Who counts as one of us: citizenship from ancient Rome to civic nationalism

The Short Version

Every society answers the question who counts as one of us?, and the five conversations here show how much rides on the answer. Gregory Aldrete calls Rome's habit of turning conquered peoples into soldiers and citizens one of the "secrets of Rome's success" [1]. Anthony Kaldellis argues that when Caracalla extended citizenship to nearly all free inhabitants in 212 AD, the Romans "meant it," and provincials soon ran the empire [2]. Christopher Capozzola shows World War I rewriting American citizenship around the obligation to serve and, if asked, to die, enforced by draft boards, neighbors and a new surveillance apparatus [3]. Vivek Ramaswamy argues that American identity is a creed rather than a bloodline [4], while Darryl Cooper describes an America that has renegotiated its identity with every wave of newcomers, even as he defends the right of nations like Ireland to stay themselves [5]. Read together, the cases make one pattern clear: belonging is always offered on terms, such as service, loyalty, creed or lineage, and the fights over those terms are older than any of today's immigration debates.

Table of contents

What They Said

Gregory Aldrete: integration as Rome's secret weapon

Aldrete, a historian of ancient Rome and military history, puts manpower rather than better generals or equipment at the center of Rome's rise [1]. When Lex Fridman suggested that Rome competed in "the realm of ideas and culture," Aldrete agreed and went further: "I think you've exactly put your finger on one of the, let's say, secrets of Rome's success, which is that they're very good at integrating non-Romans or non-Roman ideas and kind of absorbing them" [1].

He starts with how small Rome began. It was "one of these tiny little mud hut villages fighting dozens of other mud hut villages in Italy" [1]. The question is why this village came out on top, and his answer is what it did after a victory. "The normal procedure in the ancient world," he explains, is that "you conquer something, let's say you conquer another city," and then destroy or subjugate it [1]. Rome instead granted conquered Italian cities full or partial citizenship or alliance, and demanded troops in return [1]. Belonging was traded for service from the start.

The military payoff was dramatic. When the mercenary general Pyrrhus beat Rome twice, Rome simply raised a third army, and one of his officers reportedly said "fighting the Romans is like fighting a hydra" [1]. Aldrete tells the same story about Hannibal: "Rome takes a year, raises a second army, we know this story, sends against Hannibal, Hannibal wipes him out" [1]. Then Rome raised two armies at once, about 80,000 men, and lost about 60,000 of them at Cannae in a single afternoon, "more Romans hacked to death in one afternoon with swords than Americans died in 20 years in Vietnam" [1]. Hannibal's whole strategy, in Aldrete's account, was to invade Italy and peel away Rome's allies [1]. In other words, he attacked the integration system directly. Rome still won the war: it refused battle with Hannibal, struck at Carthaginian Spain and Africa under Scipio, and won at Zama [1].

Aldrete separates two phases of this integration, and the difference matters. In the first 250 years of the Republic, Rome absorbed Italian cities "who are pretty much like them. So they're people who already speak similar languages or the same language have the same gods. It's easy to integrate them. That's the ones they make, the half citizens and allies" [1]. After about 250 BC, Rome went beyond Italy, "and this is a new world because now they're encountering people who are really fundamentally different. So true others, they do not have the same gods. They don't speak the same language. They have fundamentally different systems of economy, everything" [1]. Integration was easy when the newcomers were already similar. The harder test came later.

In the imperial period Rome met that test with institutions that worked across generations. The empire raised barbarian chiefs' sons as Romans [1]. Fridman called taking the sons "a kind of generational integration," and Aldrete described the late army as "this giant machine of half a million people that takes in foreigners and churns out Romans" [1]. He gives the numbers: about 250,000 citizen legionaries and about 250,000 auxiliaries, and "auxiliaries tend to be newly conquered warlike people that the Romans enlist as auxiliaries to fight with them" [1]. Non-citizen auxiliaries earned citizenship after 25 years of service [1].

