Citizenship is not a matter of identity politics. It’s the moral basis of republicanism

Progressives such as Stacey Abrams, who lost the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia, are trying to undermine the distinction between citizen and noncitizen in American politics. But when Abrams and others confound citizens with noncitizens, they undermine the legitimacy of any popular office they would hold, for they destroy the coherency of what constitutes a people to begin with.

Citizenship must be exclusive because it involves a commitment to a group of people to whom one owes certain duties and from whom one expects recognition of certain rights.

In 2014, U.S. citizen Hoda Muthana left Alabama to join ISIS. She used social media to try to incite Muslims within the U.S. to perform violent acts of terror against American civilians. When coalition forces collapsed the ISIS caliphate, Muthana demanded that the U.S. allow her to come back. A federal judge is now hearing her case.

Contrary to Muthana’s presumption, one does not attain the rights of citizenship by simply demanding them. At its foundation, citizenship is a contract one makes with a community. If one party breaks the terms, the other is no longer obliged to honor them.

Citizenship in the U.S. involves an agreement that recognizes a moral order that transcends individuals and limits what they may rightly do. This agreement includes terms for membership that are laid out in the Constitution. New members may only be admitted at the pleasure of the current members.

If you dissolve the distinction between citizens and noncitizens, you dissolve the authority of the people as a people.

American citizenship does not depend on race or any other identity. Stacey Abrams, however, has been building her entire political brand as a stalwart defender of identity politics. She and other purveyors of identity politics maintain a political coalition by trying to widen the otherwise inconsequential divisions between citizens and uniting them in the belief that each is a marginalized group.

Abrams placed her hope for election in 2018 in changing demographics, not changing minds. In an impromptu campaign speech, Abrams proclaimed that the 2018 “blue wave is African American. It’s white, it’s Latino, it’s Asian-Pacific Islander.” But then, she seamlessly added, “It is made up of those who’ve been told that they are not worthy of being here. It is comprised of those who are documented and undocumented.”

Further, in a “Firing Line” interview, Abrams coyly admitted that she “wouldn’t oppose” noncitizens voting in municipal elections alongside citizens.

For this reason, ever since she lost the 2018 gubernatorial election, she has busied herself with founding organizations such as Fair Fight Action and Fair Count, which assume the legitimacy of including undocumented immigrants within their understanding of the people, and ultimately to serve to advance the ends of identity politics and actually undermine democracy.

But if there is no specific people distinct from the rest of mankind to consent to a specific government, then who is sovereign? By whose authority do the rulers rule? The final iteration of identity politics is a global oligarchy, governing without consent, in the name of the whole world.

Stacey Abrams called the goal of maintaining a coherent, sovereign American people, all seeing one another equally as citizens, “a false image of universality.” Lincoln, though, was able to describe that same goal in the divisive year of 1865 as “a Union of hearts and hands as well as of States.”

If we would maintain belief in a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” we must first maintain belief in the legitimacy of the very idea of a people.

Clifford Humphrey is a Ph.D. candidate in the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College. Follow him on Twitter @Cphumphrey.