America’s Quarter-millennium

IISS  |  Dana Allin

Vice President JD Vance and the second Trump administration have operationalised National Conservatism to challenge universal creedal definitions of American national identity, issuing executive actions targeting Fourteenth Amendment birthright citizenship. This ideological shift prioritises ethno-national cohesion models derived from Israeli theorist Yoram Hazony over historical Enlightenment principles of equality and constitutional inclusivity.

Historically, American federal governance evolved through successive constitutional resets, bridging the original 1789 compromise on slavery with Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address and the Reconstruction amendments of 1865 to 1870. Subsequent post-war legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, institutionalised multiracial democracy as an essential pillar of Cold War democratic competition against Soviet influence. By dismantling these statutory foundations, executive policy risks fracturing internal democratic consensus and eroding the foundational legal frameworks that sustained domestic stability across the semiquincentennial era.

Comment

The legal architecture of birthright citizenship under Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment has historically functioned as a constitutional anchor limiting executive authority over national membership. Attempting to alter this guarantee through executive action rather than constitutional amendment creates a profound structural conflict with federal jurisprudence established during the Reconstruction era. This strategy exposes a fundamental friction between executive policy directives and foundational equal protection doctrines enshrined after 1865. Unilateral reinterpretation of statutes like the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 creates immediate procedural vulnerabilities across federal district courts.

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