President Trump may be on to something. This liberal has been challenged finding an issue about which we might actually agree. Nevertheless, I think I’ve found one in birthright citizenship. We both agree that birthright citizenship, established by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, requires serious rethinking. Trump proposes to limit citizenship to those born in America and who have at least one parent who’s a citizen. I propose to limit citizenship, too, but to those who earn it and maintain it. A passive citizenship gained by mere birth in America is insufficiently precious and insufficiently demanding of holders, especially in the geopolitical pressure-cooker of contemporary American capitalist democracy. The solution is making citizenship an earned status, as it is for immigrants, as well as a status requiring maintenance via regular prosocial and pro-democracy action.

America’s constitutional framers were wary of direct democracy and so established a representative republic. Framers believed the people were generally deficient in reason, virtue, education, and good sense — qualities necessary to good governance. They concluded that giving ordinary people the power to legislate directly was a risk too great. Rather, they decided to let the people choose well-prepared individuals to make law as elected representatives. The people, apart from voting in regular elections, were licensed then to preoccupy themselves with the tasks of making a living, raising a family and living a life.

Unfortunately, the sum of representative republic and our licensed preoccupations have been political disaster. This is evidenced by citizenship passivity, widespread electoral apathy (one-third of eligible voters failed to vote last November), and a 235-year history of sociopolitical domination by a narrow demographic: high-wealth, propertied, educated white men of the professional class. This demographic elite still rules.

However, what began as a political disaster has metastasized over the past century into economic, social, spiritual, and existential disasters for Americans. The primary driver of the metastasis has been the populace embracing and acting on messaging emanating from business, advertising, and popular culture. The messaging? That Americans, having previously outsourced power to a narrow elite, should now channel their time and energy into the accumulation of consumer goods. The best place now for Americans to wield freedom and influence, exhibit status and solidarity, and find happiness and purpose would no longer be the ballot box, the Elks Lodge, the church, Shepherd’s House, and the PTA, but rather, the checkout counter. The model American as consumer, launched at the beginning of the previous century, went parabolic following the end of WWII and continues to this day: two-thirds of America’s GDP is consumer spending.  But though our purchases have benefited us in innumerable ways, the costs of the combined disasters have been many, diverse, and high.

The costs can be seen in the rising number of “deaths of despair,” the twin crises of loneliness and weak belonging, the decline in community and civic engagement, ballooning economic inequality, political polarization, broad-based feelings of social betrayal and distrust, workaholism, and spiritual longing.

America and its people are in crisis. An intervention I propose, merit-based citizenship enacted during a Constitutional convention and legislatively enabled, acknowledges and rewards Americans’ continuous investment in the American people, thereby fueling national healing. I envision a probationary citizenship granted at birth and good until the age of twenty-five. At that time, and every ten years thereafter, citizenship would be renewed based on evidence of regular prosocial and pro-democracy activities. Activities would include voting, donating, military or other national or community service, volunteering, civic engagement, news literacy, and so forth. The penalty for those who fail to contribute to the common good would be denaturalization and forced emigration.

For some this may sound threatening, for others the activities above reflect their existing practice. Either way, a passive citizenship requiring no shared sacrifice for the public good should end. Let’s rebalance the me/we scale and demonstrate through individual action that citizenship matters because Americans matter.

Dean Harris lives in Bend.