The clearest sign that this integration was real is who ended up at the top. By the second century AD, emperors such as Trajan and Hadrian came from Spain [1]. "A century later, you have Septimius Severus, who's from North Africa. You would later get guys from Syria. So I mean, the actual leaders of the Roman Empire are coming from the provinces. And it was that openness to incorporating foreigners, making them work for you, making them want to be part of your empire that I think is one of this Rome's strengths" [1]. That sentence names three things: incorporating foreigners, making them work for you, and making them want to belong. The third is the hardest to manufacture.

Aldrete is just as clear about Rome's limits. Citizenship brought privileges and duties, but of about 50 million people in the second-century empire, perhaps six million were citizens [1]. Roman slavery was not racial and people moved in and out of it, yet he insists it was "deeply dehumanizing": one agricultural writer classed slaves as "articulate tools," and runaways wore collars like dog tags [1]. Skilled slaves such as doctors and scribes could sometimes buy their freedom [1]. When the Republic fell apart, one of the resentments that broke it was Italian allies denied citizenship, alongside veterans who lost their farms, aristocrats shut out by a narrow elite, and slaves on vast estates [1]. Partial belonging served Rome for a long time, and it also bred grievance.

He adds a cultural point. Belonging was about way of life as well as law. "The best map of the Roman Empire isn't any of these maps with political borders," he says, but one showing where olives grow, and a Roman would call beer-and-cheese Wisconsin barbarian [1]. Rome borrowed constantly too, taking the toga and much of its religion from the Etruscans and absorbing Greek culture [1]. Yet the same society was obsessed with ancestors. Aristocratic homes kept wax death masks by the door, and that devotion to ancestral custom made Rome conservative and slow to make changes that might have saved the Republic [1]. Rome was open about who could become Roman and deeply traditional about what being Roman meant.

Anthony Kaldellis: the edict that made everyone Roman

Kaldellis, a historian of the Eastern Roman Empire, picks up where Aldrete's gradual integration reaches its end point. In 212 AD, Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to essentially all free inhabitants of the empire. Before that, Kaldellis says, perhaps a third at most had held it [2]. Nobody knows exactly why Caracalla did it. Kaldellis lists religious gratitude, taxes, or the vision of his legal advisers as possibilities [2]. What interests him more is what happened next.

The Romans, he argues, "meant it" [2]. Within a generation, emperors and top officials were all provincials [2]. To show how unusual that was, he compares it with the unthinkable idea of Britain granting Indians full access to power in London [2]. Plenty of empires have granted nominal status to subjects. Few have let those subjects take the top jobs. There was also a visible sign of the change: an explosion of people named Aurelius, after the emperor's family name [2]. Millions of new citizens took on the name as a badge of their new identity.

The long-term effect, in Kaldellis's account, is that Romanness spread from below and stayed. When Constantine later founded Constantinople, it did not bring Romanness to the East, because it was already there [2]. His larger argument, that the so-called Byzantine Empire was simply the Roman Empire continuing, rests on this. Its subjects were Roman citizens and called themselves Romans to the end, while Western Europeans, for political reasons, preferred "Empire of the Greeks" and later "Byzantine" [2]. The label others give a people is itself a statement about whether they belong to a tradition.

Kaldellis's ship of Theseus image explains what holds such an identity together when everything else changes. Roman history, he says, is different from Greek or Christian history: Christian history is the story of a religion. It can be in any country among any ethnic group. It's here, there, right? It's everywhere... Ancient Greeks were famously never united in a state [2]. Roman history, by contrast, is the history of a specific political community [2]. Every part eventually changed, but no member ever experienced a rupture that made them feel they had stopped being Roman [2]. He admits how different the end points were: "Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian Romans in Constantinople" and Latin-speaking... non-Christians or worshipping the ancient gods, Romans from a republic in Rome... are very, very different situations. And no doubt they would look and seem foreign to each other [2]. He asks why we place the cosmopolitan Hadrian, with "his Greek lover" and "a Greek beard," in the same story as "some warrior who's chasing down cattle from the Samnites" [2]. His answer is continuity of the political community, not sameness of language, religion or ancestry.

