffered the degradation of our communal, economic, and national life. In a word, what we have lost is our citizenship; not a thin, legalistic citizenship, but the thick, reciprocal relationship that provided the bedrock for the American republic and gave each citizen a real stake in its future.

Citizenship is the bond that turns a population into a people, establishing mutual obligation within our communities, across the nation, and between generations. It both demands and protects, asking each of us to carry burdens we did not choose, and in return giving us a place, a purpose, and a say in the forces shaping our lives. It elevates us as problem-solvers endowed with agency, who come together to do more than any of us could accomplish on our own, securing a liberty grounded in competence and self-determination rather than mere license to do as we please.

There are no “citizens of the world.” Citizenship is restricted and particular, not open and universal. It constrains, demands, and judges. It is proudly patriotic, celebrating the nation at its best yet always striving for improvement, learning from past flaws but not defined by them.

The blessings of citizenship provide ordinary citizens the foundation from which to build good lives. Through a common culture, citizenship rejects the cheap affirmations of all choices as equally virtuous and worthy of support, instead offering individuals well-defined paths down which they can confidently and successfully travel. Through a well-functioning market, it emphasizes their roles as not only consumers, but also producers, and orients them toward meeting their own needs by serving the needs of others. Through self-government, citizenship reminds individuals that their fates are intertwined and they are all part of a project greater than themselves. To be a citizen is to inherit something built by others, owe something to those around you, and leave something better for those who come after.

American citizenship was the greatest source of mass prosperity and human flourishing ever created. Its mutually respected rights, obligations, and interests represented the typical family’s most precious inheritance, held in sacred trust by each generation, bequeathed to the next more valuable than before, and steadily expanded to include the whole American people. The nation of citizens formed in this mold accomplished history’s greatest feats, toward which all could contribute and from which all could benefit, and became a beacon unto the other nations of the world. We can be those citizens, and that nation, again.

Citizenship Lost

What happened to our citizenship? The American elites responsible for setting the nation’s course corrupted the communal, economic, and national life on which it depends. And we willingly shirked our obligations, devolving from citizens into mere consumers—passive subjects of an empire that promised safety and comfort while draining away liberty, dignity, and prosperity.

With their undermining of tradition, respect, and solidarity, American elites released themselves from their own obligations to their fellow citizens, degrading communal life for everyone else in the process. With their blind faith in free markets and individual choice to maximize welfare, they dismissed family and community, morality and religion, borders and regulations as unnecessary constraints, though economic life in fact depended upon them.

Rather than promote national pride and confidence, they expressed shame and encouraged outright disdain for our shared heritage. Rather than embrace solidarity, they shattered it with a divisive identity politics that exacerbated our problems and an insistence that the pursuit of profit would somehow solve them. Rather than encourage debate over immigration, they declared the subject off-limits and imposed their own preferences by trampling not only the rule of law, but also the democratic process that secures the necessary consent for extending citizenship’s reciprocal bonds. With their rejection of nationalism and American exceptionalism, their obsession with the past’s mistakes, and their unfamiliarity with the sacrifice and discipline necessary for the ordinary citizen to flourish, American elites sapped the national will.

They did achieve their blinkered vision. Gross domestic product and the stock market kept rising higher. The American consumer had more stuff, better technology, and fewer constraints than anyone in human history. But the American citizen paid the price.

In an era of unprecedented wealth for the fortunate few, we find our nation headed toward fiscal collapse, as we continually consume more than we can produce, accumulate debt we cannot repay, and make promises we cannot and will not keep. We are headed toward generational collapse, as we fail to form families, raise children, or guide young people toward responsible adulthood. And we are headed toward institutional collapse, as our markets, our media, and our government repeatedly betray us.

The corporate elites blame politics and the political elites blame business, but to most Americans they are one indistinguishable and fundamentally corrupt clique whose members enjoy absurd privileges even as they forsake their obligation to the common good. Believing their positions earned through superior merit, they feel entitled to rule. Perhaps too insulated to even understand the consequences of their actions, they have mortgaged structures they did not build, sold off assets they did not own, and devalued the basic currency of citizenship.

Can we stand up to China, let alone fight a real war should one be thrust upon us? Can we eliminate the costly vetoes that countless interest groups use to frustrate any attempt at building anew, or agree on the rules and build the institutions necessary to ensure that artificial intelligence serves us well? Can we even find the courage to protect children from the digital hellscape they now traverse? Whether we want to admit it, we know the answer in each case is that we cannot. We can see national failure approaching, a prospect we face with dread but, increasingly, resignation.

Citizenship Reclaimed

The populist earthquake that has shaken American politics for the past decade represents a natural and much-needed rebuke to the catastrophic failures of the elites. The American people have shown that, no matter how far to the margins of the democratic process they are pushed, they still retain the wherewithal to throw the bums out. But rebuilding will require a new generation of leaders with the political virtue to govern on behalf of the people rather than themselves, articulate clearly the centrality of citizenship to our own lives and to our republic, and lead by example in reclaiming it.

What is our positive, concrete vision for the essential elements of a good life? Reclaiming American citizenship begins with the assertion that it is worth reclaiming and the articulation of the substantive ends toward which communal, economic, and national life must lead:

We reject isolation and atomization. Promising people radical autonomy and the right to define their own truth has left them disconnected from each other and from reality. We choose instead laws and a culture that reward success along well-defined paths through life, supported by meaningful relationships and institutions refocused on their purpose.

We reject stagnation and sclerosis. Our aging society has lost its ambition, its appetite for risk, and its interest in the future. We choose instead a youthful determination to carry forward the legacy of our elders, chase away the long shadow of litigation that looms over our efforts, and channel our common resources toward achieving great things.

