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Of Polling & Polis: Suffrage & The Boundaries of American Citizenship

Late last year, Donald Trump called for the end of birthright citizenship, the granting of citizenship rights by virtue of being born on United States soil. Though his threat ultimately went unrealized, it brought to the forefront of our national consciousness the concept of American birthright citizenship. This notion of citizenship, in terms of legal relationship to the state, is generally understood in a positive sense. That is to say, citizenship is discussed as a function of the rights it gives an individual within our democratic society. Less attention in the common consciousness is afforded to considering citizenship in a negative sense: whom exactly citizenship excludes, and in what manner. As it stands, citizenship excludes non-citizens by the very virtue of the rights and privileges it affords citizens, or perhaps more pointedly, the rights and privileges the notion of citizenship restricts from non-citizens. If we begin to regard the concept of citizenship as in-and-of-itself exclusionary, Trump’s challenging of birthright citizenship becomes more understandable. And, understanding the basis for this kind of exclusion can help us in our efforts to demand a more inclusive citizenship.

The Greek city-state, or polis, as discussed by Aristotle, can be a useful theoretical frame to understand the historical and contemporary realities of exclusionary citizenship. In his Politics, Aristotle envisions a system accommodating two spheres of life: the public and the private. In Aristotle’s view, free men, citizens in the view of the polis, occupied both spheres, whereas women and slaves occupied only the latter. Furthermore, Aristotle’s conception of citizenship is not inherently democratic. For Aristotle, the polis does not necessarily exist for the propagation of wealth or freedom, the respective ends, as he explains, of oligarchy and democracy. Rather, Aristotle asserts that the end of a city-state is instead “the good life” and an equal distribution of justice. In this system, the only people deemed capable of enacting justice for the end of “the good life” are the aristoi, or aristocrats: the city-state’s “best” people. Aristotle’s conception of citizenship was thus inherently exclusive, and predicated on its bestowal only upon select persons.

In sum, Aristotle’s ideal polis is dependent on public engagement and indeed in a sense controlled by the people—but only by certain people deemed worthy of having control. The rest were excluded. Though the polis prized involvement of its citizens within civic life as an ideal of the state, Aristotle’s conception of citizenship was ultimately still a basis to perpetuate exclusion, power, and servitude. For this reason, the polis is a particularly useful tool to analyze the similarly exclusionary trends of citizenship in the history of the United States.  

We can see a manifestation of this same kind of exclusionary approach to citizenship and democracy in the property qualifications for suffrage in early American democracy, even in its ostensible predication on the notion of liberty for all. Though there were many in early America who were granted the title of citizen, only white men with property were granted suffrage, a clear example of a kind of restrictive citizenship where some were more equal than others, to use Orwell’s phrase. After the Revolutionary War, the Federalist Party viewed the new country’s fight for independence primarily as an effort to reject British rule without necessarily envisioning their new state as radically different in structure from their former one. Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party, on the other hand, pushed for suffrage as “fundamental right rather than a privilege of property,” to quote historian Rosemarie Zagarri, in her book Revolutionary Backlash.  Zagarri argues that both parties began to see the implications of the Republicans’ struggles to expand suffrage beyond property qualifications. The elimination of the property barrier invited the question as to what other barriers along racial or gendered lines could be struck down. Instead of further expansion of suffrage and with it the nature of citizenship, the status quo remained intact, with such barriers maintained.

Although the Preamble of the Constitution prioritized control of the government by “the people,” the initial conceptions of American democracy maintained a decidedly restrictive definition of said people. This restriction is well-demonstrated in the Constitution’s infamous “Three-Fifths Compromise.” The “Numbers” relevant for deciding the representation for and taxation of each state were determined by combining the “whole Number of free Persons” with three-fifths the number of “those bound to Service,” that is, enslaved black people. The right to vote, however, was for the most part extended only to white males. Just like in Aristotle’s polis, women and enslaved people, despite in combination making up a literal majority of a many states’ populations, were acknowledged as inhabitants of the country yet not given the right to actively participate in its democracy. From the beginning, the Constitution deliberately excluded many Americans, instead favoring a small segment of the population. This conception of citizenship cemented itself through the rule by those whom such a conception benefitted. Though this conception has been challenged throughout American history, such challenging was not a linear purification of citizenship back to some unrestricted, ideal essence. Instead, such an unrestricted essence was created through evolving, material demands by marginalized groups for the expansion of the boundaries of citizenship beyond the landed white male elite.

