Thanks to Instapundit, The O'Toole File has found another very good blog, Patrick Ruffini's Rants. (I know, I should have found it long ago; there are just so many these days.)

One recent Ruffini post in particular caught my eye: a thoughtful disquisition on the practical benefits we might enjoy by continuing to allow Americans to maintain dual citizenship. (If you haven't clicked over yet to read the whole thing, you might want to do so now.) The post was written in response to Josh Marshall's recent suggestion that this practice is a bad idea, perhaps even a uniquely bad one here in the US. (O'Toole File commented favorably on Marshall's original post last week.)

While I think Patrick Ruffini's post was strong -- it may well be true that there are pragmatic benefits to this arrangement -- O'TF still has not seen anyone address the philosophical arguments that are at the heart of Marshall's thesis: "I'm very pro-globalization," Marshall writes, "very internationalist in foreign policy and outlook. But citizenship is inherently unitary. It implies not only membership but allegiance to a political community and a state. One can no sooner be a citizen of two countries than a husband to two wives or a wife to two husbands. The very idea is a solecism in civic thought.... One of the things that makes us all equal as citizens is the fundamental reality that makes us citizens: membership and allegiance to this political community, this country. That's what allows an immigrant citizen to be just as much an American as the guy whose ancestors came on the Mayflower."

That's a very powerful argument. And it needs to be addressed directly before many of us can dismiss our misgivings about the idea of dual citizenship.
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