JD Vance by Gage Skidmore / Flickr
CV NEWS FEED // Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, named by former President Donald Trump as a likely 2024 running mate, offered a stirring denunciation of “Wall Street Journal” conservatism during a speech at Monday’s National Conservatism Conference (NATCON).
“The real threat to American Democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more,” Vance said near the beginning of his 20-minute speech.
“The reason I’m optimistic about the future of this movement and the future of our country is because for the first time in a very long time it is clear that the leader of the Republican Party is not some donor who’s desperate for cheap labor,” Vance continued. “The leader of the Republican Party is a guy who actually plans to put American citizens first, and that’s Donald Trump.”
Vance referred to himself as a “convert” to Trump’s “America-first” agenda. In 2019, he recalled, Trump’s agenda had still not “taken over the Republican Party,” because there were still many in the GOP who were “aggressively” pushing back against it and trying to bring about a return to an earlier, “Wall-Street-Journal-Editorial-Page” approach to politics.
But “I think that’s over now,” Vance said, calling the end of the old-guard and establishment politics of the GOP “a huge huge win for the American people.”
Vance closed with what he called a “very important” observation. Many people, including many Republicans, believe that “America is an idea,” he warned. They present America as a “creedal” country – meaning a country whose people are defined by their agreement to profess an abstract political creed.
“But America is not just an idea, though we were founded on great ideas.”
Rather, “America is a nation,” Vance explained:
It is a group of people with a common history and a common future. …One of the parts of that commonality as a people is that we do allow newcomers to this country. But we allow them on our terms. …And that’s the way that we preserve the continuity of this project.
Vance offered an illustration of his point by citing his personal family history. “I am married to the daughter of South-Asian immigrants to this country,” he pointed out.
When Vance proposed to his now-wife, he recalled, he told her: “Honey, I come along with $120-worth of law school debt and a cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky. That’s what you’re getting.”
Vance called the area in which that burial plot can be found his family’s “ancestral home,” the “deep heart of central Appalachia” in “Kentucky coal country.”
It’s one of the poorest counties in the country, Vance said. The people there are “very hardworking people” and “very good people,” however. “They are people who love this country not because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home and it will be their children’s home and they would die fighting to protect it.”
“That is the source of America’s greatness, ladies and gentlemen,” Vance said.
If one day the senator and his wife, and their children after them, are interred in that same burial plot in Eastern Kentucky, Vance noted, then there will be seven generations of his family there: “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.”
“That is not just an idea,” he emphasized. “That is not just a set of principles… That is a homeland. People don’t go and fight and die just for principles. Importantly, they go and fight and die for their home, for their families, and for the future of their children.”
“If this movement is gonna go anywhere,” Vance concluded, “and if this country is gonna thrive, we have to remember that America is a nation.”
“We’re gonna disagree” on how best to serve the country and what policies are best. “That’s fine,” he said:
But never forget that why we exist, why we do this, why we care about all those great ideas, is because I would like eventually for my kids to rest in that cemetery, and I would like them to know that the United States of America is as strong and as proud and as great as ever. Let’s get to work to make that happen.
Vance’s speech represented a strain of deeply-rooted philosophy traceable through Western thinking that predates the American founding. It is a tradition of thought that was also central to the revival of Western political philosophy in the mid-20th-Century American conservative movement.
The Catholic senator’s rejection of a merely ideological account of American identity in favor of a thicker concept of “peoplehood” and “nationhood” will likely be recognized by some as a return to the thinking of magisterial conservative figures such as Russell Kirk.
Kirk’s conservatism found itself in increasing tension with so-called “neoconservative” principles in the decades leading up to the arrival of “Trumpism.”
In a 2003 essay for The American Conservative, Catholic scholar John Zmirak anticipated Vance’s argument against “America-as-idea,” arguing against what Zmirak called “America the Abstraction.”
Neoconservatives, Zmirak wrote, “brought with them vast talents, literary learning, and serious moral concern for universal issues of human rights” during the years of the Cold War. “But they also carried a strong tendency towards pure abstraction, towards viewing national questions purely in ideological terms.”
These neoconservative promulgators of what Vance now calls the “Wall Street Journal” approach to politics “defended America bravely during the Cold War—but they did so not as our homeland, as the particular place where a people and their treasured institutions took root, but rather as the (almost accidental) spot where certain ideas had taken hold,” Zmirak continued:
Those ideas—unmoored from the institutions and historical realities that nurtured them— became the important thing. The country itself became secondary to the ideas it used to govern itself, which it lived in order to instantiate and spread around the world. As Irving Kristol famously wrote, the United States and the Soviet Union were alike in one key respect—they were “the only two large nations in the world today that were born out of a self-conscious creed, and whose very existence as nations is justified and defined in creedal terms.”
“To conservatives schooled in this mode of argument, restrictions on immigration are simply insane,” Zmirak explained later in his essay, and “anyone, anywhere who will sign on to the Declaration of Independence is already an American.”
“Keeping him out makes no more sense than building a Berlin Wall to divide Manhattan’s East Side from its West,” he went on:
Embittered blacks, or religious conservatives, or leftists who do not accept the Cold War ideology of America are not real Americans. An ideological litmus test becomes the standard of citizenship. American foreign policy must cease to pursue the concrete interests of a concrete, national community and become the tool by which an abstract creed is imposed across the world—hindered only by the resistance of the benighted and bigoted, who are fated to end on the ash-heap of history.
“Such a creed is dangerous to the country that espouses it. It sets an impossible standard by which all its actions will be judged and invites well-founded charges of hypocrisy,” Zmirak concluded. “It enrages and goads enemies. It alienates home-grown patriots. Most tragically, it invites the attacks of fanatical young men on American civilians—as it did on September 11, 2001, in my hometown, New York City.”
Readers can view Vance’s full speech at NatCon here.
