The Trump Administration’s decision to contest the dominant interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment is a sign that we might be living in an era of regime politics.
Near the beginning of his Crisis of the Two Constitutions, Charles Kesler distinguishes “normal politics” from “regime politics”:
Normal politics takes place within an accepted political and constitutional order, and concerns means, not ends. That is, the purposes and limits of politics are agreed; the debate is over how to achieve those purposes while observing those limits. By contrast, regime politics is about who rules and for the sake of what ends or principles. It unsettles any existing political order, as well as its limits. It raises anew the basic questions of who counts as a citizen, what are the goals of the political community, and what do we honor or revere together as a people.
Kesler’s distinction provides us a yardstick with which to measure claims of how consequential a given political moment actually is, and to evaluate our political moment responsibly. It avoids one extreme of being misled by every sensational news story, and also the other of dismissing every claim of world-historical significance as hype. If politics today is focused upon its proper ends in a profound way, provoking and exhibiting a willingness to pursue “the basic questions” of political order, then it’s likely we are no longer in the realm of “normal politics.”
It is no surprise that our most consequential political arguments revolve around citizens and their ruling class, which also happen to be the core concerns of any regime-level dispute.
Aristotle defined a citizen (politēs) as “whoever is entitled to share in an office involving deliberation or decision.” Different regimes grant this political right in different ways, conforming more or less to what is just, and fitting better or worse with the actual conditions and capacities of their society. The regime (politeia) itself—embodied in the “governing body” or administration (politeuma) of citizens who occupy offices and exercise authority—decides who gets to participate in its governance, and how, and to what extent, just as a club determines and enforces its own bylaws and membership rules.
The citizen’s identity is bound up with the identity of the regime itself. A regime change—say, from Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation—occurs not primarily when one ruler succeeds another, but when there is a change in the regime’s very composition and purpose. With regime change comes a change in “who rules”—that is, who counts as a citizen in the fullest, Aristotelian sense—as well as “for the sake of what ends or principles”: Orthodox autocracy, or Bolshevik totalitarianism, or Putinist restorationism. In both its class of citizens and governing institutions, these regimes embody distinct political goals. There is no value-neutral regime, because human life is not value-neutral.
Understood in this light, the birthright citizenship challenge is of a piece with Trump’s other early executive orders and actions, many of which are direct attacks on the existing regime and those who staff it. The termination of remote work, freezes on federal hiring and new federal regulations, the establishment of DOGE, the unwinding of DEI, ending affirmative action while reasserting merit as a principle for federal hiring, and offering deferred resignation to federal employees are all attacks on the administrative state, the ruler of the present regime.
Trump has complemented his efforts to recover a republican regime by appointing self-conscious critics of the current regime to high-level positions in his administration: Pete Hegseth, a GWOT infantryman, for Secretary of Defense; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a crusader against Big Pharma’s regulatory capture, for Secretary of Health and Human Services; Tulsi Gabbard, a critic not only of regime-change wars abroad but of our foreign policy class’s efforts to “undermine our democratic republic” at home, for Director of National Intelligence; Kash Patel, exposer of the Russia Hoax, for Director of the FBI.
All of this, especially when coupled with major policy changes that seek to replace globalist policies with nationalist ones, such as securing the border, withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization, and freezing foreign aid, constitutes a conscious effort to challenge the existing American regime.
Liberals and conservatives who genuinely hold that America is simply an idea, who think that American citizenship is reducible to a profession of faith, and who believe America’s exceptional character consists not in its brilliantly-founded, long-maintained regime but in its exemption from the ordinary laws of politics and history are right to be shocked and appalled by the vice president’s declaration that 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.”
Those liberals and conservatives who imagine that the purpose of the American regime is not to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” but to serve as the messianic force by which democratic governance, free-market economics, and self-expressive individualism are spread to every benighted corner of the globe, are right to be shocked and appalled by the American people’s down-to-earth insistence that the American government serve their interests.
Those liberals and conservatives who genuinely believe that unelected, unaccountable, and (perhaps, until now) un-fireable bureaucrats “resisting” the policy decisions of a duly-elected president and members of our constitutionally-established branches of government are what the American Founders meant by checks and balances are right to be shocked and appalled by the reassertion of presidential supremacy over the executive branch.
Such disagreements are fundamental enough to pose a danger to any existing political order.