Belonging in his telling also had a fiscal side. Diocletian built universal census and universal taxation and ended Italy's tax-free status [2], so the old heartland lost its privilege and every province shared the burden. Kaldellis names taxation as the single most important factor in the empire's story [2]. When he explains why the empire was so resilient, he gives two reasons: rulers' sincere effort to govern on their subjects' behalf, and a tight Roman and Orthodox identity among people surrounded by enemies [2]. A shared tax system, law and identity gave ordinary people reason to stay [2]. When the West collapsed, in the East local communities chose to stay loyal [2]. There were no provincial separatist movements except Bulgaria [2], and even the breakaway third-century "Empire of the Gauls" was modeled on Rome rather than trying to leave it [2].

Kaldellis also shows the demographic side of belonging. Constantinople grew from around 20,000 to 25,000 people to half a million in two centuries, which required mass migration helped by senatorial households and a grain dole for up to 200,000 people [2]. The empire's new capital was a city of newcomers.

Christopher Capozzola: World War I and the American citizen

Capozzola, an MIT historian of war and politics, moves the question to the United States and to the moment he believes defined modern American citizenship. He starts with a definition that the other conversations rely on without stating: "When you think about citizenship, what it means is two things. First of all, what are your rights and obligations? What is sort of the legal citizenship that you have as a citizen of the United States or any other state? And the second is a more amorphous definition of what does it mean to belong, to be part of America, to feel American, to love it or hate it or be willing to die for it?" [3]. During World War I, he says, "both of those things are on the table, being a citizen who is a citizen who isn't matters" [3]. People who had never carried passports suddenly had to, and "what it means to be an American, to feel like it, to be part of this project is also kind of being defined and enforced during World War One" [3].

His emblem is James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam pointing and saying "I want you." It first appeared in 1916 as a magazine cover "under the heading, what are you doing for preparedness," while the U.S. was still neutral, and in 1917 it became an Army recruiting poster [3]. For Capozzola it is a window into American culture at a crucial moment in our history, where the federal government is now embarking on a war overseas that's going to make enormous demands on its citizens. And at the same time, where sort of technologies of mass production and mass media and what we would probably call propaganda are being sort of mobilized for the first time in this new kind of way [3]. He insists historians look at the people being pointed at as well, since there would be no global American power without their response [3].

The response was large but not unanimous. The Selective Service Act of 1917 required men first aged 21 to 30, then 18 to 45, to register. About 24 million registered and nearly 4 million served in some way, while at least half a million never registered [3]. Capozzola finds it remarkable that so many signed up for a divisive war when there were perhaps a hundred agents in what became the FBI [3]. Enforcement came instead through community surveillance and neighborly pressure [3]. Conscientious objection was allowed only for religious objections to all war, and even those objectors faced ridicule and intimidation [3].

The war also drew sharper lines around who was suspect. The Espionage Act contained a provision against interfering with military recruitment, and "that provision is used to shut down radical publications to shut down German language publications. And you know, this is really has a chilling impact on speech during the war" [3]. The Treasury's Secret Service, the Post Office reading mail, and a Justice Department that mobilized 200,000 volunteers watched draft resisters, labor organizers and German Americans [3]. Capozzola calls this the birth of the American surveillance state. Much of the wartime apparatus went away afterward, but the core of surveillance persisted, and by almost every measure government never returned to prewar size [3]. The redefinition of belonging carried an edge: those whose language or politics seemed foreign were watched.

His summary of the change is direct: citizenship during World War One now includes the obligation to defend the country, right, to serve and to if asked to die for it... And I think we see the the close linkage of military service and US citizenship coming out of this time period [3]. Then comes the twist that makes his account more than a story of state power. The new obligations fueled new demands for rights, including free speech protections and equality for marginalized groups [3]. People asked to die for a country began to ask what that country owed them.

Immigration runs through his account too. The U.S. could have stayed out of the war militarily, but could never ignore it, because it shaped trade, agriculture and "whether there were immigrants coming across the Atlantic to work in American factories" [3]. Before 1917, at least 50,000 Americans joined the Canadian or British armies [3], an early sign of how loose national commitment could be. His later book adds a striking case: Filipinos who fought for the United States while it occupied their country, an irony that persists in polls showing Filipinos view the U.S. more favorably than people anywhere, including Americans [3].

