If you didn’t watch Senator J.D. Vance’s address to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Wednesday night, take a moment to do so, or at least to read the transcript. It got the job done in introducing the candidate — who is not nearly as well-known nationally as either his detractors or his enthusiasts think he is — and it had one signal virtue that most modern-candidate rhetoric lacks, which is discernible ideas. I don’t mean policy positions, because those are a dime a dozen: those of us who labor in the speechwriting fields are well acquainted with the inevitable laundry list of items to include, declaim, and exposit.
This is important, and worth writing about: Vance has ideas on the nature of the American polity, and they’re novel but not new. I want to discuss one of the big ones here. But first, if you aren’t going to read the speech, watch it:
If you got through all that, I hope you grasped one singular passage, immediately, as the reason the Vance nomination is so consequential. It has nothing to do with any electoral map — history is emphatic that Vice-Presidential nominees rarely help, and only sometimes hurt, the overall ticket — and everything to do with the ideological contours of the coming movement-conservative synthesis, which in turn has tremendous implications for governance in the near-certain second Trump Administration. The passage is this:
[O]ne 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. Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.
The articulation of this idea, that America is more than mere proposition, has in my lifetime — I’m about half a century in the mortal span, sufficiently older than Vance to have acquired more experience but not necessarily more wisdom — been set forth in a serious way only once in any major political setting. But even Pat Buchanan’s 1992 RNC address was oblique on the point. Widely remembered for the admonition that “these people are our people,” the “conservatives of the heart,” what is less well remembered is its close. Buchanan invoked the then-recent Los Angeles riots, and described the heroism of the soldiers who quelled them as a metaphor for the retaking of the country: “the mob retreated because it had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, and backed by moral courage.” We happen to know, because he spent a lifetime discussing it, what Buchanan’s understanding of that justice was — necessary because the apologists for the riots, in both 1992 and 2020, also invoked an idea of justice — and it was an idea of a particular people rooted in a particular historical, cultural, and geographic context. It was a people with a place.
Thirty-two years ago that required some effort to discern in the rhetoric of Buchanan. In the rhetoric of J.D. Vance it is made plain.
To say this has been received with alternating incomprehension or hostility in some quarters is to understate the case. I will not engage in extensive quotation or rebuttal here, as this is not my purpose. The indignation or disagreement, as one prefers, is nevertheless worth noting to the extent that it is in good faith. Out of charity, let us say most of it is. (The bad-faith critique is the accusation of racial bigotry, a falsehood and a commonplace alike.) Americans have for generations been socialized and educated that this is a propositional nation, foremost an idea that just happened, through Providence or undirected chance, to take root and flourish on the American Continent. “All men are created equal” and classical republicanism could have taken root anywhere, given proper opportunity, and though I think it an analytic error — more on this shortly — the view had much to commend itself. One datum was the remarkable success of immigrants to America, which implied that they might have done the same in their places of origin. Another was the liberalization of Europe, and a handful of examples of the same in East Asia, which was inferred to suggest possibilities for the entire remainder of humanity. Still another was the long trial of the Cold War, which was interpreted more as ideological contest and less as conflicting national interests.
Propositionalism and dissolution.
The consequences of propositionalism — let us coin a neologism here — were profound and sweeping. The governance of the United States progressively persuaded itself that it could not meaningfully discern between citizen and noncitizen, not just in the provision of public goods like education, but also in things that were previously understood as intrinsically tied to citizenship, like voting. The immigration policy of the United States wholly abandoned the prudential caution attendant to all prior policy, everywhere, which asserted that a new arrival ought to be a positive addition amplifying the virtues of his destination. (It even abandoned the idea that the United States could decide who is an arrival.) The trade and industrial policy of the United States abandoned almost wholly the Hamiltonian understanding that employment and material production by the citizenry were superior goods to the same among noncitizenry. The foreign and national-security policy of the United States embraced the advance of propositionalism as an ideological imperative, and the United States launched regional wars on the premise.
All this can run a very long time in a nation as wealthy and powerful as the United States, and so it has. American governance has seen a great deal of ruinous folly in two and a half centuries, and the republic endured. But now there is a sense that the clockwork is somehow winding down. One may pick the metric of foreboding from a variety of sources: in national debt, in the fentanyl-and-despair epidemic, in our national inability to build seagoing vessels and advanced chips at scale, in the crime overtaking the American metropolis, in the shocking appearance of violent partisans for Islamist terror organizations in our universities and our cities. The list could go on.
My own personal datum is the number of illegal immigrants in the country. Some months back, an informed person asked for my estimate, knowing of my work on Mexico and the border. I replied that it was probably twenty to thirty million. The individual, armed with a security clearance, replied that I was undercounting by a factor of two.
The purpose here is not to make an argument for American decline. History is contingent and the Whigs have always been wrong about progress. The battered shell of the Roman state in the seventh century was succeeded by a glorious Roman imperium in the tenth and eleventh — all the way up to hubris and Manzikert. Britain stripped of its crown jewel of empire in 1783 was the leading power of the world in 1883. The list could go on. Do not bet against the American future. We do not know it — and we are also its builders. What Vance invoked in his remarks is the foundation upon which to build it.
Propositionalism and the idea of the nation.
