The title of “citizen” has lost much of the simple grandeur it once had. It deserves far better, and as Victor Davis Hanson shows in his learned, powerful, and troubling new book, The Dying Citizen, the steady devolution of citizenship speaks volumes about where we are today and where we seem to be heading.1 In fact, citizenship seems to stand at the very center of it all. The most destabilizing elements of today’s political life—the erosion and displacement of the settled and propertied middle classes by the forces of economic globalization, by ceaseless waves of increasingly unassimilated immigrants, and by the divisive influence of the politics of identity and of post-nationalism—seem to be aimed directly at the concept of citizenship, and together work to pound it into oblivion.

Such destructive efforts cannot be allowed to succeed. If they do, it will be a loss of immense proportions for all humankind, a wanton abandonment of one of the greatest political achievements of the ages. But it could happen. There never has been anything natural or automatic or inevitable about the ideal of citizenship, or about the creation of the kind of societies in which it flourishes. On the contrary, as Hanson says early in his book, human history is “mostly the story of non-citizenship,” of various forms of coercive rule—feudalism, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorship—in which the habits of self-rule are thwarted and active citizenship cannot take hold. What we have had here in the United States is something