Capozzola also gives a clear normative position. He separates patriotism, an emotion of love of country, from nationalism, which he considers crucial in a world of nation states when it is civic and inclusive: a shared project in which people sacrifice for each other [3]. Exclusionary nationalism based on ethnic hatred is to be feared [3]. He admits that the U.S. has often found it easier to define itself against something than to say what it stands for [3]. And despite today's rhetoric, he says Americans are "nowhere near as divided as we have been in other periods in our history," because "we are fundamentally one society, one economy, and deeply integrated as a nation both domestically and on the world stage in ways that look nothing like the United States in 1861" [3].

Vivek Ramaswamy: creed, not blood and soil

Ramaswamy brings the argument to the present, and his position comes out of a specific confrontation. Fridman raised his debate with Ann Coulter, who suggested Ramaswamy might be one of the good ones, but not people like him [4]. Ramaswamy calls this blood-and-soil view of American identity anti-American [4]. American identity, he argues, is creedal, grounded in allegiance to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution [4].

He makes three arguments against the blood-and-soil view. First, it makes American exceptionalism impossible, since countries like Italy or Japan have longer ethnic lineages [4]. On a contest of ancestry, America loses. Second, it creates contradictions, such as giving Native Americans a stronger claim than Mayflower descendants [4]. Third, he rejects the claim that people will not fight for abstract ideals, saying the American Revolution proves otherwise [4]. He also gives Coulter some credit, for openly voicing a view he believes many on the right hold [4].

His position is not anti-nationalist. A chapter of his book argues that "nationalism isn't a bad word" when it is grounded in a nation's true ideals, which for the United States means civic rather than ethnic nationalism [4]. He praises Italy's Giorgia Meloni and India's Narendra Modi for leading without apologizing for their nations' identities [4], and quotes Malcolm X: "a nation without an appreciation for its history is like a tree without roots" [4]. He believes the country is hungry for purpose and national identity [4].

His creedal view also shapes concrete terms for newcomers. He ties the rule of law to the southern border, speaking as the son of legal immigrants [4]. His central complaint is that the system is built on lies: people enter claiming asylum or refugee status, and then policymakers justify keeping them on economic grounds, which he says should have been the criteria in the first place [4]. "The number one attribute human attribute that our immigration system rewards is whether or not you are willing to lie," he says [4]. His examples cut both ways: a highly accomplished acquaintance, a Princeton and Harvard Business School graduate, former professional tennis player and concert pianist, who cannot get a green card after about ten years, and a Russian woman who, as reported by the New York Times, falsely claimed LGBTQ persecution [4]. His preferred terms are explicit: select immigrants who speak English, assimilate, know American history, share civic ideals, and can contribute economically [4].

His creed has hard edges. He describes "a tale of two mass deportations," one of them of millions of people in the country illegally, and would start with people who have committed other crimes and people already in detention [4]. On the roughly 20,000 Haitian migrants who arrived in Springfield, Ohio, a town of about 50,000, he says he does not blame them and that they came legally, but that "temporary protective status means it's temporary" [4]. He uses Springfield as an example of well-intentioned policy creating backlash [4]. When Fridman pressed him on economic harm and family separation, he compared enforcement trade-offs to the roughly 350,000 mothers in prison who could not bring their children; when Fridman challenged him on crime data, he agreed that legal immigrants commit less crime but disputed that the same holds for illegal immigrants [4]. These are contested claims, and the conversation itself shows the pushback.

Darryl Cooper: an identity renegotiated every generation

Cooper, creator of the history podcast Martyr Made, offers the broadest American story and the most complicated position. America, he argues, has renegotiated its identity every generation: Irish and German arrivals in the early 1800s, then Italians and Eastern European Jews, then the Great Migration of six or seven million Black Americans from the South, then the reopening of immigration in 1965 [5]. The Great Migration belongs on that list because it is about belonging inside the country, not just entry into it.

He reads the early naturalization law's offer of citizenship to free white persons, which he dates to 1798, as radically open for its time, because English and Irish settlers did not see themselves as the same people [5]. Today that clause reads as exclusion. Cooper's point is that "white" then covered groups that saw themselves as separate peoples, so the category was a broadening, not a narrowing, for its era. It is a provocative reading, and it shows how the meaning of a line about belonging changes as the people it covers change.

