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There's something deeply disturbed about J.D. Vance. It's an ugly self-loathing sickness that is both specific to Vance and a generalized Trump world disease found in the damaged freaks and weirdos trying to destroy America.
It's difficult to imagine a more universal human trait than a biological need to defend your family. But something broken inside J.D. Vance drives him to attack, not protect, his own family.
In his short political career, Vance has defined himself with a xenophobic fever. Like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, he sees immigrants as a threat, not the cornerstone of what makes America more than a place on the map with a flag. In his RNC Convention acceptance speech, as he often does, Vance adopted a classic "blood and soil" definition of what it means to be an American. "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."
As is typical of Vance, he is trying to mainstream deeply radical ideas by wrapping them in an "aw shucks, I'm just a hillbilly from Appalachia" common-sense wrapper. "When I proposed to my wife, we were in law school, and I said, ‘Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt, and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky. … Now that cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky is near my family's ancestral home. And like a lot of people, we came from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin."
But of course, those mountains and factories were filled with immigrants and the sons and daughters of immigrants. In Vance's world, your Americanism is defined by your ancestry, not your values. His is the conservatism of Father Coughlin's 1930s fascism and Joe McCarthy's 1950s Red Scare, not the immigrant-embracing Ronald Reagan. In his last speech in office, Reagan gave an ode to immigrants as the genius of America.
"A man wrote me and said: "You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. 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.
“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost."
J.D. Vance is married to a woman whose parents were not American citizens when she was born in the United States. She's an American citizen because of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. She is what the right-wing likes to demean as an "anchor baby." That's the 14th American Vance and Trump are trying to repeal:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
In an America still functioning under the Constitution, it takes a two-thirds majority of the House and Senate ratified by votes of three-fourths of the states. Last week, the Supreme Court opened a possible back door for states to refuse to recognize the 14th Amendment. That could mean that Usha Bala Chilukuri Vance could have her citizenship revoked and under the Trump doctrine, her children deported with her. Those would also be J.D. Vance's children.
What kind of man supports a movement that could result in the deportation of his own family? Will that happen? Not likely, but what is very likely is that the children of Usha Bala Chiluklkuri Vance will live in an America in which their father's hostility to their fellow immigrants will bring cruelty and pain into their lives. The Vance children will never look like they came from the mountains of Appalachia. In the America that Vance is trying to shape, they would be viewed as some second-class citizens lacking the proper ancestral heritage to make them "real" Americans. Not completely "Untermensch," but something less than the 100 percent pure American stock of Vance's family before he was married.
In Vance's world, it's not the belief in an America of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," that will define his children as Americans. They will never be able to escape the identification that they are the children of a non-white immigrant. In Ronald Reagan's America, in the America most of us still hold dear, that heritage should be celebrated. But not in J.D. Vance's. Some protégé of their father will likely mock their names, just as their father tried to belittle Senator Alex Padilla by calling him "Jose."
None of us get to pick our parents, but these immigrant children deserve better than the hate their father peddles. It is up to the coalition of the decent to do everything possible to reject J.D. Vance's definition of Americanism and continue to build an America where every immigrant will be welcomed. Including the children of Usha Bala Chilukikuri Vance.
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