The Erosion of Citizenship

>> Victor Davis Hanson: They are the people who feel that when they play by the particular rules, it's fine, but when the particular rules don't go what they the way they anticipated, then they attack the system. Thank you very much. I thought what I'd do is just for 10 minutes, outline what seems to be the erosion of citizenship and why that is happening, and give you just four or five reasons.

And then let's see if we can apply it to the current campaign. And I'll stop at 30 minutes so you can cross-examine me. I think if we look at citizenship as we can glean it from the Federalist Papers or the Constitution, our practice and customs, since then, it has eroded, and it's been eroded from two different sources, diametrically opposed.

I'd call one the pre-civilizational and one the post-civilizational or postmodern. From the pre-civilizational we have blended the distinction between a resident of the United States and a citizen. There used to be clear distinctions, what distinguished a citizen from a resident. You could see it in the Simpson-Mazzoli Act when Ronald Reagan had an amnesty for so-called illegal aliens of 3 million people, and there was a pathway to citizenship.

Almost no more than 35% chose that route. And I live in an area where it's heavily people who are immigrants from Mexico. And I always was curious, and it struck me that people said, well, there was no advantage to going through the trouble. And what they meant by that is that the distinctions have blurred.

So it used to be if you are a citizen, you are eligible and only for military service. Now, anybody can be; you don't have to be a citizen of the United States. It used to be only citizens could leave the country on their own volition and come back.

They had passport controls, but residents usually had to get visas. Now, as we see in the southern border, people go back and forth, and there's no distinction between a citizen. In fact, I was coming in this year from France, and somebody apparently lost their passport on the plane somewhere and didn't realize it.

They were yanked out at SFO and taken to another room. And yet we have people who have no ID at all that go back and forth across the southern and, to a lesser extent, the northern border. That distinction is gone. There used to be an idea that citizens could only participate in political campaigns.

That's a federal statute. As you know, Christopher Steele was not only paid by the Clinton campaign, but by the FBI. Foreign national, British subject, heavily involved in the 2016 campaign as a contract-paid employee of the DNC. Hillary Clinton, Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS, and also the FBI. It used to be that only citizens could vote in school board elections from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley.

Now, people who are not citizens, not even legal residents, can vote. And there's been a big push, as you know, in California to appoint people to administrative positions. And even suggesting they might be able, that would require a federal statute to run for office if you're not a citizen.

So the advantages and the uniqueness of citizenship versus residency versus legality have almost evaporated. Another is that we're starting to see a pre-civilizational recruitment of tribalism that was remarked on early on in classical thought by Thucydides. He said that the Greek city-state was a marked difference than the usual course of events prior to that, where people were nomadic and they had their first allegiance to a tribal affiliation.

And what distinguished the Greek city-state is Cleisthenes, in 506, destroyed the tribal affiliation and said people from different clans and locales would be mixed up within the Attic state, and their first allegiance would be to the polis of Athens. And that marked a revolutionary change in Western civilization.

But increasingly we are tribal, that we are trying to identify mostly with people who look like us, and superficial. Whether you define that as gender or race or ethnic, or sexual orientation. And what's ironic about that, that was always considered a pre-civilizational trait, not a sophisticated one. And it was often remarked that that was a problem and an impediment to civilization in the ancient world.

Today we do it. The problem with tribalism is it's much like nuclear proliferation. Once one tribe starts to identify, just like one state goes nuclear, then the other tribes will identify increasingly for nothing other than self-protection, as society starts to unwind, and we read tribal lives. A third challenge of citizenship very quickly was peasantry.

I think that was the idea that America was not going to be a European pyramidal society of a wealthy group on top and a large underclass on the bottom. But it was going to try in the founders’ visions to replicate the classical idea of agrarianism. Agrarianism doesn't mean agricultural.

If you look it up in Webster's or the OED, it says the idea that people in the middle class shall own property. That was the idea. But when you look at wage growth until 2018, for the prior 20 years, it had either been stagnated or declined. If you look at the middle class today, there are certain very disturbing indicators.

One is fertility. We've gone from 2.1 as late as 1996 down to European levels of about 1.6. You look at the average number of homeownership, it has not increased. It's down to about 61%. If you look at the average age of marriage, some of you will find this offensive because it's a judgment.

But in terms of civilizational fertility, which is key to the survival of a culture or nation, the average age of marriage has gone from 23 to about 29. First child from 2028 to about 33. First home from about 34 33 to 40. So we have a series of prolonged adolescence.

I don't know if that's because of the $1.8 trillion in student debt or a culture that sort of allows prolonged adolescence, but it's something that shows you there's a crisis in the middle class. I know in my family, there were five of us. We all had 15 children, so we thought that there would be, what, 30 grandchildren with a replacement number.

