What happens when a privileged elite continually erodes the idea of citizenship as we’ve come to know it over more than two centuries? Answer: We get the United States of America, circa 2021. We get a citizenry that increasingly surrenders its centuries-old freedoms and subordinates itself to an ever-growing and largely unelected administrative state.

So argues farmer, historian, and classicist Victor Davis Hanson in his new book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization are Destroying the Idea of America.

“Constitutional systems easily perish,” writes Hanson, “because they ask a lot of their citizens — to vote, to be informed about civic and political issues and to hold elected officials accountable. That responsibility is perhaps why, of the world’s true republics and democracies, only about 22 have been in existence for a half-century or more. We are seldom told, then, that America is a rare, precious and perhaps even fragile idea, both in the past and in the present.”

Hanson’s book argues that citizenship is reciprocal; that a nation’s citizens have rights, but that they also have responsibilities such as actively providing their consent to and regularly auditing those that govern. He also outlines the historical forces that led to our current crisis of citizenship: the evisceration of the middle class and the related rise of government dependency; the Democrats’ open-borders policy and its assault on both our national demography and our national treasury; the rise of identity politics and its erosion of our collective identity as Americans; a bloated administrative state that has gutted our ancient liberties; and the Left’s formal and sustained efforts to weaken our Constitution.

As Hanson told City Journal’s Brian Anderson during a 40-minute interview:

The common theme in the book is that the progressive message is not resonating on its own merits; that each of these issues, whether it’s the Green New Deal or identity politics or new monetary theory, it doesn’t have a majority nor do the people who advance them have majorities. And so they do one of two things: They allow pre-civilizational forces to undermine the citizen, change the demography, or make race more important, let’s say, than class, or diminish the middle class. But they also, from the very top, deliberately try to attenuate citizenship. … But in a democracy you would expect that the people would exercise some level of audit. Yet with the size of the federal government now approaching two million workers, and 40% of us nationwide working for local or state or federal government, it’s very hard for the citizen to hold people accountable.

“Freedom requires constant reinvestment in and replenishment of a nation’s traditions and ideals,” says Hanson. “Self-criticism of one’s country is salutary to ensure needed changes, but only if Americans accept that an innately self-correcting United States does not have to be perfect to be good — and especially when, in a world of innately flawed humans and failed states, it remains far better than any of the alternatives abroad.”

The American citizen may indeed be dying, but the events of this fall have shown us that he’s far from dead. Otherwise, concerned parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, wouldn’t have made such a fuss at local school board meetings, and Democrats would’ve steamrolled to victory earlier this month in that reliably blue Old Dominion and in deep-blue New Jersey.

Joe Biden is a deeply unpopular president, and for good reason: His is the party of government, and government has been failing the citizenry at every turn. We don’t expect anything good to come from the Biden presidency, but perhaps we can thank him for having ripped off the nation’s scab of civic complacency.

If we can now use Hanson’s book as a warning shot and a clarion call rather than a eulogy, perhaps we may yet preserve the pre-eminence of the American citizen.