The Ugly Ideology of J. D. Vance

In his speech at the Republican National Convention last year, Vice President Vance said:

You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And 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.

And a few weeks ago, Vance articulated an even more extreme version of this vision in a heated exchange with journalists Zaid Jilani and Jesse Singal. They were arguing about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an immigrant who was “mistakenly” deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador in defiance of a court order, and who the Trump administration now refuses to make any effort to bring back to the United States. Vance accused Singal of spouting “smug, self-assured bullshit” and said his “worldview is a justification for the mass invasion of the country my ancestors built with their bare hands.”

The unsubtle implication here is that the country is, in some sense, the property of people who have the right ancestry rather than equally belonging to everyone who lives here. We don’t need to exaggerate Vance’s claim, as some have done, and accuse him of being an outright white nationalist who wants to get rid of everyone with the wrong background. The reality of what he seems to be saying is bad enough.

Vance presumably thinks it’s fine for some people without the right ancestry (such as his wife, Usha) to move to the United States, in much the same way that it’s fine for nonmembers of a country club to come have lunch and play tennis if a member signs them in. It remains the case that, for Vance, the people with the strongest claim on Americanness are the ones whose “ancestors built [the US] with their bare hands.” And this premise underlies his commitment to disturbingly authoritarian crackdowns on unauthorized immigrants like Abrego Garcia (and legal residents with the wrong political opinions like Mahmoud Khalil).

Of course, he doesn’t bother to spell out in any of these statements why connection with the right kind of ancestors is important. Even if Vance were descended from people who did impressive things, that wouldn’t make him impressive. Nor is there any obvious guarantee that his ancestors in particular did anything especially heroic. Surely, even in Vance’s worldview, at least some of the individual human beings who existed in the United States in the right time period weren’t doing a lot of bare-handed country-building.

The reason none of these questions seem to bother him is presumably that what matters isn’t the particular individuals he’s descended from but his descent from the right group. Vance, in other words, is endorsing an ugly ethnonationalist ideology.

Rejecting Civic Nationalism

Most actually existing nationalisms exist somewhere on a spectrum from pure ethnonationalism, which defines the nation as a particular ethnic community, and pure civic nationalism, which identifies the nation as everyone who lives within its borders. Zionism, for example, is a fairly pure form of ethnonationalism. Hence, Israel is formally identified as “the nation-state of the Jewish people,” never mind that the majority of the Jewish population of the world lives elsewhere and has little interest in becoming Israeli, and a large minority of Israeli citizens are non-Jewish.

Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, you have various European nation-states that don’t officially define themselves as the nation-states “of” some ethnic, racial, or religious subset of their citizens, but do deny citizenship to the children of noncitizens who are born and grow up within their borders. One of the best things about the United States is that American nationalism has long been about as close to a pure form of civic nationalism as exists anywhere in the world.

To say this isn’t to deny America’s long and awful history of racism, the despicable treatment of indigenous people, or the waves of anti-immigrant xenophobia that have periodically afflicted the country throughout its history. But due to the particularities of its history, and a constitution that, whatever its anti-majoritarian features, does have some of the strongest protections of core liberal rights of any constitution on the planet, American identity has to a globally remarkable extent been detached from any particular ethnic identity.

No one talks about being “a quarter American.” It would sound like a category mistake. French identity, for example, has persisted throughout the various transformations of the French state from an absolute monarchy to liberal democracy to the fascism of the Vichy regime. American identity and its current form of government came into the world together. With so many Americans belonging to different religious communities and being able to trace ancestral roots to a wide variety of places around the world, there was little lying around to base a sense of American identity on apart from allegiance to the founding liberal-democratic institutions. This was doubly true after any remaining connection of that identity to even a broad, vague sense of European roots was challenged by the world-historic successes of the civil rights movement.

This was all the result of messy and contingent historical processes, with a great deal of ugliness along the way. But for those of us who would like to replace liberal capitalist democracy with something far more democratic and materially egalitarian, it’s an immensely precious starting point on which we can build. And this is exactly the starting point from which the J. D. Vances of the world wish to retreat.

One of Donald Trump’s first acts in office was to (so far unsuccessfully) try to end birthright citizenship. If he had his way, there could be millions of people who were born here and grow up here who never spent a day anywhere else who would be stripped of their rights of citizenship because they would not have the right blood flowing through their veins. It’s hard to overstate how obscene that is. Now, they’re trampling on the basic liberal rights of people like Abrego Garcia (to not be imprisoned without due process) and Khalil (to not be punished for expressing political opinions) and justifying it through a need to defend the integrity of the nation against the infiltration of undesirable foreigners. But what kind of nation would America be if it continued to systematically violate these basic rights? The vice president’s unabashed reference to the country belonging to those whose “ancestors” collectively built it just spells out the poisonous ideology underlying these moves.

Some leftists are more comfortable embracing a rhetorical position that allows them to disown all American nationalism, civic or ethnic, with equal distaste. But that’s a serious mistake. In the long run, we’d all be better off in the sort of egalitarian world-wide human community envisioned in Star Trek. But that run is very long, and for now the inclusive civic sense of American identity desperately needs to be defended. We should do so loudly, proudly, and with no regard for how cringey it might seem. America is absolutely an idea.