I think there are five now. And that's typical of this declining fertility rate. That suggests there are economic or cultural, or social implications involved. But besides the challenges of tribalism and peasantry and residency versus citizenship, there's also some active postmodern assaults on citizenship. One, as I call the evolutionaries, these are people who believe that human nature is malleable, fluid, and can be changed if they have enough power, they have enough money, they have enough science on their side.

And they feel that the Constitution and the customs and traditions that accompany it are ossified, archaic, and they need to be updated. You have to evolve society to meet the new man of the 21st century or the new woman. So we've seen that most of the institutions and customs, and traditions are now under assault.

Let's take a few examples. The Senate filibuster is somewhere between 175 and 180 years old. It was weakened, as you know, for Supreme Court nominees, then to all judicial appointments at the federal level. And now it's pretty much, I think, common ground that if the Democrats will control the Senate, they'll go after the Senate filibuster.

We have had for 60 years a 50 state union. And remember, part of the grand compromise in the 19th century, and even up until 1959 and 60, is that you brought one state in that was considered more conservative and one state that was considered more liberal. So you didn't use partisan citizenship to recreate the Senate.

So what? Hawaii was considered liberal, and Alaska was considered conservative. Now we're talking openly about making Washington D.C. a state, and also Puerto Rico, for one purpose and one purpose only, to bring in four senators from one party. Again, to disrupt a kind of 60-year tradition. It used to be that the word court packing was an obscenity.

And when FDR tried to do it, as you remember, the Judicial Reform Act of 1937, his own party revolted the idea that you would increase the justices to 15 and then you would have term limits and try to force out and pinch them out all the way down to the circuit and appellate courts.

And that was discredited with the anger at the conservative bent, which is very different than the Warren Court, when the Warren Court was in its heyday. And remember that most of the Warren Court, at least the majority of those justices, were reported appointed by Republicans. And they had a transformation, the kind of a David Souter as later as an example, but now there's this idea that we should have 15 justices.

Joe Biden mentioned that he wanted to reform the Supreme Court. Elizabeth Warren said that that would be one of the first things they did was to increase the justices by 15. The Electoral College is another one. They want to get rid of it. Who are they? The people who feel that when they play by the particular rules, it's fine, but when the particular rules don't go the way they anticipated, then they attack the system.

So, for example, if you go back in the literature, in 2004, but especially 2008 and 12, if you Google blue wall, it's almost in religious terms, how wonderful that was. The impenetrable blue wall that meant that before the votes were cast, the electoral college in Illinois, New York, and California, along with Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, almost predetermined the election.

So a lot of the support for the Electoral College was on the left. The Republicans were grumpy, they complained, they whined about it, but they didn't try to get rid of the Electoral College. As you know, most of the Democratic primary, all of them in 2020, said they were committed to ending the Electoral College.

And now there's something called the National Voters Compact, where state legislatures have voted that their electors will not represent the state ballot but the federal. That's unconstitutional, it's trying to destroy the college without a constitutional amendment. That's, again, indicative of the evolutionary mind that attacks citizenship as we knew it.

Another is the unelected. Six million people work for state and local governments, and they have enormous resources at their command. Judge, jury, and executioner, they often interpret laws in a way that was never intended. My favorite example as a farmer is the Inland Waterways Act, which said that large inland waterways could be inspected by the EPA because they might have too much nitrogen from runoff.

And then they started thinking, well, what if these farmers have ponds on their land? And then it was, well, maybe after a rain off a low spot. So they began going on people's property without permission and saying this low indentation in your land has water. We're going to sample it, and if it has too much nitrogen, we're going to fine you.

And you can object, but ultimately, the discretion whether to fine you, the person who will adjudicate it, the level of the fine, and the person who will be subject to appeal will force you to go to an outside court. Most people had to settle because they didn't have the resources.

And another one is this neo-Confederate idea of nullification. Remember, one of the events that precipitated the Civil War was South Carolina in 1832 decided it was going to fight the federal government against tariffs because they felt that British clothing industry and the milling industry, because the Yankees, so to speak, in the north wanted to protect their industries with tariffs and they would slap it on southern cotton.

So they decided they weren't going to follow the federal government. Andrew Jackson threatened to put troops in. And then, of course, on the eve of the Civil War, the Southern States, before they rebelled and succeeded, they began nullifying federal law. They would not allow southern state armories to contribute their weapons to the federal government before.

And we now have 600 sanctuary cities. And the premise of all of them is that state and local jurisdictions will trump federal immigration law. And it's not symmetrical. I mean, you can see where this would lead. I happen to live in a very conservative area of Fresno County.