The other half of his story is exploitation. Exploiting immigrant labor, he notes, is an old American story, and he cites Irish dock workers in the 1850s who lived about 14 years after arriving [5]. Many American public institutions, like public schools, began as responses to waves of immigration, and for much of its history America was built for strivers rather than ordinary workers, who were largely forgotten until they pushed back [5]. He calls the early labor movement, in which many of those workers fought for basic dignity, "America's best story in my opinion" [5].

Cooper's view of America sits next to a different view of other nations. From the Jewish experience in the 20th century he draws the lesson that "everybody needs a country," since minorities are easily scapegoated [5]. He contrasts America with European nations like Poland or Ireland and argues that real diversity means Ireland remaining Irish and China Chinese, not every place looking the same [5]. He notes that Ireland, which colonized no one, is projected to become minority Irish by around 2070, and argues that some lessons drawn from World War II have made such countries feel they lack the moral right to preserve themselves [5]. For Cooper, America's renegotiating identity is a distinctive achievement, not a template for everyone.

Joe Rogan, hosting, adds his own view. He loves America's melting pot and descends from immigrants himself, but believes current immigration is partly coordinated to shift voting and to supply cheap labor, which he calls anti-American; everyone working here, he says, should be paid like an American [5]. Cooper's Irish dock workers are the historical precedent for Rogan's worry.

Cooper also ties back to Rome. He compares industrial agriculture to Rome after its conquests, when slave-worked estates pushed small farmers into the city and created the mob that helped end the Republic [5]. That matches Aldrete's list of resentments that broke the Republic, which included dispossessed farmers and slaves on vast estates [1]. Both men see a society that brought in labor without bringing people into full belonging, and paid for it.

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

Agreement: belonging is a bargain, not a gift. In every case, membership comes with terms. Rome traded citizenship or alliance for troops, and auxiliaries earned it with 25 years of service [1]. World War I America made service, and if necessary death, part of what a citizen owed [3]. Ramaswamy's terms are allegiance to a creed, honesty about why people come, English, assimilation and economic contribution [4]. Cooper's America offered entry and work, often on brutal terms, and newcomers then pushed for better ones [5]. Capozzola gives the clearest account of how terms change: once citizens owed their lives, they demanded rights in return [3].

Agreement: real access to power is what makes integration stick. Aldrete's emperors from Spain, North Africa and Syria [1] and Kaldellis's provincials who ran the empire within a generation of 212 [2] make the same point: Rome's openness reached the top. Kaldellis draws the contrast with Britain and India to show how rare that was [2]. Ramaswamy's own position, as the son of immigrants arguing over what makes someone American in a presidential race [4], is a modern version of the question Coulter's remark raised: whether newcomers can belong fully or only as exceptions.

Agreement: civic nationalism over ethnic nationalism, at least for America. Capozzola and Ramaswamy, who come from very different political positions, land on similar ground. Capozzola calls civic, inclusive nationalism crucial and warns against nationalism based on ethnic hatred [3]. Ramaswamy calls blood-and-soil anti-American and argues "nationalism isn't a bad word" when grounded in civic ideals [4]. Neither rejects nationalism; both want it tied to a shared project or creed.

Disagreement: is the civic model universal or American? Here Cooper adds tension. He celebrates America's generational renegotiation but argues that real diversity means Ireland stays Irish and China Chinese, and that nations like Ireland have been made to feel they lack the moral right to preserve themselves [5]. Ramaswamy's praise of Meloni and Modi for not apologizing for their nations' identities, and his phrase civic rather than ethnic nationalism for the United States [4], suggests he may partly share Cooper's view that the American creed is a national answer rather than a global one. Capozzola speaks of civic nationalism as healthiest in a world of nation states generally [3]. The sources do not settle this. One side holds that the creedal model is America's distinctive inheritance; the other treats inclusive civic belonging as the healthy form of nationalism everywhere.

