Civitas No. 6
On Citizenship as Burden, Not Identity
To The People of the United States:
There is a growing confusion in the public mind between citizenship and identity. The former is a demanding role; the latter a comfortable description. When the two are conflated, self-government erodes -- not through malice, but through neglect. A people who mistake what they are for what they owe soon discover that liberty, untended, does not endure.
Citizenship was never meant to be a label, a heritage, or an aesthetic. It is not a posture to be displayed, nor a sentiment to be affirmed. It is a charge. To be a citizen is to accept duties as real as the rights one claims -- duties to attend, to judge, to restrain oneself, and to shoulder the consequences of collective choice. Where these duties are denied or forgotten, citizenship becomes a costume, and freedom becomes performance. Nowhere is this truth more visible than in those who have wagered their lives for the Republic. They remind us that the highest privilege of citizenship is not what one takes from the public treasury, but what one risks in its defense.
The American tradition understood this plainly. Rights were secured not as indulgences, but as protections necessary for the exercise of responsibility. Speech was protected so citizens could deliberate; arms so they could defend; due process so law would bind ruler and ruled alike. These rights presupposed a citizen capable of judgment and restraint. They were not gifts to be enjoyed in isolation from obligation.
When rights are severed from duty, they do not expand liberty; they cheapen it. Entitlement replaces responsibility, and grievance substitutes for governance. The citizen becomes a claimant rather than a steward -- one who demands protection without participation, benefit without burden. In such a condition, the language of rights persists even as the practice of self-government withers.
This transformation is often defended in the name of inclusion or compassion. Yet compassion that excuses responsibility does not elevate the citizen; it infantilizes him. A republic cannot be sustained by permanent adolescence. Freedom requires maturity, and maturity requires the willingness to accept limits -- on oneself as much as on power.
Identity politics, whatever its intentions, accelerates this decay. When citizenship is reduced to a marker of belonging, it becomes something one possesses rather than something one performs. Disagreement is personalized, duty is outsourced, and civic failure is blamed on others. The harder work -- self-examination, participation, and restraint -- is quietly set aside.
A people who treat citizenship as identity cease to practice self-government. They still speak its language; they still invoke its symbols; but they no longer bear its weight. Decisions are left to representatives, administrators, and judges, while citizens retreat into spectatorship. When outcomes disappoint, they protest; when processes demand effort, they withdraw. This is not oppression. It is abdication.
The purpose of this paper is not to flatter, but to clarify. Liberty is not sustained by passion alone. It survives where citizens accept that freedom exacts a price: attention instead of apathy, discipline instead of indulgence, and responsibility instead of comfort. These demands will never be popular. They are nonetheless essential.
Self-government cannot be outsourced without consequence. Where citizens decline the burden of judgment, others will assume it on their behalf. Where they refuse the discipline of participation, power will consolidate among those willing to wield it. This is not a conspiracy; it is a vacancy.
Citizenship, properly understood, is a burden before it is a benefit. It asks more than it promises. It requires effort without guarantee and responsibility without applause. Those unwilling to accept this burden may still enjoy the protections of law, but they will not preserve them. That work belongs to those prepared to carry it.
Liberty does not survive because people feel entitled to it. It survives because some are willing to do the unglamorous work of maintaining it. A republic that forgets this truth will not be taken by force; it will be given away.
Civitas Americana