New York Times writer Ezra Klein had an interesting interview with Yoram Hazony, an Israeli intellectual who is close to Vice President J.D. Vance. They were discussing Vance’s definitions of American nationalism and citizenship. Before the discussion, Klein posts some extended quotes from Vance.
While many modern political thinkers have for years defined being an American as holding allegiance to the United States and an American creed of democracy, equality, constitutionalism, due process, and other ideas we all learned in civics classes, Vance seems to have different grounds for his Americanism. His is nationalism, rather than patriotism, which is inherited from one’s biological ancestors. According to Vance, the children of an immigrant may love the United States, but they can never compete with a person whose ancestors have lived in this country for centuries.
Vance gets to this point through the backdoor. For instance, Vance at the far-right Claremont Institute said that:
The radicals of the far left, they don’t need a unifying ideology of what they’re for because they know very well what they’re against. What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites and big pharma lobbyists? It isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx. It’s hatred. They hate the people in this room. They hate the president of the United States. And most of all, they hate the people who voted for that president of the United States in the last election in November. This is the animating principle of the American far left.
This “hatred” by the “radicals of the far left” (who inexplicably include “big pharma lobbyists”) leads them to marginalize those descendants of the white settlers who originally set up the United States. In his book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance writes that:
I realized that in this new world, I was the cultural alien. I began to think seriously about questions that had nagged at me since I was a teenager: Why has no one else from my high school made it to the Ivy League? Why are people like me so poorly represented in America’s elite institutions? Why is domestic strife so common in families like mine? Why did I think that places like Yale and Harvard were so unreachable? Why did successful people feel so different?
Because America is so culturally diverse, he, as the descendant of the formerly privileged majority, is now the “cultural alien.” This alien-ation leads to “domestic strife in families like mine” he says. At one time, conservatives used to say that “domestic strife” was the result of personal failings, but Vance says it is the process of cultural marginalization by the elite (who apparently include undocumented immigrants).
Next Vance insults women in power as “childless cat ladies,” his famous choice of phrasing:
We are effectively run in this country — via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs — by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.
For some reason, he and Donald Trump have made a big show of allying with “corporate oligarchs.” I also wonder how many corporations are headed by “childless cat ladies.”
Vance tells his audience that our society is suicidal.
Every Western society, as I stand here today, has significant demographic and cultural problems. There is something about Western liberalism that seems almost suicidal — or at least socially parasitic — that tends to feed off of a healthy host until there’s nothing left.
Vance believes that as we have become more diverse, our country has become ever weaker:
America in ’25 is more diverse than it has ever been. And yet the institutions that take this incredibly diverse country and form culture are weaker than they have ever been. While our elites tell us that diversity is our greatest strength, they destroy the very institutions that allow us to thrive and build a common sense of purpose and meaning as Americans.
The Vice President adopts the stand of ethno-nationalism:
If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence — that’s a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow?
To be an American is not to believe in American values, it is to be descended from an ancestor who lived more than a hundred years ago in the United States, according to Vance:
If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the A.D.L. [the Jewish group Anti-Defamation League] would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it’s absurd — and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this — to saying: You don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.
When Vance says that he rejects America as a “purely creedal nation,” he seems to be relying on his education in the Ivy Leagues rather than his “hillbilly” youth. He says that adhering to the “creed” of America, adhering to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, loving the United States and wanting to succeed here, cannot compete with having had “ancestors [who] fought in the Civil War.” These sons and daughters of the Union and Confederacy “have a hell of a lot more claim over America.”
Vance does not even say which set of “ancestors” were right. Does having an ancestor who fought a war to maintain slavery give you more say over the current American culture than a descendent of an ancestor that immigrated in the early 1900s? If your ancestor fought a war to break up the United States, why should that person’s descendants have greater status as an American than someone whose ancestors were held in slavery and was not able to fight in the war?
Now, nothing says that a modern day descendent of a Confederate is any less an American than someone, like Donald Trump, whose ancestors came in after the Civil War from Germany and Scotland. As long as these two individuals believe in due process, the rule of law, separation of powers, and the central ideal of a republican-no king-then there is no distinction between them as regard to American citizenship.
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To think, Vance is insulting his wife Usha with this drivel. She’s a first generation American with no Civil War ancestors and is contributing to the “demographic problem” he’s calling out.
Agree that Klein’s montage of Vance and Hazony is provocative and perplexing but your version of it makes it even more contusing. No where is Vance calling his “ hillbilly” ancestors an elite , anything but. He is contrasting .what he and coservatives are for— say, founding ideas— and what progressive are against— saying its everything they hate, namely Trump and those who voted for him. They aren’t FOR anything. Be well