Disagreement: how open is open? Aldrete and Kaldellis both praise Roman integration, but their numbers point to how limited it was before 212. Aldrete says perhaps six million of about 50 million people in the second-century empire were citizens [1]; Kaldellis says perhaps a third at most held citizenship before Caracalla [2]. These are different estimates, and Kaldellis's "at most" signals an upper bound, but both show that most inhabitants were outside full citizenship for centuries. Aldrete also notes that allies denied citizenship were among the resentments that broke the Republic [1]. So the "secret weapon" was gradual and partial, and its limits caused trouble too.

Disagreement: what is wrong with today's system? Ramaswamy and Rogan both criticize current American immigration, but for different reasons. Ramaswamy's complaint is dishonesty: the system rewards lying and fails to choose by stated criteria [4]. Rogan's complaint is motive: he believes immigration is partly coordinated to shift voting and supply cheap labor [5]. Cooper's history of exploited Irish dock workers supports Rogan's labor concern without endorsing the voting claim [5]. Fridman's challenges to Ramaswamy on crime data, economic harm and family separation [4] show these claims are disputed.

A tension inside the civic model. Capozzola's history is a warning for anyone who wants belonging to rest on loyalty. When citizenship came to mean willingness to serve, the state and 200,000 volunteers watched German Americans, labor organizers and draft resisters, and German-language publications were shut down [3]. A creed can be inclusive about ancestry while still being enforced harshly on those suspected of not holding it.

Why It Works

The sources give several mechanisms for why integration strengthens a society.

Manpower and resilience. Aldrete's main argument is arithmetic. A state that turns the defeated into allies and soldiers can lose battles and keep fighting, which is why Pyrrhus's officer compared Rome to a hydra and why Rome could absorb Cannae [1]. The half-million-strong imperial army that "takes in foreigners and churns out Romans" [1] turned integration into a permanent process.

Generational integration. Raising chiefs' sons in Rome and granting citizenship after 25 years of service [1] work on the timescale of a lifetime. Cooper's "every generation" [5] describes the same rhythm in America: each wave takes a generation or more to become part of the story.

Real stakes in the system. Kaldellis argues that a shared tax system, law and identity gave ordinary people reason to stay [2], and that local communities chose loyalty when the West collapsed [2]. Ending Italy's tax-free status [2] meant the heartland lost its privileged position. Aldrete's phrase "making them want to be part of your empire" [1] describes the same thing from the other side.

Identity among enemies. Kaldellis credits a tight Roman and Orthodox identity among people surrounded by enemies [2]. Capozzola admits the U.S. has often found it easier to define itself against something [3]. A shared outside threat helps hold diverse people together, though Capozzola prefers turning enemies into rivals: "You compete with competitors. You fight with enemies" [3].

Obligations produce rights. Capozzola describes a feedback loop: wartime demands made people insist on free speech and equality [3]. Cooper's labor movement is a similar story of workers who were brought in for their labor and then demanded a fair share [5]. Belonging gets renegotiated because those asked to give more push back.

A creed that can be learned. Ramaswamy's argument for creedal identity is partly logical: if identity is lineage, newcomers can never fully belong, and America's claim to exceptionalism falls apart next to older nations [4]. A creed can be taught and adopted, which is why he puts knowing American history and sharing civic ideals among his criteria [4]. Kaldellis's ship of Theseus offers a historical parallel: a political community can survive the replacement of every part, including language and religion, as long as members never feel a break [2].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

Integration is easiest among the similar. Aldrete's own distinction is the biggest caution. Rome's early success came from absorbing Italians who shared language and gods, where "it's easy to integrate them" [1]. The encounter with "true others" outside Italy was a different, harder problem [1]. Anyone using Rome as a model for integrating very different populations should note that its easiest successes were with neighbors.

Rome was an empire, not a democracy. Roman integration came with slavery Aldrete calls "deeply dehumanizing" [1] and a citizenship most inhabitants lacked for centuries [1][2]. Its terms were set by conquest. Kaldellis even reflects on how "empire" relates to modern states, noting that Wales was conquered and "the Welsh have their own identity, their own language. I don't know that you would call that now an imperial relationship" [2]. Lessons from Rome carry over to modern nations only with care.

Civic belonging can be coercive. Capozzola's World War I shows a civic definition of citizenship enforced through surveillance, chilled speech and pressure on minorities [3]. Civic nationalism does not guarantee tolerance.

