Who are the “real” British? Those torching hotels housing asylum seekers, attacking mosques and chanting hateful slogans, or those who flooded the streets after the riots this summer to reject racism and xenophobia? Posed like that, the question is a no-brainer. Those terrorising neighbourhoods do not reflect who “we” really are. This is the message the counter-protesters poured out to deliver. And yet the clash between the two sides raises deeper questions about citizenship and belonging that endure even after the racism and violence have been repudiated.
As the far right’s ethnonationalist narratives gain political ground, the left is being forced to reshape its own idea of what it means to be a citizen. Across the Atlantic, the response of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to Donald Trump’s exclusionary rhetoric suggests new ways of negotiating age-old tensions at the heart of political belonging in today’s plural democracies.
For much of modern history, citizenship of a state has been viewed primarily as a legal status, defined by civil, political and social rights. A citizen is bound by the law, but also enjoys the right to its protection. But citizenship is also something more. At its best, it functions as a source of identity, belonging and social cohesion. It fosters solidarity among strangers, creating bonds of loyalty and trust. More than a neutral contract between the state and the individual, citizenship is the foundation of a common life. Problems arise, then, because it is not clear how citizenship can and should combine these diverse legal, political and social functions, especially in the context of the multicultural pluralism that is a feature of most modern states.
The exclusionary rhetoric of the Trump-Vance campaign suggests that citizenship’s true meaning and integrative social function depend upon the existence of a prior national identity tied to ethnic origins, language, religion and notions of gender and family. “We need a leader who fights for the people who built this country,” declared Vance at the Republican National Convention, referencing the so-called “heartland” communities from which he hails. In his words, “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” His barely veiled message is that citizenship rights are not there to allow law-abiding people to live, love and worship as they choose, but instead to protect and privilege the ethnocultural meaning of the “real” America to the benefit of “real” Americans.
The critical point against the liberal, pluralist view is that citizenship is not just an abstract legal status, nor is it captured in allegiance to political values such as liberty, equality, tolerance and the rule of law. Thus, the true belonging at the heart of citizenship is not something any law-abiding newcomer to the US can easily attain. A similar idea fuelled the Brexit campaign and continues to thrive on the British right. The subtext is that certain groups are essentially excluded from political belonging as inescapably lesser, forever “other”.
The Harris-Walz ticket rejects the idea that majority culture should be the basis of citizenship. In his speech at the Democratic National Convention, Walz spoke about his upbringing in Butte, Nebraska, a town of 400 people: “Growing up… you learn how to take care of each other and that family down the road. They may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do, they may not love like you do, but they’re your neighbours and you look out for them and they look out for you. Everybody belongs and everybody has a responsibility to contribute.”
This is a fascinating rejoinder to the ethnonationalism of Trump and Vance. Walz is not simply doubling down on the importance of liberal values such as pluralism and tolerance. Instead, he follows Vance in putting rootedness, community and tradition—this specific place, these people—at the centre of the story about who “we” are. To be sure, respect for the principles of tolerance and pluralism is integral, but in Walz’s telling this respect stems from a culture of neighbourliness that naturally values these things anyway. He thus breaks from liberal orthodoxy by putting notions of community and solidarity at the heart of citizenship, but rejects the exclusionary us-versus-them logic that arises when community is taken to depend upon ethnocultural homogeneity. In this way the Democrats are seeking to reclaim and resignify the notion of community, not as something that excludes, but as something that binds us together in spite of our differences.
Similar tactics are being used to repudiate Trump’s anti-democratic rhetoric, as when he promises to jail political opponents or deploy the military against US citizens. Instead of defending liberal principles and values—such as the separation of powers or the right to vote—on purely abstract grounds, Harris and Walz tend to anchor their importance in the specific, historically imagined community of Americans who have fought to make these values a reality.
This is “the people” Harris pointedly invoked at the Democratic National Convention when she promised to meet the political moment “on behalf of our children and our grandchildren and all those who sacrificed so dearly for our freedom and liberty”. Disentangling American political culture, in this sense, from Trump’s exclusionary majority culture is the ongoing task of the Democratic campaign and a core part of its rejoinder to the Republicans’ resurgent nationalism. It points to the uneasy liberal-nationalist synthesis they are working, against the odds, to achieve.