And you hear all of the complaints from what would be called conservatives if they were to say, well, in Fresno county, we're just not going to honor federal gun registration. So if you want to buy a handgun, come into one of our gun stores and we'll do it by county legislation.

Or I've talked to a developer who said that, you know, I had to stop an entire development for the three-spotted newt. He was on the endangered species list. But he could say, in Fresno County, we don't honor the Endangered Species Act. We're a sanctuary's developer city. See what happens.

And so these people who have enormous power over our lives are not elected. And just to give you an example, what does James Comey, the former director of the FBI, what is James Clapper, the former director of the NSA, what does John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, and what does Andrew McCabe all have in common?

They all lied under oath, admittedly so, to either a Federal investigator, Andrew McCabe, four times, Mr. Brennan, twice under the Senate, and Mr. Clapper once under the Senate. And James Comey said he couldn't remember 245 times under oath. And what were the ramifications for committing perjury? Nothing. Nothing. So we've created an entitled class that operates on the principle that Congress.

Most people, senators, come and go. They don't really understand statutes. They don't understand how the FBI, the IRS, the NIH, CDC work. But these people, in the case of Anthony Fauci, will be here for 40 years, and they know better. So Anthony Fauci can testify there was no gain-of-function research that was subsidized by the United States government when it was illegal to do it here.

And he routed $600,000 to Peter Dosick's Echo Health and had nothing to do with gain-of-function research that led to the COVID-19 virus. Another challenge, and I'll get to the campaign. The final one is what I would call cosmopolitanism. It's a fancy word for the Greek cosmos, the world, and polis, the city.

You're a citizen not of the United States, but of the world. That's really gaining traction, and it's a threat to citizenship. So if you're a soldier in Afghanistan and you're told that your unit is under attack in Helmand Province, and you want to call in an artillery strike. We told the International Criminal Court may or may not charge you with a war crime if that strike hits a collateral target and people damage, it's not so far-fetched as we see.

Whatever your views on Gaza, the International Criminal Court is weighing in on that war, sometimes on both sides. There is a United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Until about 2010, 50% of its human rights violations were not Rwanda. They were not the former Yugoslavia, they were Israel. And the idea was that they were of moral superior judgment, and they could go into the internal affairs of a sovereign nation and punish people.

And how do you punish them? By denying them entry to their country, or subjecting them to a warrant if they travel on an international carrier, etc. I think our Secretary of State after, shortly after he was inaugurated, asked the United Nations Commission if they wanted to come in and look at systemic racism as it occurred, perhaps in the aftermath of George Floyd.

So you would be asking members in the past that have included Iran, Saddam Hussein, Iraq, and other countries that are illiberal and don't ever vote until their representatives go to the United Nations, then vote in that assembly in a way they don't at home. If you add all of this up, I think it's very disturbing because the Founders’ original idea of an autonomous, economically independent, outspoken, cantankerous citizen who would govern his own or her destiny by voting for elected officials with a limited government, that idea is pretty much gone.

I'd like to just then turn to Sort of the threat to citizenship and freedom that's happened in the last two years in this campaign. But I'm not so interested in suggesting that this is bad or good, only that it's novel and you can make up your own determinations whether it was deleterious or just inadvertent.

So, in the history of the United States, we have never impeached a president twice. Never. The founders, if you read the Federalist Papers, they were very, very worried. They had a big fight about whether the house should require 2/3 as well as the Senate for conviction, just for impeachment.

Because they said that as soon as a president lost his majority in his first term, they might impeach him. They were very worried that there were remedies to impeachment, and one of them would later become two terms, but the President would have to seek reelection. The voters would decide.

They would have midterm elections where they could win or lose the congressional majority. The Supreme Court could declare some of their programs unconstitutional. The Congress could veto them, override. There were checks and balances, but they did put in the impeachment. We have never used it, though, in the European sense of when the President lost his majority and almost immediately, he was impeached.

In the question and answers, we can talk about whether it was validated or not. I'm not interested in that right now. But just the novelty of it. We have never in the history of the United States tried a President in the Senate as a private citizen. That was the first that happened, as you know, after January 20th of 2021.

We have never in the history of the Republic taken a candidate of one of the other two major parties and attempted to remove him from the state ballot. Sixteen states filed that intention. Three of them actually removed him until the Supreme Court invalidated that. That is a new statute.

We had never, ever invaded an ex-president's home with the FBI SWAT team over what had been a jurisdictional matter of whether he removed a classified or confidential matter. Sort of the status quo is the way that we had accorded the Biden case. Joe Biden. For 30 years, we learned, had removed classified documents.

