CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Stealing Democracy: Trump’s Assault on Birthright Citizenship

Dred Scott. Oil on canvas by Louis Schultze, 1888. (Detail) Missouri History Museum Collections. n23864.

The United States has always been divided against itself. From its founding, the promise of democracy has existed alongside the violence of settler colonialism, slavery, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. The nation’s greatest democratic advances have emerged not from the fulfillment of its founding ideals but from generations of struggle against racial domination, economic exploitation, and political exclusion. American history is therefore not a story of inevitable democratic progress. It is an ongoing struggle over whose histories are remembered, whose humanity is recognized, and whose freedom counts, a struggle measured against the gulf between the nation’s claims to freedom and justice and the reality of systemic cruelty and racialized terror. Today, that struggle has entered a new and dangerous phase. The assault on birthright citizenship is not simply another dispute over immigration or constitutional interpretation. It is an attempt to decide once again who counts, who qualifies as a citizen, and who possesses the right to have rights.  At stake is nothing less than whether the United States becomes a multiracial democratic socialist society or completes its transformation into a fascist white republic.

The attack on birthright citizenship forces the nation to confront a question every democracy must answer: Who belongs, and whose lives are valued? As Judith Butler argues, politics is organized around distinctions between lives regarded as grievable and those rendered ungrievable, between those recognized as fully human and those denied that status. Every authoritarian movement answers that question by transforming citizenship from a universal right into a racial, nationalist, and class privilege. Once citizenship becomes conditional, every other right becomes conditional as well. The Trump-Miller campaign against birthright citizenship is therefore not simply an attack on immigration policy. It is an attempt to transform the United States from an imperfect democracy into a racial state. In doing so, it revives a political tradition that never disappeared, one rooted in the racial nationalism of the Johnson–Reed Immigration Act of 1924, the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, and the recurring fantasy of preserving the United States as a white republic.

The assault on birthright citizenship is an attempt to steal one of Reconstruction’s greatest democratic achievements. As constitutional scholar Sherrilyn Ifill reminds us, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment undertook a “race-conscious project” designed to dismantle racial caste and establish birthright citizenship as the legal foundation of a multiracial democracy.  As Martha S. Jones demonstrates in Birthright Citizens, birthright citizenship was not bestowed from above. It was forged through generations of Black struggle against slavery, racial caste, and white supremacy. The Trump administration seeks to reverse that democratic achievement by redefining citizenship as a privilege of ancestry, bloodline, and racial hierarchy rather than a constitutional guarantee of democratic equality. As Eddie S. Glaude Jr. observes, “These people are the inheritors of that legacy. They believe the country should be white.”

Nor did this assault emerge suddenly. Trump’s “birther” campaign against Barack Obama was the opening act in a broader effort to reopen the very question Reconstruction sought to settle: Who can legitimately claim to be an American? The issue was never where Obama was born. It was whether a Black man could legitimately embody the nation itself. Birtherism transformed citizenship into a weapon of racial warfare, preparing the ideological ground for today’s assault on birthright citizenship. The current campaign extends that poisonous logic from one symbolic target to millions of others, rendering citizenship increasingly contingent, revocable, and politically expendable.

This is why the struggle over birthright citizenship is fundamentally a struggle over the legal foundations of democracy itself. Citizenship is the constitutional basis of every democratic right. Once that foundation is transformed from a universal guarantee into a privilege granted by political authority, democracy itself begins to disappear. Rights cease to belong equally to all; they become favors distributed by a state that defines belonging through race, nationalism, and ideological conformity.

John Ganz captures the magnitude of this transformation with unusual clarity:

It’s long been my contention that the attack on citizenship is the most serious and frightful aspect of the Trump phenomenon and the one that makes it most deserving of the epithet fascist or totalitarian…. If they successfully destroy American citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution they will have destroyed the country. We will be, all of a sudden, somewhere else.

It’s long been my contention that the attack on citizenship is the most serious and frightful aspect of the Trump phenomenon and the one that makes it most deserving of the epithet fascist or totalitarian…. If they successfully destroy American citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution they will have destroyed the country. We will be, all of a sudden, somewhere else.

The ideological stakes of this struggle become especially visible as the United States marks the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its founding. Official celebrations largely substitute patriotic spectacle for historical reckoning, presenting the nation’s past as an unbroken story of liberty, unity, and democratic progress. Such mythology erases the central role of Indigenous dispossession, slavery, racial capitalism, and generations of democratic struggle in shaping American history, obscuring the crucial truth that democracy has advanced not because the nation faithfully realized its founding ideals but because ordinary people repeatedly forced the nation to confront the violence, exclusions, and contradictions built into those ideals. The assault on birthright citizenship is simultaneously constitutional in its aims and pedagogical in its methods, seeking to reshape how Americans understand democracy, belonging, and political identity.

Ganz’s warning points beyond legal rights to the wider struggle over democratic identity, public values, civic consciousness, and the distribution of political and economic power. The attack on citizenship cannot be separated from the rise of gangster capitalism and the oligarchy that increasingly dominates American society. As wealth and power become concentrated in the hands of a tiny corporate and financial elite, democratic institutions are emptied of any substance, public goods are dismantled, and the media are increasingly captured by concentrated private interests. In addition, staggering class divisions, entrenched racial injustice, and a politics of disposability become normalized. The attack on citizenship is one mechanism through which this emerging social order redraws the boundaries of political membership, legitimates exclusion, and diverts public anger away from the structures of exploitation that produce widespread misery.

This is neoliberal fascism intensified by oligarchic power and racial capitalism. As Harvey J. Kaye reminds us, what often disappears in discussions of authoritarianism is the class war from above that has laid the groundwork for its emergence. For decades, corporate elites, their political allies, and neoliberal policymakers have waged a relentless assault on workers, public goods, democratic institutions, and the social state, producing staggering inequalities of wealth and power while intensifying racial and social injustice. This class war has not only deepened economic insecurity; it has generated the resentments, abandonment, and civic despair upon which authoritarian movements flourish. The attack on citizenship is inseparable from this broader class project.

What is unfolding today is not merely the return of fascist rhetoric but the deliberate construction of a political order in which democracy is hollowed out from within by the convergence of oligarchic power, white supremacy, and authoritarian rule. Constitutional protections are eroded, dissent is criminalized, cruelty........

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