I don’t much care for JD Vance’s MAGA politics. I’m not a fan of his anti-free-trade protectionism, his America First near-isolationism, his blood-and-soil nationalism, his scapegoating of immigrants, his disdain for liberal democratic mores, his repudiation of limited-government conservatism, or his sycophantic embrace of a Donald Trump he used to describe as “noxious,” “reprehensible,” an “idiot,” and “cultural heroin.” Vance’s speech to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last Wednesday was well delivered, but even a Periclean delivery couldn’t compensate for misguided and harmful ideas.
One passage in his speech struck me as especially benighted.
”You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea,” Vance said.
”To be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
He continued: “Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.”
To illustrate what he means by allowing newcomers to become Americans “on our terms,” Vance related that when he proposed to his future wife Usha, the daughter of immigrants from India, he emphasized to her his attachment to his family’s “cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky.” He wanted her to know that in marrying him, “that’s what she was getting.” His family’s connection to ancestral property, Vance told the convention delegates, goes to the essence of what it means to be American. In other words, the people among whom he grew up derive their American identity, above all, from the soil on which their forbears settled. “This is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it,” Vance said. “That is the source of America’s greatness.”
Then he said this:
”Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”
Of course America is the homeland of people who have lived here for generations. Of course there are millions of Americans who feel bound to that homeland by their “shared history.” But much of what makes the United States so extraordinary is that for more than two centuries it has also been the homeland of millions of people — immigrants and the children of immigrants — with no lengthy family or property ties in America. At the heart of Americanness is not blood or soil but the embrace of fundamental principles and beliefs. Vance is wrong. America’s greatness is rooted precisely in the ideas that he regards as secondary. His wife’s American identity does not inhere in the burial plot of the family she married into. It is bound up, rather, in the worldview her parents adopted when they left their native India and put down roots in America.
This was a point that Ronald Reagan made frequently, including in his very last speech as president.
On Jan. 19, 1989, in a final ceremony to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Reagan said he wanted to make “an observation about a country which I love.” That observation, simply stated yet profound, isolated a key truth about the United States. “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman,” Reagan said, quoting a letter from a correspondent. “You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
How does a person become an American? By taking on American principles, above all those enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — that we are created equal and endowed from birth with the rights to life and liberty. At the heart of “American exceptionalism” is the recognition that full-fledged membership in our nation — unlike in France, Germany, Turkey, or Japan — is not a matter of birth, blood, ancestry, or soil. America is the embodiment of certain ideas, and to be fully American one need only pledge allegiance to those principles.
The Republican Party used to celebrate American exceptionalism. But Trump explicitly rejects the concept, so it stands to reason that his running mate, having jettisoned so many of his principles to refashion himself as the MAGA heir apparent, would turn his back on this one too.
Even so, how can Vance — who enlisted in the Marines after 9/11 — claim with a straight face that “people will not fight for abstractions”? What does that even mean? People have been fighting for “abstractions” — for ideas and principles — for millennia. Certainly Americans have.
What was the American Revolution, after all, if not a war fought for abstractions? The colonists were in no danger of losing their land or their homes. They took up arms because they wanted independence, an end to monarchy, the right to govern themselves, no taxation without representation — abstractions all.
And what was the Civil War if not a fight for “abstractions”? Abraham Lincoln led the nation in what began as a war to preserve the Union, then became a war to end slavery. In his matchless address at the Gettysburg battlefield, Lincoln laid out in his first two sentences the transcendent abstraction for which the Union fought:
”Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
During World War II, Frank Capra produced a series of seven films called “Why We Fight.” Its purpose was to explain to the American public why the nation was at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan.
The first documentary in the series put the fundamental question front and center: “What put us into uniform, ready to engage the enemy on every continent and every ocean?” The answer came at once: “This is a fight between a free world and a slave world.” Over and above every other consideration, the bloodiest foreign war ever waged by the United States was fought for the preservation of freedom, democratic liberalism, and Western civilization — the greatest “abstractions” of them all.
In his quest for power, Vance has repudiated views and values he once expressed with seeming conviction. But while Vance may have remade himself into an unrestrained Trumpian for reasons of political expediency, the ideas at the core of the American experience remain unchanged. Ours is a nation built upon a set of ideas — ideas not rooted in bloodlines and burial plots but in values and ideals. Anyone who doesn’t understand something so fundamental about the United States is unfit for high office.
