Citizenship presupposes nationhood. Nationhood doesn’t presuppose citizenship -- monarchies are nations, and in a monarchy there are only subjects, not citizens. (Hobbes disputed this, but he was wrong.) A category mistake nowadays is to think the latter is true -- that nationhood presupposes citizenship. It’s a nice-sounding democratic idea (since the more adequate the rights of citizens, the more stable and robust the nation), but empirically false.

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The false conception is arguably the source of the error in which it’s thought that “principles” can independently form the basis of citizenship in a given country, and thus form the country’s national identity. E.g., anti-discrimination laws or practices, qua principles, may make voting possible and easy for ex-citizens (dead people), undetermined citizens (people who move and are given mail-in ballots at both the old and new addresses, and people supposedly living at an address that can’t possibly be a residence), and non-citizens -- if America is unique in having mass mail-in balloting, is it ultimately because of wayward anti-discrimination principles fathered by liberal judicial interpretation of the 14th Amendment? Or again, an abstract rendering of birthright citizenship in which a baby dropped on our soil, having non-citizen parents, is in the nation, descriptively speaking, and prescriptively speaking is a citizen in virtue of that. (In the status quo mythology, the fact of being born on American soil entails the value of being a citizen.)

Insofar as citizenship presupposes nationhood -- an undoubted truth -- no abstract and nation-transcending principles can reliably tell us what our citizenship is, or what constitutes it. On the contrary, because citizenship presupposes nationhood, what citizenship means in a given country is fundamentally determined by the particularities of history in that country, not by any abstract principles. One merely needs to recall how generous the USSR constitution was in giving citizens rights.

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America isn’t such an exceptional nation that it can defy the principles of logic, or of dialectical reasoning (in Aristotle’s sense). I believe this is a problem for people who say that America is a creedal nation.

It’s easy to see why many self-professed classical liberals believe that about America. They assume, without much reflection, that nationhood derives from citizenship, and not the other way around. Regarding citizenship as formally a matter of abstract principles (as positive law indeed makes it out to be), they inevitably understand nationhood as equally a set of abstract principles. Because citizens are understood relatively abstractly in the law, in terms of general rights and duties, the nation is to be understood abstractly in terms of principles. Thus, the attraction to the “creedal nation.”

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Other liberals equivocate, sliding from the undeniable truth that citizenship presupposes nationhood to the mistaken idea that nationhood presupposes citizenship, going back and forth and blurring the difference. If I’m not mistaken, Kantian liberalism -- the paradigmatic modern liberalism -- more or less consciously equates citizenship with nationhood, to the detriment of federalism and decentralized government; what’s good for the nation (as decided by the government) becomes what’s good for citizens. Rousseau’s famous General Will fits neatly with this, and so does Communism -- “liberalism in a hurry.” (The General Will presumably lies behind all Court-packing schemes, by the way.)

Citizenship can’t be equated with nationhood if it presupposes nationhood, but these non-classical liberals are oblivious to that. It seems that when true liberals aren’t Lillian Hellman (“everything she says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”), they’re Chauncey Gardner.

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The political conservative (and all-time great philosopher) David Hume’s defense of monarchy isn’t inherently mistaken, just otiose by contemporary standards. He apparently never discussed the relationship between citizenship and nationhood in terms of which determines which, or is prior to which. But Hume wouldn’t have casually assumed that nationhood presupposes citizenship (which of course would have precluded monarchy as a good form of government). Not for him is the habit of blundering into philosophical errors.

Such perceptiveness isn’t universal among conservatives. Reagan conservatives, including Ronald Reagan himself (and presumably including Margaret Thatcher, who thereby unwittingly paved the way for Britain’s disastrous Muslim migration), don’t realize that it’s wrong to understand nationhood essentially in terms of citizenship, and doubly wrong to understand citizenship itself in the narrow and abstract sense found in positive law, including constitutional law (the fundamental positive law). Their problem may simply be one of committing a category mistake. It can happen to the best of people. I mean that sincerely.

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What it comes to in practice, in regard to immigration, is making it a quasi-official dogma that anyone who comes here (legally or illegally) is to be benignly considered a potential American, with the burden of proof squarely on the government to exclude some or all immigrants. This has it backwards, but the creedal-nation proponents are fine with it.

Rejecting the “Reaganite” view of immigration shouldn’t be that hard, especially when we understand that a nation isn’t constituted by abstract ideas about who is a citizen or what a citizen is. Rather, who is a citizen, and what a citizen is, is determined by nationhood. Our assumption should be that America is not a creedal nation. For if America were a creedal nation, it would have to be true that nationhood presupposes citizenship -- that, somehow, citizens are prior to the nation. What comes before a nation is its people, not citizens qua citizens. And that’s normally decided along ethnic or geographically contiguous lines; it has little to do with abstract principles, about citizenship or anything else.

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The creedal-nation view can’t be based on the idea that citizenship presupposes nationhood, because that’s incompatible with it; the historically realized nation is prior to any abstractly realized citizens. (Remember that positive law describes citizens, and their rights and duties, generally and relatively abstractly.) Rather, the creedal-nation view has to be based on the idea that nationhood presupposes citizenship, with its flawed idea that the citizen is prior to the nation. In this view, the principles of the nation, and its very identity, are to be found in the characteristics of citizenship, such as fidelity to such-and-such beliefs, where the beliefs are inevitably abstract. And this just isn’t possible, since it’s illogical to suppose that citizenship is prior to nationhood. (Note that it would be circular to base a nation’s principles on the nation itself, or its characteristics.)

The idea that citizens exist prior to the nation is arguably the philosophical basis of a broad conception of birthright citizenship. This conception is divorced from historical particulars, notably antebellum slavery and its constitutional removal in the Reconstruction Amendments. We remedied the original Constitution’s half-hearted and reluctant endorsement of slavery by making ex-slaves full citizens after the Civil War. It doesn’t follow, as Philip Hamburger eloquently and lucidly argues (“Allegiance, Birthright, and Citizenship,” in Law and Liberty), that 14th Amendment birthright citizenship is to be readily extended on the grounds of merely having crossed our border.

Wittgenstein said, “Don’t think, just look and see.”

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