Citizenship Without Obligation Is Not Citizenship at All
Rome extended citizenship faster than it could sustain the obligations it required. Within a generation, the Republic was at war with itself.
Alexander Petkas, in a recent essay for TomKlingenstein.com, traces the unraveling of the late Roman Republic to a specific structural failure: the expansion of citizenship beyond the institutions, norms, and shared obligations that once gave it meaning. The Romans did not fall because they were too exclusive. They fell because they extended membership faster than they could extend the cultural cohesion that membership required. The newly enfranchised Italians, lacking deep attachment to Roman political tradition, became instruments of elite manipulation. Within a generation, the Republic was in civil war.
The parallel to our own moment is not decorative. It is structural. American citizenship is being hollowed out from two directions simultaneously: from below, by policies that erase the practical distinction between citizen and noncitizen; and from above, by an elite class that treats the expansion of the franchise not as a civic act but as a factional weapon.
Consider the erosion from below. Municipalities in California, Maryland, Vermont, and the District of Columbia now permit noncitizens to vote in local elections. San Francisco allows noncitizen parents to vote in school board races. Washington, D.C., extended local voting rights to all noncitizen residents in 2022. New York City’s council passed a law in 2021 that would have granted municipal voting rights to some 800,000 noncitizens; the state’s highest court struck it down 6X–1 in March 2025, but the political appetite behind the effort remains intact. Meanwhile, California’s Values Act prohibits local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration agents, effectively guaranteeing that noncitizens who commit crimes will not be transferred to the federal authorities whose job is to remove them. As Lyceum has documented, this policy contributed directly to the murder of Kembery Chirinos-Flores in Sunnyvale, California, by two Honduran nationals whom ICE had repeatedly flagged for removal.
The erosion from above is subtler but no less consequential. Petkas identifies the dynamic precisely in the Roman case: powerful factions supported mass enfranchisement not because they believed in civic equality but because they calculated that a large body of new voters, lacking established loyalties, could be secured as a permanent client base. The modern version of this calculation is barely disguised. When the New York City Council voted to extend the franchise to noncitizens, no serious person believed the motive was civic inclusion. The motive was electoral arithmetic. The same logic drives the resistance to voter ID laws, the opposition to citizenship questions on the census, and the sustained effort to blur every administrative line between those who belong to the political community and those who do not.
The American public, to its credit, has not accepted this project passively. Voters in eight states approved constitutional amendments in 2024 explicitly prohibiting noncitizen voting. Texas followed in 2025. Eighteen states now carry such language in their constitutions. In November 2024, Santa Ana, California, rejected a noncitizen voting measure by a 60–40 margin. Michigan’s citizens submitted 750,000 signatures in March for a citizenship voting requirement on the 2026 ballot. The instinct is sound: the American people understand, even if their governing class does not, that citizenship must mean something beyond a piece of paper.
Petkas draws from the Roman example a principle the American Founders understood well: those willing to risk their lives and fortunes for the safety of the state have a right to determine its government. The Militia Acts of 1792 reflected this logic. So did the expedited naturalization pathways for military service in both World Wars. Citizenship was earned through obligation and sacrifice. It was not a bureaucratic status to be distributed for factional advantage or withheld from scrutiny as a matter of ideological courtesy.
The cold civil war Tom Klingenstein has described is, at bottom, a conflict over this question: what does it mean to belong to the American political community? One side answers that belonging requires nothing beyond physical presence. The other answers that it requires allegiance, obligation, and a willingness to sustain the constitutional order that makes self-government possible. Rome answered this question poorly, and the Republic did not survive the consequences. We are not Rome. But we are making the same category of error, and the Romans did not have the benefit of their own example to warn them.