The early push for black citizenship represents one aspect of the drive to expand the inherently exclusionary conceptions of American democracy. Before the Civil War and emancipation, the very presence of slavery within the Union stood in stark contrast to the principles of freedom upon which the country was ostensibly founded. Frederick Douglass in his 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is Fourth of July?” directly and forcefully exposed the inherent paradox present in a country that both ostensibly promoted freedom yet tolerated enslavement. In Douglass’ view, the celebration of American Independence Day revealed to black Americans:

“…more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery…”

For Douglass, celebrating liberty was futile and hypocritical if such liberty was not extended to all.

Douglass did not decry all aspects of the American conception of citizenship in relation to democracy. Indeed, he found the Declaration of Independence to espouse “great principles of political freedom and of natural justice” and similarly called the Constitution a “glorious liberty document.” The great abolitionist instead challenged these documents’ incomplete interpretations as being what allowed the promotion of slavery and further injustice. In Douglass’ sentiments, he clamored for an expansion of the concept of citizenship to coincide with the freedom that the United States claimed to celebrate. Douglass can therefore be seen as challenging the disjunction between the rhetoric and material realities of American freedom. Such material realities harken back to the exclusive definition of citizenship in the polis. In Douglass’ view, the idea of citizenship was only valuable if it included all people.

After the Civil War and into Reconstruction, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, therefore, were turning points. Respectively, they abolished slavery, instituted the notion of “birthright citizenship,” and redefined the terms of citizenship by prohibiting the denial of the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In one sense, the amendments were a step of significant progress in the expansion of the American democracy; on the other hand, the mere necessity of such expansion plainly highlighted the existing flaws in the governmental system of a country run by a white male minority. The passage of the 14th Amendment was accompanied by an extension of suffrage still limited by gender. The partial quality of this expansion perpetuated a kind of ingrained exclusivity, even if the boundaries of such exclusion were broadened. In a speech in August 1880, Frederick Douglass spoke of the preceding and incipient struggles of the new citizens:

“They were hated because they had been slaves, hated because they were now free, and hated because of those who had freed them. Nothing was to have been expected other than what has happened, and he is a poor student of the human heart who does not see that the older master class would naturally employ every power and means in their reach to make the great measure of emancipation unsuccessful and utterly odious.”

Douglass astutely observed that expansion of the limits of American citizenship was not a natural one, implied by some pre-existing definitions of the term that was restricted by certain power groups. Instead, citizenship had to be forcefully and radically redefined to make it more true to a more inclusive iteration of the concept. Even then, however, the redefinition was merely a partial one: it extended citizenship to a large group, but only to a few the rights we associate with such citizenship.

Though it is easy to view historical efforts to expand the boundaries of citizenship as a part of citizenship’s natural evolution, such efforts were much more radical than they may appear to the contemporary view in their demands to broaden an originally intrinsically narrow definition. Though the struggle for black suffrage can be taken as an important manifestation of the broadening of citizenship’s boundaries, such boundaries were not completely eliminated in this or other similar demands from history for their expansion. Though the boundaries have become broader and less distinguishable, they still indeed exist, thereby keeping citizenship an inherently exclusive concept like in Aristotle’s polis.

The modern rhetoric centered around the idea of an “incipient minority” of white Americans, to use Robert L. Tsai’s term from his article “Specter of a White Minority” in the LA Review of Books, shares clear parallels with the preceding basis of exclusion through United States history. When politicians like Donald Trump speak of the danger immigrants pose to the order of our modern society, they inherently appeal to an ingrained sense of exclusion engendered by the historical precedent of white-male rule. In effect, they appeal to an expectation of a society predicated on exclusivity. Trump’s conception of citizenship is then consonant with Aristotle’s: only a certain group should be allowed to rule, and those outside of it must be directly excluded. Striking down the notion of birthright citizenship, therefore, would merely be a tool to enable the rule of such a conception. When the notion of citizenship is this fraught, the question emerges as to whether citizenship should be redefined in a manner more inclusive, or whether the concept should be eliminated entirely in hopes of a more just society. We can look to the original constitution of the USSR for an alternative, and potentially promising, form of citizenship. The USSR Constitution granted “all political rights of Russian citizens to foreigners who live in the territory of the Russian Republic and are engaged in work and who belong to the working class.” Furthermore, the state recognized “the equal rights of all citizens, irrespective of their racial or national connections” and proclaimed “all privileges on this ground, as well as oppression of national minorities, to be contrary to the fundamental laws of the Republic.” For the state, inclusion was not demanded through generous interpretations of a set of rules to find nuances to allow for greater expansion. Instead, it was a given. In lieu of an easily manipulated conception of citizenship predicated on arbitrary or unequitable qualifiers such as place of birth, race, or gender, we must demand something more. We need a definition of citizenship not built upon oppressive exclusion, as in the polis, but one built upon mutual respect and communal participation.

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