Anxieties of Membership: American Citizenship after Democratic Nationalism

This dissertation argues that the democratic goal of collective sovereignty requires a particularistic, imagined sense of association among members of the demos, and that American egalitarians’ rejection of that idea has profoundly shaped the trajectory of American citizenship since the late 1960s. It develops an analytical framework of “holistic democratic citizenship,” which treats citizenship in contemporary democracies as a composite status of five historically-accreted elements (political participation, rights, equality, intersubjective identification, and perpetuation), and reconstructs an American intellectual tradition of “democratic nationalism,” which prominently attempted to promote holistic citizenship through a nationally-scaled narrative of peoplehood between the first and second Reconstructions./nThe inclusive ideal of nationhood championed by democratic nationalists promoted, in particular, the holistic components of intersubjective identification and perpetuation, encouraging Americans to imagine themselves in terms of an expansively-defined national demos. The dissertation argues that in the wake of American egalitarians’ broad rejection of nationalism since the 1960s, newer theorizations of citizenship tend to detach its formal elements (participation, rights, and equality) from location within temporally-continuous settings of intersubjective identification, undermining the epistemic and psychological preconditions of collective sovereignty, and depriving egalitarians of the conceptual resources needed to contextualize, motivate, and render legible the work of democratic inclusion in the United States./nThe first part of the dissertation provides a historical and theoretical framework for the second part’s discussion of three contemporary anxieties of democratic membership surrounding immigration, race, and inequality. Chapter One traces democratic nationalism’s rise in the Civil War and Reconstruction era and its decline in the civil rights era, explaining the historical process by which American egalitarians’ democratic aspirations became fused to, and then broken from, a nationalist vision of the demos. Chapter Two introduces the framework of holistic democratic citizenship, showing how the components of participation, rights, equality, intersubjective identification, and a sense of shared futurity contribute to a complex whole, and how monolithically conservative understandings of nationalism motivate a corrosive formalism and disaggregative tendency in citizenship theory./nPart Two analyzes three contemporary anxieties of membership through the historical tradition of democratic nationalism and the analytical framework of holistic democratic citizenship. Chapter Three analyzes debates over the fate of unauthorized denizens residing in the U.S., defending a political (not economic or humanitarian) approach which resists calls for open borders or differentiated citizenship in favor of democratic principles which instead imply that full inclusion on political grounds is owed to a specific class of migrants./nChapter Four analyzes historical and contemporary debates over the possibility of interracial solidarity on a national scale, which is directly connected to support for a policy of integration. The chapter argues that in the absence of a nationally-scaled form of identification, racial egalitarians can only fall back on formalistic, one-sided views of citizenship that eschew the politics of integration and ironically reinforce the same racialized boundaries that already obscure patterns of mutual responsibility among citizens./nChapter Five discusses the anti-tax politics of the conservative movement in the context of contemporary economic inequality. It traces the market naturalism of the new right to a view of citizenship which rejects identification, and argues that this rejection of identification is ironically mirrored by the depoliticized view of political economy that prevails among liberal politicians. These intellectual and discursive changes, traceable to the decline of democratic nationalism in the 1960s, help to explain the unrivaled position of economistic visions of citizenship in an era of spiraling inequality./nThe conclusion describes possible futures for democratic citizenship in the U.S. in light of past attempts at national “reconstitution” in both a legal and an ethical sense. The conclusion argues that the avoidance of further democratic decay requires citizens to revive particularistic yet inclusive accounts of their shared democratic life./nThe dissertation’s historical narrative and analytical framework contribute to ongoing debates over nationalism, American identity, democracy, and citizenship; as well as immigration, race, and economic inequality. It develops a non-cultural defense of bounded solidarity that differs from both liberal nationalism and constitutional patriotism, while merging the intellectual-historical literature on postwar American “fracture” with political-theoretical analysis of the changing nature of democratic citizenship under globalization.

Advisor: Song, Sarah
Bevir, Mark