The Unmaking of the American Citizen: Neoliberalism, Identity Politics, and the Conservative Renewal

We moved from Progressivism to New Deal liberalism, from postwar “liberal consensus” to globalist neoliberalism, and finally into the age of identity politics and the Great Awokening. At each stage, our leaders promised greater freedom, fairness, and prosperity. Yet the result has been something very different:

A swollen but incompetent federal bureaucracy

Hollowed-out communities and rising despair

Permanent culture war between “oppressors” and “oppressed”

Institutions that no longer treat us as citizens, but as demographic categories to be managed

The Unmaking of the American Citizen tells that story, and points toward a way out.

Moving chapter by chapter through modern American history, this book:

Explains how Progressivism and mid-century liberalism prepared the ground for the welfare state and the liberal consensus.

Shows how neoliberalism, on both the left and right, used free trade, global markets, and permanent war to reshape the economy and weaken the middle class.

Unpacks the rise of identity politics, critical theory, and “systemic racism,” and how they replaced equal citizenship with a new moral hierarchy of victim and oppressor.

Traces the Great Awokening: the merger of corporate, bureaucratic, and academic elites with identity-based movements to preserve their power and define dissent as dangerous.

Chronicles the populist backlash on left and right, the election of Donald Trump, and the use of COVID-19 policy and racial unrest to consolidate a new ideological regime.

But this is more than a postmortem on the American experiment. It is also a blueprint for conservative renewal.

In its final chapters, the book makes a concrete case for:

Recovering equal citizenship under the law, rights that belong to persons, not identity groups.

Relearning republican virtue: the habits and responsibilities needed to sustain real self-government.

Reviving Christian and natural law traditions in churches, schools, and local communities.

Building local institutions, schools, charities, associations, and parallel structures, so families are less dependent on failing federal systems.

Encouraging conservatives to stop apologizing for their skin color, faith, and heritage, and instead calmly defend the full rights and duties of citizenship for all.

Written in a clear, teaching tone, this book is for:

Readers who sense that something fundamental has changed, but can’t quite name what.

Conservatives, Christians, and independents who want more than slogans or nostalgia.

Anyone who believes America can still renew itself from the ground up, if we recover the truths and virtues that made self-government possible in the first place.

If you are tired of being treated as a data point in someone else’s narrative, and want to understand how we got here, and how we might live differently, this book is for you.