There’s a lot going on in the world, arguably much of it of more material consequence, so readers will be forgiven if they missed J.D. Vance’s speech on July 5th at the Claremont Institute, where he accepted their “Statesmanship Award.” But I think it’s remarkable and worth paying attention because it demonstrates the core of this regime’s project. It’s not notable for being new, but for being old. Vance has articulated this kind of blood and soil nationalism before, and so have his ideological progenitors on the far right. What he’s doing is trying to go back to the foundation of the country and redefine it. He’s trying to abandon the Declaration of Independence, which one might be one way to quick way to understand this entire administration, from its would-be monarchism to its assaults on republican liberty and equality. As Josh Kovensky writes in Talking Points Memo:
What Vance expressed to the friendly Claremont audience was a dramatically reduced vision of American citizenship. It’s one in which having ancestors who have lived here for generations entitles you to more; a vision of citizenship that’s long existed around the world, with a notable and aspirational exception in the United States.
“Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence — that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,” Vance said.
He explained that such a definition “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree” with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, dubbing it “the logic of America as a purely creedal nation.”
By the opposite token, Vance said, conceiving of American citizenship “purely as an idea” would “reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,” he said, referencing the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that was founded to combat antisemitism and that, among other activities, tracks far-right groups.
First of all, the reference to the ADL is pretty weird. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they are not exactly progressive these days. He could’ve said the “SPLC,” but didn’t. What they are is Jewish. Basically, this sounds like, “What these Jews call “extremists” I think are realer citizens.” Who is on those lists? Well, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and Klansmen. So, to recap, the problem with the creedal understanding of American citizenship for Vance is that it includes the brown hordes and rejects the white supremacists.
An irony that a casual observer might miss is that this took place at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank founded by the students of Harry V. Jaffa. He would be rolling in his grave: Jafffa was the American right’s most powerful defender of Abraham Lincoln’s interpretation of Jefferson’s Declaration. In particular, Jaffa’s central contention is that “all men are created equal” actually means what it says. His most famous work, Crisis Of The House Divided: An Interpretation Of The Issues In The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, promulgates a thesis that is precisely the opposite of Vance’s. I’d refer Vance and his acolytes to a speech given by Lincoln in Chicago on July 10, 1858, shortly before the Lincoln-Douglas debates began: