The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America: Summary & Key Insights

Our story begins long before the American republic. In the ancient city-states of Greece and later Rome, citizenship was an innovation that upended older notions of belonging. No longer were individuals mere subjects of a king or members of a tribe; they were autonomous actors responsible for their political community. In Athens, the citizen took part in the assembly, defended the polis in war, and shouldered the moral obligation to deliberate on public affairs. In Rome, the republican heritage fused civic duty with property ownership and military service, producing the concept of the citizen-soldier.

These early forms were fragile but powerful. They taught that freedom was inseparable from responsibility. If you owned land, you had a tangible stake in the order of society. If you bore arms, you affirmed that governance was not someone else’s burden. These traditions influenced the English commonwealth experience, the Protestant sense of individual conscience, and ultimately America’s founding generation, who drew explicitly from classical models in crafting republican institutions.

For centuries, this lineage emphasized locality, self-reliance, and merit. Citizenship was not simply granted by birth or law; it was earned through participation. It required education in history and familiarity with civic virtue. Without this moral dimension, the citizen becomes a mere resident—a consumer of rights rather than a defender of them. By understanding these origins, we can see how modern tendencies toward passivity and entitlement betray a civilization that once regarded citizenship as the highest form of human dignity.

The first great internal assault on the old conception of citizenship came not from an external enemy but from the modern administrative state. As bureaucracies expanded across the twentieth century, the citizen’s sphere of responsibility narrowed. Professional managers, regulators, and experts began to make decisions once determined by local communities or elected representatives. Government’s reach extended into every aspect of life, creating dependency rather than participation.

I do not deny the achievements of modern administration—public health, education, infrastructure—but the cost has been steep. The citizen no longer feels ownership of government. Instead of self-governance, we face a labyrinthine system in which power is exercised by people we neither elect nor hold accountable. Bureaucratization erodes civic spirit by convincing individuals that their voices no longer matter.

In ancient and early modern republics, the challenge was apathy or corruption; in our age, it is procedural suffocation. Decisions are made by commissions, not assemblies; policies arise from memos, not debates. The very skills and moral habits that once sustained the citizen—prudence, compromise, courage—atrophy when replaced by forms, audits, and mandates. This is not mere nostalgia. The bureaucratic state infantilizes the populace, treating citizens as clients or wards. Once they internalize that lesson, the idea of common ownership of the republic begins to collapse.