The Dying Citizen: Civic Illiteracy, Elite Detachment, and the Erosion of Self-Government

Post 6 of 8 — The Inheritance: Western Civilization, Its Critics, and What Is Actually at Stake

Mar 26, 2026

a large american flag flying in the sky — Photo by Lesli Whitecotton on Unsplash

Mark Twain’s epigraph to Victor Davis Hanson’s The Dying Citizen does not waste words: “Citizenship is what makes a republic; monarchies can get along without it. What keeps a republic on its legs is good citizenship” [1]. The observation is 120 years old. It has become considerably more urgent.

Previous posts in this series examined the intellectual history of the forces attacking Western civilization from the outside of its traditions — critical theory, postcolonialism, CRT. This post examines a different kind of threat: the decay from within. Not the assault on Western institutions by their ideological critics, but the failure of the citizens who are supposed to inhabit and sustain those institutions to understand them, take responsibility for them, or transmit them. The critics could not succeed without this failure preparing the ground.

Citizenship as Active Inheritance

Hanson’s foundational claim runs against the grain of contemporary political culture, which tends to frame citizenship primarily in terms of rights — what the state owes the citizen, what protections the individual can claim, what entitlements flow from membership in the political community.

Hanson inverts this: citizenship is not an entitlement; it requires work. Yet too many citizens of republics, ancient and modern, come to believe that they deserve rights without assuming responsibilities — and they don’t worry how or why or from whom they inherited their privileges [2]. The citizen does not have to thank anyone for his rights. They are innate and properly his own [3] — but that innateness does not mean they are self-sustaining. They require the active practice of citizenship to survive.

This distinction — between rights as innate and rights as requiring active maintenance — is precisely what the current cultural moment has collapsed. The inheritance is real. The obligation to tend it is also real. A civilization that insists on the former while abandoning the latter is consuming its capital.

The self-critical capacity that Post 1 identified as a specifically Western achievement is also, Hanson notes, a double-edged instrument: “In sum, the nature of consensual government at its origins was constant self-critique and reassessment. When such perpetual introspection ceases, so does citizenship” [4]. The introspection must be genuine — aimed at improvement — not a performance of guilt or a vehicle for political power. When it becomes the latter, it corrodes the very institutions it claims to be correcting.

The Middle Class as the Republic’s Structural Foundation

Hanson draws on Aristotle’s Politics for the structural claim that underlies the entire book: the middle class is not merely morally superior to the elite, but more stable and reliable than the poor [5]. The middle class is the glue that makes republican government possible. It is large enough to outvote the rich, independent enough to resist the blandishments of the poor, and sufficiently invested in property and social order to prefer law to upheaval.

Without a middle class, the republic’s foundations dissolve. Hanson’s formulation is stark: “Without a middle class, society becomes bifurcated. It splinters into one of modern masters and peasants. In that situation, the function of government is not to ensure liberty but to subsidize the poor to avoid revolution and to exempt the wealthy, who reciprocate by enriching and empowering the governing classes” [6].

This is a description, not a prediction. It is an accurate description of a significant portion of contemporary American institutional life: an administrative and credentialed class that has progressively insulated itself from the economic pressures affecting everyone else, combined with a welfare apparatus that manages the bottom of the income distribution and a regulatory architecture that suppresses the middle-class business formation that once provided upward mobility. The bureaucratic and administrative state overregulated commerce and choked economic growth and start-up businesses, reflecting the interests of a largely well-to-do affluent class that had profited enormously from globalized marketing [7].

The most prominent symptoms for younger generations: radical disruptions in the usual middle-class patterns that encourage traditional citizenship and national cohesion — marriage, child rearing, and home ownership [8]. The economic conditions for forming the households that produce the social fabric of republican citizenship have been systematically undermined. The consequences for civic culture are not accidental.

The Paradox of Affluence

Hanson’s most counterintuitive claim, and perhaps his most important: failure can occur at any time and results more often from what we, rather than others, do to ourselves — affluence and leisure often prove more dangerous to citizenship than poverty and drudgery [9].

This paradox has a specific contemporary manifestation. The farther American society has progressed from the founding conditions — chronologically and materially — the more aggressively it has blamed the founders for their failures rather than examining what is being done with what they built. The strange habit of faulting the present-day United States for its past purportedly illiberal generations: it is as if, when unhappy with the opulent present, we look to the impoverished past to blame our unhappiness on the dead, who faced daunting natural obstacles, rather than on the living, who so often don’t [9].

The translation of genuine historical criticism into a totalizing narrative of guilt — the move that Post 4 and Post 5 examined — is partly a symptom of this affluence pathology. A citizenry that takes its inheritance for granted, that has never had to defend it or earn it, that has never lived under the alternatives, finds it easy to perform dissatisfaction with it. The performance costs nothing. The erosion it produces costs everything.

Civic Illiteracy: The Numbers

The data Hanson assembles on American civic knowledge is not merely discouraging. It is diagnostic. In a 2017 poll by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, thirty-seven percent of Americans could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment. Only one out of four could name all three branches of government. One in three could not name any branch of government [10].

It is harder to lament the potential loss of constitutional freedoms when majorities of Americans willingly do not know what they are [11]. You cannot defend what you cannot name. You cannot transmit what you do not understand. The educational institutions that were supposed to produce citizens have, as Post 3 established, deliberately replaced civic formation with political activism — and activism of a kind that treats the constitutional tradition as an obstacle rather than an inheritance.

The Citizenship Condition and National Cohesion

Hanson’s treatment of citizenship and immigration is precise in a way that the current debate almost never is. The argument is not ethnic but civic: “Citizens differ from visitors, aliens, and residents passing through who are not rooted inside borders where a constitution and its laws reign supreme. For citizenship to work, the vast majority of residents must be citizens. But to become citizens, residents must be invited in on the condition of giving up their own past loyalties for those of their new hosts” [12].

The operative principle is loyalty transfer, not ethnic conformity. A republic is held together by shared commitment to its laws and institutions, not by shared ancestry. But it requires that commitment to be real and primary: “Once a man owes more loyalty to his first cousin than to a fellow citizen, a constitutional republic cannot exist” [13]. The question is not where one came from. It is what one is loyal to.

The Populist Signal

Hanson’s reading of the 2016 political moment deserves more attention than it typically receives. The simultaneous rise of Trump and Sanders — antithetical in nearly every programmatic respect — shared a common diagnostic: both believed youth did not have the same opportunities as their forebearers. Both alleged that the ‘system’ — respectively, either the greedy oligarchy or the swampy government — had thwarted opportunity [14].

The middle class’s political revolt is not, on this reading, primarily ideological. It is the expression of a structural reality: the conditions for middle-class formation have been eroded, the institutions that were supposed to serve ordinary citizens have been captured by a credentialed class that serves itself, and the people who know this most acutely have been told, repeatedly and with great condescension, that their perception is a symptom of their racism, ignorance, or cultural resentment.

The condescension is itself diagnostic. Reno’s observation from Post 2 applies with full force: the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism but the decline of solidarity and the breakdown of trust between leaders and the led [15]. That breakdown is visible. It is not being honestly addressed. And Hanson’s warning closes the loop: republics are so often lost not over centuries but within a single decade [16].

Referenced Highlights

[1] “Citizenship is what makes a republic; monarchies can get along without it. What keeps a republic on its legs is good citizenship. —MARK TWAIN, 1906”