Often, this descends into little more than an argument about eligibility for welfare benefits. This is a disaster for progressives, who find themselves fighting on the chosen terrain of the ethnonationalist right.  But it doesn’t need to be this way. The history of progressive politics is a history of the broadening and deepening of citizenship: widening access to the rights of citizenship, and expanding the rights we enjoy and the mutual responsibilities we owe.A new progressive politics of citizenship will, however, need to be different to the past. That is because our politics has become increasingly transactional, ill-equipped for a moment when fundamental conflicts of ideology, interest and raw power are coming to the fore. This paper advances the case for a new politics of democratic citizenship, based on two principles: rebuilding the public and resisting oligarchy.