Another way to put it is that propositionalism and its consequences eradicated the enduring Western understanding of what a nation or a polity actually is. In its application there is little in millennia of tradition and political thought to which it did not eventually run counter. Aristotle’s Politics asserts civic “friendship” as the cornerstone of the state, and furthermore avers that one of its intrinsic qualities is its possession of purpose: “political communities must be taken as being for the sake of noble actions, not [just] for the sake of living together.” A generation prior to Aristotle, Euripides had his Iphigenia sacrifice herself to that end of “noble action”: “I give my body to Hellas; sacrifice it and make an utter end of Troy … And it is right, mother, that Hellenes should rule barbarians, but not barbarians Hellenes, those being slaves, while these are free.” Propositionalism denies the wisdom of these classical understandings of community. Propositionalism furthermore overrides the Westphalian understanding of the state. (Alert readers will have long since noted this in a variety of spheres.) Propositionalism renders impossible the friend-enemy distinction in Carl Schmitt’s 1932 Concept of the Political, which is presently enjoying a resurgence in popularity on the American right, precisely because of propositionalism’s real-world effects as set forth above. Although it is not explicitly articulated much, it is worth doing so here: propositionalism and its counterpart, process-oriented liberalism, have made it nearly impossible to constitute a nation. What may cohere under it, however, is a government, or more properly, a ruling class.
This, not its material effects, is the fundamental danger of the propositional-nation ideology: in stripping the people of all the constitutive elements of the political, especially history and community, it forces them into a pre-political state. The irony is that it does so under the banner of an erroneously defined political idea of America. If we must ask why the reversion to the pre-political is desirable, we can offer many answers: but chief among them must be that a pre-political society is easier to rule.
I wrote above that I wouldn’t do this, but it is worth an exception in illuminating the example of MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, and her commentary on Vance’s “America is not just an idea” passage in his Wednesday-evening address. She accuses the nominee of dropping “Easter eggs of white nationalism,” which is mere rhetorical chaff, and then makes a very interesting assertion that gets to the real critique at hand: “The thing about America,” she says, “is it’s not a group of people with a shared history … a lot of people would argue it’s quite the opposite, it’s a lot of people with different histories, different heritages.” Wagner then goes on to accuse Vance of valuing his own eastern-Kentucky heritage as more-normative and therefore more American than the heritage of his wife and in-laws, the latter being natives of Andhra Pradesh. Watch the full clip here:
It would be presumption to read the Senator’s mind and heart on the thing, but as a purely objective matter, of course a six-generation lineage on the western-Appalachian slope is more-normatively American, and more fully constitutive of America, than is a one-generation lineage from India. Understand this clearly: this does not mean the individuals at hand are more or less American. History is replete with examples of Jamestown descendants who fail at the duties of Americanness, and also with examples of newly arrived immigrants who make themselves exemplary Americans in full. (Read the life of Silvestre Herrera, who had the option of escaping the Second World War draft as a Mexican national in the United States, and chose to volunteer instead, earning the Medal of Honor.) What we mean is that the community and the history that made the America to which the immigrants arrive is the standard — and deserves a positive defense. Wagner and, one suspects, most of the educated class either do not comprehend this, or suspect a bigotry beneath it. This too is propositionalism, which ineluctably finds its way toward a demand that the deeply rooted peoples of the land adapt themselves to the newcomers, but never vice versa.
The future upon the history.
Lost — but found in Vance’s thought, at least — is the truth that “people with different histories, different heritages” did not make America. Whether they ever could is debatable: this is my gloss, not the Senator’s. America required a specific context with centuries of real history preceding it: the Christianization of England, the Protestant Reformation, the Elizabethan settlement, the English Civil War, King Philip’s War, the Glorious Revolution, Locke, and so on. Nothing else would have done it, and nothing else ever did. My own paternal ancestors were the Spanish colonizers first of Mexico, and then of Nuevo Santander: they were great men, heroes in my view, but if you’d mailed them translated copies of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers in 1750, they’d have made nothing of it. Alexis de Tocqueville himself wrote on the inability of the new Spanish American republics to constitute governments upon the same lines as the Anglo-Americans. Two hundred years later it remains an elusive end across the hemisphere. We who come from centuries-old settlements between the Nueces and the Rio Grande merely had the good fortune to be conquered, literally and metaphorically, by the Texans from the 1840s through the 1920s. The proposition alone was never enough.
We repose within history, and the liberties and prosperity we enjoy as Americans require engagement with it, not an unmooring from it. Much of it is simple memory. I was surprised to learn that one of the men gravely wounded in the attempted assassination of President Trump last Saturday is James Copenhaver. I am a relative of his. I do not know him, and likely never will, nor do I know any of his immediate family. But I am one of the Copenhavers — all of us are from the lineage of a single man who voyaged from the Rhineland-Palatinate to Philadelphia half a century before the American Revolution. In 1774, one of that man’s sons signed his name to the very first American threat of armed rebellion against the King over the sea. My youngest son is named for him. That child and his brother, both of whom I love above all others, were born in China: but he bears the name and the inheritance of one of the original Americans, and all his hopes and future rest upon the preservation of their work.
This is what J.D. Vance means, and he is right. An America that forgets its creation and preservation, at the hands of families buried on Kentucky hillsides, at the hands of three centuries of Copenhavers, at the hands of every family that can look back and count its men in the Argonne, at Shiloh, at Buena Vista, at Fallen Timbers, at Saratoga — or its men and women alike on pioneer trails from the tidewater sunrise to the ocean sunset — is an America that does not know why it is America. When it does not know why, it will stop being America. We ought to privilege that rootedness and that history, mostly because that privileging is intrinsic to nationhood. We also ought to privilege it because, nearly alone among the vast inheritances of mankind, it is what makes it possible to take in others — and we ought to take in others based upon their ability and fitness to defend that inheritance.
“America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” It’s good to hear it said. Without the history, that future — and that nation — is no more.