Is America an idea or a homeland? That question lies at the heart of this roller coaster of a presidential race. It’s about whether we Americans should continue to set our sights on global leadership and enforcing universal principles or instead hunker down and take care of our own.
President Biden, in his speech on Wednesday explaining why he withdrew his candidacy, described America as “the most powerful idea in the history of the world.” In language echoing legacy Republicans like Ronald Reagan, Mr. Biden said that it was “an idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant.”
But Donald Trump’s Republican Party is turning away from that kind of language. At the Republican convention, JD Vance, his running mate, made a point of saying that America is “not just an idea” but a “homeland,” evoking a mountain cemetery in Eastern Kentucky where he said his ancestors are buried and where he hopes that he and his children will be buried as well.
Some of his critics immediately denounced those references to his family’s land and lineage as coded “blood and soil” nationalism, the ideology of Nazis. In The Atlantic, Adam Serwer accused Mr. Vance of signaling an “exclusivist vision of America to his far-right allies” when he asserted that America is a country made up of people who share a history rather than a “creedal nation” — one primarily based on ideas like freedom and equality. “If America is a creedal nation, then anyone can be an American,” Mr. Serwer wrote. “But if real Americans are those who share a specific history, then some of us are more American than others.”
These critiques ignore the sense of duty that human beings everywhere feel to the places and people that raised us. Americans are no exception. And dismissing the intense debate about whether America is a creedal nation versus a specific place of specific people who share land, history and culture misses a chance to understand something important about the MAGA movement’s appeal.
People who speak of America as an idea tend to have a global outlook, arguing for more immigration, free trade and a robust role for the United States around the world. Those who emphasize that it’s also a homeland see the country’s resources as being squandered on outsiders, while the needs of citizens are brushed aside.
There is so much that is troubling about Mr. Vance and the MAGA movement in general — election denialism and support for insurrections come to mind — but this message resonates, especially among the working class. I’ve spoken with American workers who compete with undocumented immigrants for low-wage jobs in home construction and landscaping and they speak of the downside of the notion that America is an idea — anybody can walk across the border to claim it. Any soldier in an ill-fated war that tried to export America’s self-evident truths to foreign lands may understandably prefer to think about the country as a homeland rather than a set of principles that must be defended everywhere.
There’s another reason that people might be attracted to the idea of an American homeland. The modern world can be disorienting, as people lose their vital ties to the places they are from. The rise of cellphones, social media and globalized commerce has created a sense of “placelessness” that often robs people of the rootedness that human beings need to flourish, along with the motivation to live “purposeful lives of self-government and civic engagement,” according to Wilfred McClay and Ted McAllister, editors of the anthology “Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity and Civic Life in Modern America.” The impulse to reclaim a sense of place in the world could be part of why nationalism is on the rise in many countries.
I can understand the risks of talking about the country as an abstract idea. Being from somewhere specific obliges us to grapple with the problems of the people who live there. Ideas, on the other hand, demand little. They are universal and portable, perfect for remote workers moving to Portugal on a golden visa, but less useful for those who have never left their hometowns.
The irony here is that Mr. Biden has done a great deal for the forgotten hometowns that Mr. Vance speaks to.
But this debate lives on, partly because, for conservatives, this is about not just economic populism but also cultural change. Carson Holloway, a fellow at the Claremont Institute, laid out the case against thinking of America primarily as a creedal nation last year in an essay in “Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right After a Generation of Decay.” Mr. Holloway argues that overemphasizing universal ideas that liberals like to talk about — freedom and equality — as the source of American identity has allowed the country to be “hijacked by novel and radical notions of freedom” that left American society adrift, full of young people who believe in gay marriage and, he told me, “an immigration policy that seeks low-wage workers rather than virtuous citizens.”
When Mr. Vance spoke about the country as a homeland, he appeared to be distinguishing himself from the corporatist, globalist part of the Republican Party. His words seemed intended to repudiate those of Paul Ryan — another young Republican vice-presidential pick from a very different era — who declared in 2013: “America is more than just a country. It’s more than Chicago or Wisconsin. It’s more than our borders,” in a speech supporting legal immigration.
Mr. Vance is clearly skeptical about unchecked immigration and the cultural change that it can bring. But his speech was far from a call to end all immigration, or to view all immigrants as second-class citizens, let alone an appeal to Nazi ideology.
Indeed, Mr. Vance heaped praise on his wife — a Southern California native and the daughter of immigrants from India — who introduced him at the convention. Mr. Vance said that it was an American tradition to welcome “newcomers into our American family” — as long as it is “on our terms.” That’s not so different from the way many people — liberal and conservative — with decades of family ties to their communities think about newcomers.
As I write this, I’m sitting in a neighborhood in Detroit where people size up whether or not you truly belong by how long your grandmama lived on the block. My neighbor left me a nasty message last weekend after I parked too close to his car: “You are the new neighbor on the block and need to fall in line with reasonable requests and be respectful of those who have been and will continue to be here long after you are bored with your new purchase.”
It was brutal. But he had a point. Belonging to a place is more than a notion. It takes time, effort and willingness to adhere to community norms. That’s true of the country, too. America can be an inspiring idea. But for that idea to have meaning to those who live here, the country also must feel like home.
The post Decoding JD Vance’s Brand of Nationalism appeared first on New York Times.