J. D. Vance’s Empty Nationalism

As the Civil War began to rage in 1861, the American press became enraptured with an idea—that Giuseppe Garibaldi, the gallant Italian nationalist and erstwhile New Yorker who had become famous fighting wars of independence in two hemispheres, was willing to join the Union cause.

There was only one condition: The Union had to embrace emancipation. “If your war is for freedom, I am with you with 20,000 men,” Garibaldi told an American diplomat, the historian Don Doyle wrote in The Cause of All Nations. Garibaldi was convinced that he would make short work of the armies of the decadent planter aristocracy, save the “Great American Republic,” and then move on to liberating all the enslaved people in the Western Hemisphere.

The Union wasn’t ready to commit to emancipation, however, and Garibaldi never fought for the United States—a shame for the Union army, which had to wait years for a brave and competent commander. Millions of other immigrants did fight for the Union. “Immigrants and the sons of immigrants constituted well over 40 percent of the Union’s armed forces,” Doyle wrote. As with Black troops who were fighting for a nation that did not yet recognize them as equals, many of these immigrant soldiers were defending ideals—American ideals that they held more closely than some of their native-born white brothers in arms did. One of the soldiers Doyle described, the German American immigrant August Horstmann, wrote to his family of his willingness to “die in the fight for freedom and the preservation of the Union … The freedom of the oppressed and the equality of human rights must first be fought for here!” We can spend all day listing the ways America does not live up to this ideal, but that does not make it any less worthy, or change the fact that Americans have long been willing to fight to defend it.

[From the November 2022 issue: The American idea]

Many Americans at the time regarded immigrant enlistees with suspicion, seeing them as mere foreigners. Given the contradictory nature of the American founding—one that protected slavery while proclaiming universal equality—that sentiment is perhaps understandable from the perspective of 1861. It was a little strange to see it expressed at the Republican National Convention in 2024.

The Ohio Republican Senator J. D. Vance, who once feared that Donald Trump would be “America’s Hitler,” is now a convert to Trump’s cause. Trump has always reveled in forcing former opponents to supplicate themselves, and his targets have always validated his judgment by trading their dignity for their ambitions. In his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination, Vance put forth a profoundly reactionary idea, couched in deflecting platitudes, that America is a “nation,” not “just an idea.”

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.

The first problem with this is that Vance does not believe in the rule of law, having told Vanity Fair in 2022 that Trump should simply ignore Supreme Court rulings he disfavors. Vance’s view of “religious liberty” is likewise one in which conservative Christians have the right to impose their religious dictates on everyone else. So it’s not as though Vance even upholds the good American ideas mentioned. Also, as the writer John Ganz observes, “Vance didn’t include any part of the Declaration, egalitarianism or even freedom as the ‘brilliant ideas,’ just vaguely gesturing to the ‘Constitution,’ religious liberty and the rule of law.” Vance did insist that “we will put the citizens of America first, whatever the color of their skin,” a commitment that he undermines with his definition of America. Indeed, given that Vance has embraced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory as a plot to import “Democrat voters” through illegal immigration, as though Hispanic voters are mere liberal automatons, it’s entirely fair to question the sincerity of his egalitarianism here.

The argument that America is a “nation” and not an idea is much more sinister than perhaps it sounds at first listen. If America is a creedal nation, then anyone can be an American. But if real Americans are those who share a specific history, then some of us are more American than others. I suspect that Vance wishes to have it both ways, signaling an exclusivist vision of America to his far-right allies while still including vague gestures to pluralism so he can take umbrage at anyone who extends the logic of his argument to its natural conclusion. Vance’s description of whom he includes in America as a “nation” makes this somewhat clearer, as he describes a cemetery where he plans to be buried:

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.

Now. Now, that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

As a historical matter, this is false, but it is also not special. Human beings have been willing to fight for “their homeland” for their entire existence, from prehistory to the present day. To say that Americans are willing to fight for their plot of land is to say that they are like every other group of people that has ever existed and that exists now. It is to say that there is nothing particularly special about America or American ideals at all. But the ideals that have animated the American project have exercised such a powerful appeal around the world precisely because they speak to more universal aspirations. And the notion that some Americans are better than others is a rejection of those ideals.

Vance’s narrow tribalism is an expression of contempt for not only the America that exists, where people of different backgrounds have found love and community with one another, but also for the universalist ideals that Americans have fought and died for. It is a history that, by his own description, Vance cannot even fathom.

[Tom Nichols: The moral collapse of JD Vance]

The Union won the Civil War in part because people were willing to fight for what Vance calls “abstractions.” Immigrants from around the world enlisted, fought, and died wearing Union blue for the cause of human freedom, even when many of their native-born white comrades did not share their beliefs. It was not the first or last time in American history that immigrants would, because of their intense patriotism and idealism about America, remind those of us who have been here for generations how precious ideals such as democracy and pluralism truly are. One almost wonders whether it is that very patriotism and commitment to American ideals that Vance finds repulsive and inconvenient.

In Vance’s definition of what it means for America to be a “nation,” these people who sacrificed their lives to preserve the republic are less American than the soldiers of the slaver army that sought to destroy it. Some of those Union veterans are buried in cemeteries like the one Vance describes, after being forced to bear the kind of nativist bile spewed at the RNC. Vance’s definition of America is less a nation than an entitlement, something inherited, like a royal title or a trust fund. The irony is that Vance’s idea of the nation is as much an abstraction, an imagined community, as the American creed he disdains; it is simply narrow, cramped, and ugly. Unfortunately, people fight and die for those too.   

Vance did give a brief nod to pluralism, saying, “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.” Who the “we” and “them” are here is left implied but unsaid. The idea that Trump and Vance are interested in protecting the rights of Americans “whatever the color of their skin” clashes with their conception of true American citizenship as containing a kind of grandfather clause, dependent on having a particular ancestry from a particular time.  

Either we have a commitment to equal rights for all or there is a hierarchy of Americans who inherit greater status because they happened to be born to the right families.

Which of these ideals, do you think, are Trump and Vance genuinely committed to?