In Defense of Citizenism

Here is the first of the posts I have been meaning to write over the weekend:

Noah Millman and Nicholas Antongiavanni have both criticized Steve Sailer's promotion of "citizenism," that is, that the U.S. government should protect the interests of current U.S. citizens first and foremost, which Sailer in particular sets up against white nationalism here.

In both cases, the general idea appears to be that the U.S. should calculate national interest not on the basis of the collective interest, as it were, of American citizens, but on the basis of promoting the political ideas of America's founders. In other words, America is not a nation, but simply a political lobby.

The easiest way to understand citizenism, in my opinion is to understand what a nation (or a nationality) is and why it commands loyalty. If a race is an extended family, and that is why people feel racial loyalty, then a nation is a race which is allowed to adopt members (as opposed to a simply biological family). That a nation would put the interests of its current members first is no surprise. Almost any family with children is going to put the interests of their current children ahead of the interests of a child they may potentially adopt in the future; the calculation of course changes after the adoption when the child becomes their child. Similarly, the U.S. government and the citizenry would sensibly put the interests of those who are already citizens over those who may become citizens someday.

Noah Millman raises a few objections, each of which I will deal with.

First: How do we determine what is in the "aggregate interest" of the citizens of the United States? While he does have a point that an exact quantitative determination is impossible, well, so what? That we don't have an exact method of calculating "utiles" doesn't negate the concept of a common interest or a common good; people have to make such qualitative calculations all the time. What is in the best interest of the folks in this nursing home? What is in my family's best interest? etc., etc. Millman suggests that our poltical and economic sytem is the means by which we do the aggregation, and then points out the fllaw with such an analysis: how does one determine how the system is working in a way that does not amount to a tautology? His answer is that you do so by essentially defining the national interest by our political system and that immigration policy should be determined by how it affects our political values. But by that standard, there is nothing wrong with totally displacing all of the current population of America, as long as you replace them with another group of classical liberals.

I think that for the most part, one can get a sense of "aggregate interest" without complicated mathematical formulae. In general, an increased economic standard of living is a net plus, having cleaner water, land, and air is a net plus, having healthier citizens is a net plus, etc. While there may be some disagreement as to what policies and what outcomes are the optimum (depending on how competing interests are weighed), and thus elections and other such political manifestations may be necessary to determine how the U.S. will weigh its national interest, I think that all of these qualitative calculations (for lack of a better term) can be done with the goal of promoting the national welfare (i.e. that of the current citizenry) without needing to reduce the U.S. to nothing but a political movement. That is, all sides can agree that the most important issue is the welfare of the current citizens and all sides can attempt to argue their idea of how to do that, with the interests of non-citizens coming in a distant second, and with the general outline of what constitutes a better life for Americans being reasonably similar for all major political groupings involved.

Second, Noah Millman asks "Why is "the citizenry of the United States" the relevant body within which to do the impossible aggregation of citizens' utiles?" that is, why not argue for loyalty to one's city or state instead.

The answer here is that "citizenism," while Sailer on the immigration issue defined it as relating to national citizenship, actually can apply to all levels of government. At each level of government, the government should put the interests of those under its jurisdiction first. San Francisco should put the interests of San Franciscans first, California of Californians first, and the U.S. government of U.S. citizens first. If you believe in such organizations as the U.N., then those organizations should try to represent everyone's collective interest.

However, on issues of immigration the national level is the relevant level, because it is the lowest level of government at which there is control over its own borders. That is, California cannot legally prevent people from migrating from other states, nor can San Francisco prevent migration from other cities. The only level of government at which border contorl is allowed is the federal government, so it is the relevant entity here. Moreover, due to the open borders between states and between cities, the U.S. citizenship is more stable than the citizenship of any of the smaller units, so in general citizenism will apply more to issues at that level. That is, the list of current citizens is too fluid at the state and local levels for it to take hold the way it does at the national level.

But why, one might ask, is citizenism a good thing? Millman writes:

Citizenship is not just membership in a club; it's allegiance to a flag and the Republic for which it stands. And hence, debating the conditions of citizenship and how they should be extended is not just a debate about the interests of the club members in a bigger or smaller membership, or what class of new members they want to associate with, but about the meaning of the entity to which allegiance is pledged and how that meaning will be shaped either by accepting new allegiants or rejecting them.

So is citizenism simply allegiance to a club? Why is supporting fellow citizens in itself a noble activity, if not to promote a political and social ideology?

For the same reason that it is a good thing that people in a geographic region support the sports teams associated with that region. Because they are our family, even if adopted rather than biological, and family is necessary for a healthy society. And we need to regulate whom we let into our families, not just for the sake of maintaining a particular philosophy, but for the good of the members of our family and thus of the family itself.

Millman may somewhat derisively look at citizenism as reducing citizenship to membership in a club, but I look at his philosophy as reducing it to membership in a political party. The best paradigm here, and the one which causes the whole thing to make sense, is that of family.

That is all.