The Dying Citizen Quotes

“In a 2017 poll taken by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, most Americans appeared ignorant of the fundamentals of the US Constitution. Thirty-seven percent could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment. Only one out of four Americans could name all three branches of government. One in three could not name any branch of government. In a 2018 survey conducted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, almost 75 percent of those polled were not able to identify the thirteen original colonies. Over half had no idea whom the United States fought in World War II. Less than 25 percent knew why colonists had fought the Revolutionary War. Twelve percent thought Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded troops in the Civil War.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“The clever globe-trotting fox learns many things about the world, the local burrowing hedgehog only one: the essential truth that people are people, and learning how to understand and serve them begins at home with those one sees and speaks with face to face.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“Saving the world is a much more ambitious, ennobling, and ego-gratifying project than preserving the neighborhood.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“Wealthy tech workers in San Francisco hold frequent conferences and symposia about addressing water, sewage, and disease in Africa, but they have demonstrated no ability to address California’s own fetid city streets, which are home to over three hundred thousand homeless and rife with medieval diseases, refuse, excrement, and rodents.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating custom and tradition as by breaking laws.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“America, then, is only as good as the citizens of any era who choose to preserve and to nourish it for one more generation. Republics are so often lost not over centuries but within a single decade.3”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“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 the living, who so often don’t.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“All Americans, not only in the States most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“The effect of so many immigrant poor has certainly transformed California into not so much two different states as two different worlds: a highly sophisticated, highly regulated, and uniform coastal gentry juxtaposed with an impoverished interior of largely immigrant”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“The iconic old clapboard farmhouses of the region, once owned by a rich diversity of first- and second-generation agrarian Americans of Armenian, Basque, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Mexican, Portuguese, and Scandinavian ancestry, are now often the homes of mostly impoverished Mexican nationals, many without legal residence.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“In January 2020, not a single Republican held statewide elective office. There were Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. Democrats held forty-six of fifty-three congressional seats.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“at least some of the current overt dissatisfaction with the Constitution is old. It represents the eternal war of individual liberty and limited government versus an all-powerful, all-knowing state ensuring government-engineered equity—what is sometimes informally referenced as the antitheses between the American (1775–1783) and French (1789–1799) revolutions.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“In fact, the state was among the nation’s leaders in terms of high taxes, the highest poverty rates, the largest number of welfare residents, both in absolute and relative numbers, the greatest number of homeless people, among the steepest gasoline and electricity prices, the largest number of illegal aliens, the greatest number of outmigrants, among the worst schools and roads, and the greatest ratios of inequality.34 The”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“When we speak of a “dying citizen,” we can take that phrasing quite literally: Americans are not reproducing themselves and are starting to follow European models of slow-motion demographic suicide.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“Diverse interests are created that view each other as greater enemies than they do foreign threats. Since the common civilizational enemy has been successfully repulsed, it can no longer serve as an effective target for and outlet of people’s sense of superiority, and human psychology generally requires an adversary for the purpose of self-identification, and so a new adversary is crafted: other people in the same civilization. Since this condition of leisure and empowerment, as well as a perception of external threats as non-existential, are the results of a society’s success, success is, ironically, a prerequisite for a society’s self-hatred.46 One”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“Contrary to popular belief, the term “deep state” never implied a secret cabal. Much less does it now convey any notion of official membership. Rather, it is a natural and loose alliance of those who see themselves as permanent custodians of US power, morality, and influence. The hierarchy is an anointed class, self-defined by its members’ educations, résumés, incestuousness, and contacts. All too often they exude disdain and condescension for what they see as transitory, mostly clueless elected officials who come and go in Washington—and the ill-informed citizens who put them in office.