We reject the lottery economy. “Opportunity” has become another word for “escape”—from the blighted conditions in which everyone else lives. We choose instead the vindication of every citizen’s inherent dignity through an American Dream that becomes a true American Promise, premised not on escape for the few but decent lives for all.

We reject naked consumerism. The folly of unquestioned deference to “revealed preference” in the marketplace has revealed how easily we can lose all sense of higher purpose, succumb to mind-numbing entertainment, and slide toward utter dependence on outside support. We choose instead a nonnegotiable commitment to agency, competence, self-determination, and the use of technology to enrich lives rather than monetize their decay.

We reject chaos and corruption. American elites have treated the basic norms and behaviors of ordered liberty as a game, undermining the rule of law and normalizing a culture of taking whatever you can get. We choose instead to rebuild trustworthy institutions, police our streets, and impose consequences on those who abuse power for personal gain, whether in the halls of government or on the company jet.

We reject polarization and despair. The polluted public square has become an arena merely for fighting, with no prospect of resolving differences or achieving change. We choose instead a responsive politics that demonstrates faith in the wisdom and morality of ordinary citizens and holds elites accountable for representing and serving them well.

The United States is not alone in its maladies. Elites around the world have made common cause in destroying the particular citizenships of their own nations, to great and tragic effect. But we are alone in the depth and continuity of tradition we can draw upon, the extraordinary economic, cultural, and natural resources still at our disposal, and the heights that we know our uniquely American citizenship can reach. American citizens created and validated the notion of government of, by, and for the people, preserved the union, settled a continent, assimilated tens of millions in the melting pot, built the middle class, invented the modern era in humble garages and great laboratories, won two world wars, landed on the moon, and defeated global communism. Civilization’s trajectory in the twenty-first century depends on whether we can activate and harness this power again.

Optimism Renewed

The arguments for cynicism are all familiar by now: that our problems are fundamentally cultural and thus insoluble; that the only solution is religion, which policy has no power to impose; that America has passed its point of no return, rebuilding a functional republic is futile, and seizing whatever power possible is the only practical strategy. We reject these too.

The younger American men and women seduced by the political fringes are rightly outraged by the squandering of their inheritance, made all the more infuriating for its carelessness. Taking for granted and demolishing a social order is easy compared to building and cherishing one. But which are they doing? One side decries America itself and proposes to replace it with a state-dominated collectivism that has never worked. The other adopts a performative nihilism that despairs of progress and embraces transgression and conflict as ends unto themselves. Both are dead ends.

Decline is a choice, and we can choose otherwise. It is the precise purpose of our republic, as described in our Constitution, to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” In such a republic, a citizenry committed to reconstituting itself still controls its own fate, can still elevate leaders committed to that process, and so has the power to determine its future.

The sense that policy has worked to strip away our citizenship but cannot help us reclaim it is a function of the goals that our policymakers have chosen. Of course, when “reform” consisted merely of consolidating control in bureaucracies on the Left and clearing obstacles to efficiency on the Right, evaluated always with cost-benefit analyses and economic growth “scores” that assigned citizenship no value, its results mirrored those measures.

How would public education look if we defined its primary purpose to be equipping young people with the skills and values to build decent lives, rather than just getting them into the most prestigious universities? Vocational education with on-the-job experience and knowledge of a practical trade would become mandatory for all students. Social insurance, housing and health care policy, infrastructure, labor and employment law, and tech regulation, to name just a few areas, could all support people in getting married and having children if we allow ourselves to elevate that path as uniquely important, rather than treating it as just another consumer choice. We can just say no to the digital destruction of childhood. A virtuous cycle is possible, in which a reclaimed citizenship creates the context for better policy, which strengthens citizenship further.

When immigration policy was built around humanitarian concerns, population increases to boost GDP, and wage suppression to keep prices down, any mention of restriction was inherently suspect. Conversely, if the goal is reclaiming American citizenship, borders must be secure, current immigration laws fully enforced, and policy for the future rebuilt from the ground up around the question of what serves the national interest. To American elites, the very notion of place is mostly just inconvenient. But rootedness is fundamental to citizenship and place-based policy, even if it fails on some measures of return on investment, is crucial to helping more places thrive. We don’t have to concentrate our top researchers at a few elite institutions in a few coastal enclaves. If we distribute funding more evenly across public universities, the talent, technology, and economic activity will follow.

The policy implications of reclaiming American citizenship span nearly every issue, from promoting reindustrialization, to restoring fiscal discipline, to restraining our foreign policy, to pursuing great national projects. True, better policy will not refill the pews. But it could certainly create conditions in which pews might more plausibly refill. Policy does shape culture and, where it cannot provide a solution, policymakers and their fellow elites also have the option of taking seriously their own positions as role models whose choices carry enormous influence outside the legislative process. We need not only different policies, but also different ways of thinking and acting.

In the vicious cycle of modern American politics, each side justifies its corrosive conduct as necessary to counter the other’s, even though the ensuing tactics invariably fail. The party in power overreaches, underdelivers, and succumbs to the next wave election. No one achieves a durable governing majority. All involved feel that they are losing, because all are indeed losing.

That failure may be depressing, but we believe it is also cause for great optimism. If tearing down America is not a winning formula, building it back up might just have a chance. What passes for radicalism these days at both ends of the political spectrum has become quite dull, performed for attention, impressive to no one, incapable of solving problems. We stand for something that is far more radical because it dares to be responsible and responsive: the hard work necessary to reclaim American citizenship, reform ourselves, and restore our American republic.