Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show

today is Victor Davis Hanson. Victor's the Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford

University's Hoover Institution. He's a longtime contributing editor of City Journal, and he's the author

of many books, most recently The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism,

and Globalization are destroying the idea of America. It's a vital book about a vital topic.

So, Victor, thanks for joining us, as always, on Ten Blocks.

Thank you for having me.

Your book is organized around six forces that you argue are undermining citizenship,

a citizenship as we traditionally have understood and embraced it in American history.

The first three, you say, are pre-modern, ancient, political, economic, and ethnic ideas that are coming back in

force. The next three are postmodern ideas espoused by, you know, what really is a small

number of American elites that threaten to, in your view, dismantle constitutional governments and erode our sense of

nationhood. So let's start with the pre-modern or pre-citizenship trio, peasants, residents, and tribes.

You know, what runs through the illuminating historical discussion in this part of the book

is a very important point that authentic citizenship in a consensual society is not a given,

that history is filled with far less attractive political orders.

So could you say a little bit about each of these reversions, these pre-modern reversions that you see going on

in contemporary America. Now, by peasants, you don't mean that people are going back to the land,

right? No. Yeah, we've never really had the word peasant in the American experience, because

from the very beginning, this constitutional

republic was based on a solid and broad middle class and they were landowners and then as agriculture

...