America may be a special case. Cooper's contrast between America and Ireland or Poland [5] suggests the renegotiating, creedal model fits a nation founded by settlers and immigrants better than an old national homeland. Ramaswamy's for the United States points the same way [4]. Capozzola's view of inclusive civic nationalism is broader [3]. Readers should keep this disagreement in mind before applying American lessons elsewhere.

History is written from the present. Aldrete warns that "often, histories that are written tell you a lot more about the time they're written than they do about the subject they're written about," giving the example of how admiration for Caesar rose with fascism in the 1920s and 30s and collapsed after World War II [1]. Cooper adds that historical sources come from a tiny literate, adult, male, upper-class slice of society, and that the goal should be understanding with humility [5]. Kaldellis notes that culture "will set the dials" on a fairly constant human nature [2]. Any story of who belonged in the past is shaped by who is telling it now, and that applies to this article's pattern too.

Today's facts are contested. Ramaswamy's claims about crime, asylum fraud and deportation, and Rogan's claim about coordinated immigration, are political arguments that drew pushback or remain unproven within these conversations [4][5]. The historical pattern frames today's debates; it does not settle them.

What To Do With It

1. Separate the two meanings of citizenship. When you hear a debate about belonging, ask whether it concerns legal rights and obligations or the "more amorphous" sense of belonging Capozzola describes [3]. Many arguments talk past each other because one side means papers and the other means identity.

2. Name the terms being offered. For any proposal, ask what the price of membership is: service, as in Rome and 1917 [1][3]; a creed, English and assimilation, as Ramaswamy proposes [4]; or lineage, as in the blood-and-soil view he rejects [4]. Making the terms explicit is half of an honest debate.

3. Check whether belonging reaches the top. Kaldellis and Aldrete measure Roman integration by whether provincials became emperors and officials [1][2]. Ask the same of any society: can newcomers and their children reach real power, or are they welcome only as workers and soldiers?

4. Watch for resentment among those left half in. Aldrete lists Italian allies denied citizenship among the forces that broke the Republic [1], and Ramaswamy uses Springfield as an example of policy that creates backlash [4]. Partial belonging and sudden change can both breed grievance. Ask who is being left half in, and who feels overwhelmed.

5. Demand honest criteria. Ramaswamy's complaint that the system rewards lying [4] applies whatever your politics: if a society wants newcomers for economic reasons, it should say so and choose on that basis rather than routing everyone through humanitarian claims.

6. Guard against exploitation. Cooper's Irish dock workers who lived about 14 years after arriving [5] and Rogan's insistence that everyone working here be paid like an American [5] point to a recurring failure: bringing people in for labor without bringing them into belonging. Rome's slave estates did the same, with damage to the Republic [1][5].

7. Watch how loyalty gets enforced. Capozzola's history of the Espionage Act, mail reading and 200,000 volunteer watchers [3] is a reminder to ask who gets surveilled when a society defines citizens by loyalty, and whether protections for speech and minorities keep pace.

8. Think in generations. Rome raised chiefs' sons as Romans and granted citizenship after 25 years of service [1]; Cooper sees America renegotiating every generation [5]. Judge integration over decades, not news cycles.

9. Tell the story of the creed as well as the borders. Ramaswamy quotes Malcolm X on a nation without history being "like a tree without roots" [4], and Kaldellis urges explaining why institutions exist [2]. A creedal identity only works if people actually learn the creed and the history behind it.

10. Read history with humility. Following Aldrete and Cooper, keep in mind that accounts of the past reflect the time they are written and the narrow slice of people who wrote the sources [1][5]. Use Rome, 1917 and the immigrant waves as perspective on today's fights, not as proof for one side.

Sources

1. Gregory Aldrete on the Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome: Hannibal, Caesar, Augustus and the Power of the Past · Lex Fridman Podcast
2. Anthony Kaldellis on the Roman Empire That Never Fell: Byzantium, Power, and 2,200 Years of Roman History · Lex Fridman Podcast
3. Christopher Capozzola on World War I, American Citizenship, Propaganda and Politics · Lex Fridman Podcast
4. Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War · Lex Fridman Podcast
5. Darryl Cooper · The Joe Rogan Experience