What Kind of American Are You?
Americans need to be told they do not want to live in a version of the US in which they have to be the right kind of American to be treated equally, or without malice.
The path toward the scene in 2024’s Civil War in which Jesse Plemons’ character asks a group of journalists about what kind of Americans they are starts with Republicans’ diabolical attack on the 14th amendment.
Probably you recall the scene in question if you saw Civil War, a depiction of a near-future United States that has been torn apart by – you guessed it – a civil war between the federal government and the Western Alliance, comprised mostly of Californians and Texans fighting a totalitarian president who has refused to cede power. Our protagonists – a handful of reporters and photographers risking their lives to get to D.C. and interview the American dictator – are cowering, begging for their lives as Plemons, a rogue American soldier, considers executing the journalists and dumping them in a conveniently-located mass grave.
Plemons toys with the journalists like a psycho. He waves his gun around nonchalantly and quietly delights in the spine-freezing fear of his human prey, who shake and weep and retch with anxiety. Then he asks the question: What kind of American are you?
The journalists glance at each other and say nothing. It’s unclear if there is a right answer, one that might not end with their bullet-filled corpses tossed into a big hole in the ground. The question – what kind of American are you? – hangs in the air like a grand piano falling from eleven stories above. In this fictional universe, there are presumably several kinds of Americans, all at war with each other. Being the wrong kind of American in the wrong place at the wrong time will get you killed. Being the right kind of American becomes a matter of life or death. Who determines what kind of American you are is anyone's guess.
Trump on Monday will sit at a mock desk in front of adoring throngs of anti-democracy fanboys and girls and sign dozens of executive orders meant to eviscerate the United States Constitution and rule the nation via executive fiat. Among those orders will be an appalling step in the American right’s genocide against transgender people and, as promised, an end to birthright citizenship, a bedrock of the nation's constitution.
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The New York Times assures us that Trump deciding the 14th amendment to the Constitution no longer exists – a move that falls outside the power of the president – will only apply to all future births by legal immigrants in the United States. And yeah, you read that right. The child of someone who has legal standing as a U.S. citizen will not have automatic citizenship. It is the culmination of white supremacist Stephen Miller’s dream of a racially pure America, and its consequences could have cascading effects for generations if Trump’s repeal of the 14th amendment is allowed to stand (I wrote about Miller's hideous anti-immigrant politics back in 2018 if you'd like background on the most ferocious racist in the entire Trump orbit).
Denny Carter
Opposing birthright citizenship means, in short, that you hate the United States and its constitutional order and, naturally, its people. Anyone who so much as suggests the 14th amendment should be repealed or ignored is explicitly anti-American, as much as any foreign adversary you may have been raised to hate. Democrats, if they can manage to stop groveling before a president who barely won in November, should be clear about this: Refusing to grant citizenship to people born in the US is an attack not just on migrants and immigrants – those with or without the proper documentation – but on the country as a whole.
The 14th amendment was enacted after the Civil War (the first one) to guarantee formerly enslaved people and others would have constitutional rights in the eyes of their state governments. The amendment included the citizenship clause to overrule the infamous 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott v. Sandford decision that ruled black Americans could never become U.S. citizens. The 14th amendment put those who had been legally enslaved on equal legal footing (in theory) as those who had enslaved them. It was an effort to have a functional society in a nation plagued by the original sin of slavery.
President Andrew Johnson, a favorite of the modern right wing, was among those who spent years whining about the modest leveling effects of the 14th amendment. “This provision comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood,” Johnson said. “Every individual of these races, born in the United States, is by the bill made a citizen of the United States.”
That Trump and his allies have talked so openly about ripping away this right from those they deem unworthy of American citizenship makes them the inheritors of slavery’s monstrous legacy. They have so happily, so shamelessly, picked up the torch of those who centuries ago strived to create tiers of American citizenship, permanent hierarchies of domination that they hoped would define American life forever and ever. They wanted a legal underclass in the United States. The 14th amendment dashed those devilish dreams, but only for a while. Until now, with warriors for repression and inequality taking power and so politely welcomed by those who failed to stop them.
Denny Carter
It’s unclear what, exactly, Trump’s executive action on the 14th amendment will mean in the coming months and years. If there is any law remaining in the US, it will mean nothing, or next to nothing beyond the fascist bluster that Trump does so well for his rabid throngs of frothing opponents of democracy. There is an opportunity here, both for us in conversations with our apolitical and fascist family members, and for the few elected Democrats who still have the stomach for the fight, to define Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship as an attack on us all. An end to the guarantee of birthright citizenship might, for now, apply to some faceless immigrant you do not know. But it will come for you and those you love.
Where does an end to birthright citizenship end? For now, it means legal immigrants can’t have children who gain American citizenship the minute they are born. But who is an immigrant? Would this redefining of citizenship trickle down to those who protest against the sitting government or vote for the wrong political party? Would citizenship become a selective process, available for those who tow the line and stay out of the way? Would it be controlled by the most hateful and racist among us? How could anyone witness what is happening today and say these potential futures are beyond the pale?
Americans need to be told they do not want to live in a version of the United States in which they have to be the right kind of American to be treated equally, or without malice. They need to understand – and quickly – that a future where Jesse Plemons is playfully twirling a rifle in your face, asking you what kind of American you are, is now in the range of outcomes. Pretending otherwise is wishful or foolish, or both.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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