By Rich Lowry
Friday, July 19, 2024
His critics’ comments were thoughtless, ahistorical, and
utterly removed from the lived reality of Americans.
In his speech at the Republican
convention, vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance trespassed against one of the foremost clichés
in American life — that our country is simply an idea.
Vance said of the people he grew up with in Appalachia,
“they love this country, not only because it’s a good idea, but because in
their bones they know that this is their home, and it will be their children’s
home.”
He invoked the family cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,
encompassing generations of the Vance family.
“That is our homeland,” he said. “People will not fight
for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”
This isn’t quite right. People do indeed fight and die
for abstract ideas (see, for instance, the French Revolution and the wars that
convulsed Europe in its aftermath). Yet, Vance is correct that people are
motivated, in all times and places, to fight for their homes and that America
is more than the sum of our national ideals.
These propositions should be considered truisms but were
too much for Vance’s critics.
MSNBC’s Alex Wagner called this passage an “Easter egg”
of “white nationalism.” America, she continued, is not a group of people with a
shared history, but, rather, “a lot of people with different histories,
different heritages.” Vance doesn’t understand this, supposedly, because he’s
“someone who fundamentally believes in the supremacy of whiteness and
masculinity.”
E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post found Vance’s
riff “troubling.” Chris Lehmann of the Nation thought Vance’s speech
took a “blood-and-soil turn.” Substacker John Ganz headlined his post on the
speech, “This Land is Mein Land.”
These critiques are thoughtless, ahistorical, and utterly
removed from the lived reality of Americans. Our common associations — a common
language, history, culture, and land — matter a great deal, and acknowledging
as much isn’t quasi-fascism.
What do the commentators repelled by Vance think Abraham
Lincoln was getting at with the finale of his First Inaugural? If Lincoln spoke
today of the “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every
battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all
over this broad land,” he’d probably be accused of a dog whistle, too. (Even
worse, Lincoln referred to America as “the national homestead.”)
If ideas and institutions are all that count, we should
love the countries of the G-7 — fellow advanced liberal democracies — as much
as the United States and be just as comfortable living in those countries as we
are here. Most of us don’t and aren’t because the United States . . . is our
home.
In addition to our founding documents, we treasure our
national heroes, our rituals and holidays, our memorials, and our landscape,
while we are further bonded to this place because our forebears lived and died
here, and our children and grandchildren will, too.
Yes, we are constantly replenished by new arrivals, but
so is any family or home. J. D. Vance, who married the child of immigrants,
doesn’t need to be lectured about this. He spoke of his wife and biracial
children eventually resting in that same eastern Kentucky plot.
John Thornton Kirkland, a future president of Harvard,
captured all of this well in a 1798 speech: “We have learned to love our
country, because it is our country; because we are near it, and in it, and have
an opportunity of being useful to it; because we breathe its air and share its
bounties; because the sweat of our fathers’ brows has subdued its soil; their
blood watered its fields, and their revered dust sleeps in its bosom; because
it embraces our fathers and mothers, our wives and children, our brothers and
sisters; because here are our altars, and here our firesides; because
patriotism is the combined energy of the social affections, and he who can tear
it from his heart, commits sacrilege upon his nature.”
That J. D. Vance saying the same thing is now
controversial says much about how our national self-conception has gone off the
rails.
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