He had them in three or four locations. He didn't come forward about it. His ghostwriter did not have a security clearance and was given access to it. When Robert Hurst subpoenaed that transcript from the ghostwriter, he said that he had destroyed it because he was afraid somebody would hack his computer files.

There was no indictment for destroying subpoenaed evidence, but the idea was that you just didn't go after the President of the United States when he had taken files out as a senator or as a vice president. That was a new development that we saw. We have never had a major, we've thought about it, but we've never had a majority ex-president or major candidate as an object of a state, local, or federal indictment during a campaign season.

We've never seen anything like the Fannie Willis indictment over a phone call. And I think if you talk to a lot of representatives or congressmen, they'll tell you that when the vote is deadlocked, they often talk to the registrars and say, I know there are votes out there, you people, I want you to count them.

So, whether that's wise or unethical. No. But it was never seen as a criminal violation of a criminal statute. Alvin Bragg, we've never seen anything like that of overvaluing your real estate assets. And excuse me, lead Tita James in order to get a loan that the bank said not only performed well but was profitable, and they had no objection to the way it was issued.

We've never seen anything like the Alvin Bragg that 10 years prior, somebody had a non-disclosure with an embarrassing incident, and that became a campaign finance violation in a way that other violations that we know of are not prosecuted criminally. Jack Smith, the problem with the Jack Smith indictment was that the DOJ had a prompt, a common protocol that in an election season, but especially 90 days before election, they did not try to indict a major political figure because it would be interpreted as political, ideological, the weaponization of the office.

And we've seen that, and we've never seen the asymmetrical. We had two independent councils working simultaneously on basically the same purported office. Offense one was that one ex-president had improperly removed classified files and had stored them insecurely. And the current president had in his possession classified files that he had stored improperly.

And yet one special prosecutor said this is in violation, and it might be an actionable act, but he has cognitive challenges of such a nature that he would be sympathetic to a jury. So he would not seek to prosecute him because it would not lead to a verdict of guilty.

And yet that did not extend to the other one. We have never seen a political party. We have seen FDR remove Henry Wallace, but that was his Vice President. He was worried that under protest, the Conservative Wing of the Democratic party, as you remember, came to FDR in 1944 and said, Eleanor Roosevelt, be down, we do not want this basically communist.

And Henry Wallace was a very nice man. He was an entrepreneur, a multimillionaire, he was geneticist who had created a very profitable seed company, but he had a very favorable view of Stalin and the Soviet Union. And they came to FDR and they said, you're gonna die very soon.

They were blunt about it. In fact, he died seven months later in April of 1945. So they said he goes off the ticket, and we put a southerner, this nobody named Harry Truman. He's got a Southern accent, he'll reassure the South, and they'll vote for the Democratic Party.

And it was a fortuitous decision because remember he died on I think April 7th of 1945, right in the midst of the Okinawa. And Truman came in, and he was pretty tough on Joe Stalin the way that Henry Wallace but we have never seen a party in the middle of a campaign, much less a president seeking reelection, to say to him, you're gonna get off the ticket.

Say to them, we don't know who they are. Is it donors, is it inside party bosses, is it congressional leaders? But to remove someone, and apparently, according to news reports, with the threat that if you don't leave, we're going to invoke the 25th Amendment, that you're cognitively impaired and you're gonna lose your presidency.

So that was the grand compromise. But the point was it nullified the citizens’ vote of 14.8 million people had voted for Joe Biden. And that we've never seen in the modern era, we did in the 19th century, that, as a result of that, this late in the season, the vice president was anointed as the candidate.

And people there was no. The convention hasn't taken place till next week, there's no discussion about another candidate. She has never in her life entered one primary, has never won one delegate, and yet she is now coordinated as a Democratic nominee without any input from the delegates who are elected or appointed by the DNC, much less the primary voters.

So let me conclude by suggesting that whatever your particular views are, we're in novel ground, we have never seen anything like this. And how does it occur? When I talked earlier about the dying citizen, these pre-civilizational and post-modern, it was not really ideological. It was just modernism.

And certain people were modernists, and certain people were traditionalists. Some wanted to change, but this is very patently aimed at Donald Trump, for the most part. And the premise is that this man is so unusual, he's so evil, and we are so morally superior and we are so much intellectually superior to him that we have a right, indeed a duty, to change custom, tradition, and if need be, law to eliminate this Hitlerian threat.

And I suggest to you that anytime you get into that frame of mind and you start to destroy customs, traditions, and laws, then you, the guardians of democracy, become its destroyers. Thank you very much.