Victor Davis Hanson - The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

Victor Davis Hansons book is not a complaint nor a polemic but rather a fine-grained diagnosis of a very serious disease. Its symptoms are all around us: the fragmentation of Americas national identity by the assertion of not merely separate but separatist identities with the vehement support of the most privileged of all Americans. May this brilliant diagnosis lead us to a cure.

Edward N. Luttwak, author of The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy

The great glory of the democratic revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was extending the blessings of citizenship to anyone and everyone who embraced the principles and responsibilities of self-governing nations. As Victor Davis Hanson explains, by subtle degrees were reversing course, through a deliberate attempt to dilute and eventually erase national identity, sovereignty, borders, and the meaningful content of citizenship itself. But if everyone is a citizen of everywhere, it means they are citizens of nowhere, with the return of autocratic rule the final result. The hour is late, and we have Hanson to thank for this capacious account of what we need to recover.

Steven F. Hayward, author of Patriotism Is Not Enough

This is not a drillthis is the real thing. If you dont believe that the survival of the American republic hangs in the balance, you must read Victor Davis Hansons relentless exposition of the facts. Americas free citizenry is at imminent risk of defeat at the hands of an unelected Deep State allied to a globalist elite that flouts American law with impunity and plans to jettison the Constitution. Even if you think youre informed and alarmed about these trends, Hansons brilliant presentation will leave you much better prepared to address these dangers. Get this book into the hands of everyone you know.

David Goldman, deputy editor of Asia Times and author of You Will Be Assimilated

Once again Victor Davis Hanson has written a masterly account of a great public affairs crisis. He has given a learned history of the concept and indispensability in a democracy of responsible citizenship; has perceptively chronicled how it has been undermined in the US; how Donald Trump in his sometimes frantic way tried to revive it, and of the tense but not unhopeful current prospects. This book is a concise masterpiece that all serious citizens should read.

Conrad Black

This is a book about an ongoing and threatening change of regime, which means a change not only in how we are governed but also in how we live. To understand such a thing requires perspective: Victor Hanson is deeply educated in the classics, where knowledge of regimes was first developed. It also requires a close observation of what is happening today, about which he writes insightfully and in profusion. In this book, Hanson demonstrates yet again his command across time and for our time. This book and he are a treasure.

Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College

As I write, Victor Davis Hansons book The Dying Citizen is still a couple of months from publication. But here is a prediction: it will instantly be seen for what it is, one of the most important and insightful books of the early 2020s. Hanson is that rarest of authors: a man of immense erudition who also commands a penetrating and sympathetic understanding of the practical side of life. Political freedom, Hanson shows, is inextricable from the life of citizenship. And citizenship is not a given. It is an achievement, an achievement, moreover, that must be tended to survive. Most of history unfolded without citizens, only subjects, serfs, slaves, and sycophants. And just as there were ages before citizenship, so we can see from our own experience that citizenship can decay and fail. Should it failshould citizenship give way to any of the utopian alternatives on offerthen our political freedom will go with it, a casualty of those good intentions that always seem to line the road to perdition. Among much else, then, The Dying Citizen is an impassioned cri de coeur, an admonition, a startling tocsin in the night. Victor Hanson has written a number of good and informative books. The Dying Citizen is without a doubt his magnum opus.

Roger Kimball, editor and publisher of The New Criterion