America: A Great Idea for a Nation

JD Vance’s Cemetery Isn’t Haunted by the Ghost of Fascism

Monument at Valley Forge National Park. Note the classically American use of both nationalistic (“place of sacrifice,” “our fathers,” “our children”) and idealistic (“union,” “liberty,” “progress”) language. Source: Author’s Trip to Valley Forge, PA

Is America an idea or a nation? As my own immigrant experience shows, the answer is both. My citizenship application asked if I support the Constitution and form of government of the United States. Score one point for America-as-idea. However, I was only eligible to file for citizenship after marrying an American (not an idea) and fulfilling residency (not ideological) requirements. Score one point for America-as-nation. Furthermore, my two children became citizens simply by being born on American soil. No one in the delivery room asked if they supported the Constitution and form of government of the United States. And no one can rescind their citizenship if they grow up to be monarchists. Score another point for America-as-nation.

I ask this question because I was struck by the alarmist reactions to vice-presidential nominee JD Vance’s July 17 Republican Convention speech. In it, Vance made the banal point I just made, that America is both an idea and a nation:

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.

I didn’t become an American by reading the Declaration of Independence and affirming its claims to myself. I moved to a place, married a person, and applied to join a people. As Vance says, I moved to a place founded on ideas. But ideas alone make for a graduate seminar, not a nation. America is a nation because those ideas helped forge a shared history, culture, and identity.¹ Moreover, any idea is itself rooted in a particular historical and cultural context. It can certainly transcend that original context and achieve universality. But ideas come from people, and people, no matter how individualistic they may be, are rooted in specific traditions and societies.²

According to Adam Serwer in The Atlantic, Vance’s “profoundly reactionary idea” that America is a nation has sinister implications: “If real Americans are those who share a specific history, then some of us are more American than others.” If I were to visit Gettysburg, I might feel less emotionally connected to the site than an American whose ancestors fought in the Civil War. But I would certainly still be stirred there by the history I’ve chosen to adopt. The notion that such a “shared history” requires literal ancestral ties has been read into Vance’s speech, but is not in the text. In fact, his description of a family cemetery makes the opposite point:

Now, in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Serwer says the above passage makes it clearer “whom he [Vance] includes in America as a ‘nation.’” Yet Serwer neglects to mention that Vance’s wife is a second-generation Indian American and a practicing Hindu. Clearly, then, Vance’s “America as a nation,” if his family cemetery is any guide, is open to recent immigrants, different races, and non-Christian religions. So much for the “easter egg of white nationalism” (in MSNBC’s Alex Wagner’s words) interpretation of what is actually a statement of inclusivity as deep as the grave.

When I (legally) crossed the border into America, I didn’t move to a country founded the day I arrived. I moved to a country that was developed and defended over many generations. For Vance, and other multigenerational Americans, to take pride in their ancestors’ contributions to this nation doesn’t diminish my status here. It doesn’t de facto imply, as Serwer claims, “a hierarchy of Americans who inherit greater status because they happened to be born to the right families." Serwer’s argument, like that of John Ganz, who accuses Vance of blood-and-soil nationalism, relies on the assumption of subterfuge. Thus, according to Ganz, though Vance specifically said America is not just an idea, his real view is that “contrary [emphasis mine] to the notion that America is an idea, a creed, a set of self-evident propositions . . . we are a specific people with a specific past.” And though Vance promised to “put the citizens of America first, whatever the color of their skin,” he really only meant his “charmed Caucasian circle” (per The Nation).

The problem with insinuation-based interpretation of political speech is that it goes both ways. To say America is just an idea makes it sound as if that idea could be implanted anywhere, among any people, with the same results. It implies, for example, that an army could invade a Middle Eastern country, topple its dictator, impress its people with the “self-evident truths” of the American creed, and liberty would automatically bloom. It also implies that secure borders and the type of legal immigration process I went through are unnecessary. After all, a good idea shouldn’t be restricted by lines on a map or rules and regulations. Obviously, not everyone who says “American is an idea” favors wars to spread democracy or open borders. Similarly, to state that “America is a nation” does not automatically equate to support for two-tiered citizenship and white supremacy. To assume otherwise is essentially to accuse the large numbers of Americans who think of their country in national terms of fascism and racism.

My point here isn’t to defend Vance as a politician or even every aspect of his speech. For example, Vance’s statement that “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home” downplays the power of ideas. (And the extent to which nationalism itself is a deeply rooted abstraction. How else could his ancestors’ “home” extend from Appalachia to the Pacific Ocean but through an act of collective imagination?)³ Rather, my point is that America is a great idea and a great nation, however imagined, and the eagerness of both sides of its political divide to assume the worst of the other diminishes that greatness. Of course, the left’s indiscriminate smearing of nationalists as “fascists” is matched by Donald Trump’s (il)liberal use of the word “communist” for his opponents. But leftists, while quick to use the label “reactionary,” rarely consider the extent to which their own rhetoric and actions contribute to the reactions they then denounce. There’s enough to criticize about Vance without denying, and therefore insulting, the American nation—forged of abstract ideas and concrete sacrifice—in the process.

1. As Hans Kohn writes in The Idea of Nationalism (1944), “The American constitutional laws of 1789 have lasted because the idea for which they stand was so intimately welded with the existence of the American nation that without the idea there would have been no nation.”

2. For example, the American idea is rooted in the British constitutional (eg, Magna Carta) and religious (eg, Puritanism) tradition, as well as the broader European Enlightenment.

3. That being said, Vance is correct insofar as nationalism expands and abstracts from the love of home, and is then made “real” through history. In Kohn’s words, “love of home and family is a concrete feeling accessible to everyone in daily experience, while nationalism, and in an even higher degree cosmopolitanism, is a highly complex and originally an abstract feeling. It gains the emotional warmth of concreteness only through the effects of an historical development which . . . brings about the integration of the masses and their identification with a body far too great for any concrete experience.”