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“Proximity to borders mattered too. Those who could go back and forth across the southern border faced greater challenges of Americanization than those more distant for whom a nineteenth-century sailing passage across the rough Atlantic or a long steamship trip from Tokyo marked a clean break from the past. Distance, premodern travel and transport, two oceans, and the huge size of the United States all made America a point of no return.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“The ideal was that a citizen was to be defined by his values, not just by his birth and not at all by his creed or color.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“Sometimes the elite green gospel has proved catastrophic—especially for the middle classes. In August and September 2020, high winds, lightning strikes, and scorching temperatures caused hundreds of forest fires throughout California. Past “more natural” policies had discouraged controlled burning, removal of brush from forest floors, cattle grazing on hillsides of dead undergrowth, and the logging of tens of millions of dead trees lost during recent droughts. Even the emasculated timber industry might have managed if it had been permitted to hire thousands to harvest the dead trees of the last six years, thus providing jobs, timber, and forest safety. Instead, the summer perfect storm created a sort of green napalm—a combustible fuel of unharvested timber that would turn a traditional wildfire into an uncontrollable inferno, burn over four million acres, and send one hundred million metric tons of carbon emissions into the air. Due to the tremendous temperatures created by the infernos, eerie pyrocumulus clouds for weeks dotted the Sierra Nevada skyline, in apocalyptical fashion emulating the mushroom clouds that billow up after nuclear blasts. The ensuing smoke clouds soon covered much of the state and overwhelmed the efficacy of public and private solar farms, which in turn led to rolling scheduled power outages. And the power crisis had been made worse by the voluntary state shutdown of clean-burning natural gas and nuclear power plants—all exacerbated by near-record temperatures in some areas of the state reaching 110 degrees.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“As long as the farm, then the factory, then the office offered social stability and upward mobility to the citizen, the American idea of empowered political citizenship remained viable. When it would or could not, then citizenship was imperiled.10”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“Such social insulation, along with science fueled by free market capitalism, has succeeded in ending starvation, dying in one’s thirties and forties, and, for the most part, chronic malnourishment, as well as ensured access to a wealth of material appurtenances. But otherwise, twenty-first-century American “peasants”—currently perhaps about 46 percent of the population—usually die with a net worth of less than $10,000,”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“Again, the classical traditions of the Roman Republic followed Hellenic precedent. Small agrarian Italian soldiers, the famed legionaries of Rome, became the foundation of a republic to ensure political rights predicated on their economic viability and martial prowess—a paradigm found nowhere else in the Mediterranean. The Roman civis (cf. “civil,” “civic,” “civilization,” etc.), or citizen, was the beneficiary of rights codified in an extensive body of law. Legal protection for the civis against arbitrary arrest, confiscation, or taxation ensured the value of citizenship. Indeed, later, throughout the Roman-controlled Mediterranean, echoed the republican-era boast civis Romanus sum—“I am a Roman citizen.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“In the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s analyses, once armed, moderate property holders became the majority in the city-state. Only then did consensual government for the first time become possible.1”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“The current reality is that millions of Americans, through debt, joblessness, and declining wages, are now becoming our own updated urban and suburban versions of the rural European peasantry of the past.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“In sum, the nature of consensual government at its origins was constant self-critique and reassessment. When such perpetual introspection ceases, so does citizenship.5”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“What so bothered Plato and other reactionary critics of democracy was that the impulse toward inclusivity always grew without logical bounds once a society had institutionalized equality and freedom within consensual governments. Among his bleaker notions—one seemingly supported by long periods of postdemocratic history—was that an always radicalizing democracy would eventually lead to chaos and then a swing back to tyranny.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“A sign of democratic sclerosis is a loss of confidence in the integrity of voting—to the point that it becomes seen as a futile exercise rather than a bulwark of citizenship.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“America, then, is only as good as the citizens of any era who choose to preserve and to nourish it for one more generation. Republics are so often lost not over centuries but within a single decade.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

“Refusing to stand during the national anthem or to salute the Stars and Stripes is not illegal, but it is not sustainable for the nation’s privileged to sit in disgust for a flag that their betters raised under fire on Iwo Jima for others not yet born. Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating custom and tradition as by breaking laws.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America