[Breitbart] Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow sat down with historian and professor Victor Davis Hanson at the latter’s home in Selma, CA, for a wide-ranging interview examining how America is being undermined by a modern globalist aristocracy. Hanson drew from analyses in his latest book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.
Hanson warned of lessening governmental accountability to citizens via the dissolution of American citizenship. The concept of citizenship, he added, is an essential component of Western civilization.
"The citizen is very rare," he said. "Civilization is very old — seven thousand years old — but for nearly the first 4,500 years, there were no citizens. They were slaves, or subjects, or tribes, or residents."
He continued, "[Citizenship is] the idea that you would have people who live in a confined space and they would govern themselves. They would elect their officials They would audit them. They would set their budgets, their expenditures. They would decide when to go to war, when to have peace. That was a lot of responsibility."
He explained, "The idea of citizenship is integrated with property rights, he remarked. "Most importantly, [citizenship] seems to have started in the 8th century B.C. on the principal of inheritance, that you planted olive trees or vines on binds on your small plot, and you ... own them — the state didn’t own them — and you had the right to pass them on without interference from the state. Like the American Constitution, the protection of property was very important."
He observed how architects of the globalist enterprise cultivate ethnic and racial agitation to create perceptions of grievance and victimhood among targeted demographic groups. He noted that upward mobility rooted in meritocracy threatens the leftist paradigm of a zero-sum struggle between haves and have-nots. |