Citizenship in this context means two things. First, it means sharing a common, civic identity: the “self” in self-government. Second, it means participating in the creation and receipt of public goods, the sharing of burdens and benefits: the “government” in self-government. A sense of diminished citizenship is now pervasive across the socio-economic spectrum in North America. What is new is that the opportunities and demands of citizenship no longer seem to resonate strongly either with economic elites or with growing numbers of the middle class.
For the poor and marginalized, growing economic inequality undermines the promise of citizenship. There is less upward mobility for low-income Americans today than there is for their counterparts in Canada or Western Europe. Significant inequality used to be justified in the United States by the idea that everyone had a fair shot at the American Dream. That is less and less true today. Meanwhile, the middle class is beleaguered. Since 2000, according to Pew Research, it has “shrunk in size, fallen backward in income and wealth, and shed some – but by no means all – of its characteristic faith in the future.”
Many at the top of the economic heap seem inclined to hive themselves off from their fellow citizens – in gated communities, niche charter schools, and luxury boxes at sports events. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney found it difficult to appeal to “the 47 percent” in part because he found it hard to respect them as co-equal citizens. After all, what united the 47 percent – including many African Americans, Hispanics, and young people – was that they were all seen by the wealthy as recipients of “gifts” from the government of the day, not as civic participants in a political and governmental process whose programs bring them burdens and benefits as it does for other members of the political community.
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