Victor Davis Hanson on His New Book "The Dying Citizen" | The Interview with Hugh Hewitt

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Hugh Hewitt

Oct. 5 2021

 

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America and The Dying Citizen

Freedom requires constant reinvestment in and replenishment of a nation’s traditions and ideals. 

Only a little more than half of the current world’s 7 billion people are citizens of fully consensual governments.

That lucky 50 percent alone enjoys constitutionally protected freedoms. Most are also Western. Or at least they reside in nations that have become “Westernized.”

Migrants, regardless of their race, religion, or gender, almost always head for a Western nation. And most often their destination remains the United States. The more it is now fashionable for Americans to take for granted or even to ridicule the idea of their own country, the more the non-American global poor risk their lives to crash America’s borders.

 

Constitutional systems easily perish because they ask a lot of their citizens—to vote, to be informed about civic and political issues, and to hold elected officials accountable. That responsibility is perhaps why, of the world’s true republics and democracies, only about 22 have been in existence for a half-century or more. We are seldom told, then, that America is a rare, precious, and perhaps even fragile idea, both in the past and in the present.

American citizens are clearly also not the custom of the past. Unlike history’s more common peasants, citizens are not under the control of the rich who, in turn, seek undue influence in government through controlling them.

Instead, viable citizenship has always hinged on a broad, autonomous middle class. Those Americans in between lack both the dependence of the poor, and the insider influences of the elite. Suffocate the middle and we know that a binary feudalism will soon replace it. We are seeing just that medievalization in contemporary California.

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Victor Davis Hanson: ‘Open Borders,’ ‘Globalism,’ ‘Tribalism’ Are Reminiscent of Rome’s Collapse

 

Victor Davis Hanson, historian, professor, and author of The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, said on Wednesday that “open borders,” “globalism,” and “tribalism” are contributing to a collapse of the United States reminiscent of the fall of Rome.

Borders, language, and culture are essential for national continuity, Hanson stated in an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

 

He remarked, “Every nation that has survived has had borders that were defensible and clear, and the idea was that they have their own space to inculcate their language or traditions or customs, then enhance their constitution. Without that, it’s just short of a migratory, 5th century A.D. Rome where people come across the Danube River and destroy the nation-state.”

Growth of “identity politics” predicated on ethnicity and race, Hanson warned, would contribute to American collapse if unchecked.