America is both a people and an idea. Its people can be loyal to their nation and also care about their old homelands.
America is both a people and an idea. Its people can be loyal to their nation and also care about their old homelands.
Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods,
“And for the tender mother who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses his baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens who feed the eternal flame?”
T hat’s the most famously stirring passage from Thomas Babington Macaulay’s epic 1842 poem of the Roman Republic, “Horatius at the Bridge.” It captures the spirit of why men since time immemorial have fought for hearth and home, needing no further moral cause. And war only reveals in its starkest forms the underlying sentiments that make up a nation. Nations since the beginning of recorded time have rallied in crises around the tribal sentiment of us — the identification of a people as a community, needing no further gloss of ideology.
Patriotism, nationalism, tribalism, community — these are all words for variations on the same basic, primal feeling of home and us. That feeling is too deeply wired into human beings to be eradicated. As with many of humanity’s animal spirits, the goal of civilization should instead be to channel it in productive ways — to constrain its worst impulses while harnessing its emotive power.
Is America different? The debate over that question has been roiling for a very long time. We may look askance at the “blood and soil” nationalist traditions of Europe, but we are not only a propositional nation of ideas. As conservatives, we understand that ideas do not exist in isolation of people and cultures. Both soil and blood still matter here, and they still move hearts.
We are not just an idea, but an idea with a people, and arguably, a people with an idea, who shaped that idea. America’s ideas developed in English soil among the overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon free population that dominated the English colonies and the new republic between 1607 and the 1830s — a period that makes up just over half of our history since Jamestown. The early American was, in Tocqueville’s phrase, “the Englishman left alone.”
John Jay observed in Federalist No. 2:
Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people–a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence. This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.
As Joshua Treviño has argued, America’s ideas are themselves derived from our cultural heritage — not only the broad heritage of Judeo-Christian religion and Western Civilization, but also the specific heritage of the Anglo-Saxon political and cultural traditions:
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 . . . 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. . . .
“People with different histories, different heritages” did not make America. Whether they ever could is debatable. . . . 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.
But to acknowledge that heritage is one thing. To treat it as the only way to think of America is quite another.
Whose Heritage Counts?
The latest storm kicked up by JD Vance on this question comes from this tweet:
During my senate campaign in 2022, I met a Ukrainian-American man in NE Ohio. He was very angry about my views on the conflict, and my desire to bring it to a rapid close. “You are trying to abandon my country, and I don’t like it.” “Sir, I replied, “your country is the United States of America, and so is mine.”
I always found it offensive that a new immigrant to our country would be willing to use the power and influence of their new nation to settle the ethnic rivalries of the old.
One of the most important parts of assimilation is seeing *your* country as the USA. It’s part of the bargain: if you’re welcomed into our national family, you ought to look out for the interests of the United States. I know many immigrants who have the right perspective, and I’m grateful to them. For example, I met many Ukrainian Americans during that campaign (and since) who agreed with my views, or at the very least, asked the right question: what is in the best interests of the United States?
Now, at the most general level, Vance, of course, is right: We ask new immigrants to forswear all allegiance to their old country and bind themselves to ours. It is right that we ask all Americans to place America first. That is true if we are to remain a people; it is also true if we value the exceptionalism of our ideas and institutions.
But Vance is also playing with some explosive materials here. There’s a long and dolorous history of charges of “dual loyalty” against Americans of varying backgrounds, from pro-Israel Jews to the German and Japanese Americans who were interned during the First and Second World Wars, when people such as Teddy Roosevelt railed against “hyphenated-Americans.” We should not be feeding that tradition just to have a club handy against those who favor Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
It’s also unrealistic to ask an immigrant, or even the child or grandchild of immigrants, to have no pang of sympathy for the country of his or her ancestors or birth. Americans are not immune to the human impulse to remember where we came from. That Ukrainian-American man may be a naturalized citizen, but if so, he has not forgotten the land of his birth, where generations of his forbears may have fought for their country and now lie in their graves, and where he may yet have many family members even today, suffering under the Russian assault.
It is strangely discordant for Vance, of all people, to deny this. Recall his speech at last summer’s Republican convention, the most noteworthy portion of which is worth quoting at length:
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. 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 past to, hopefully, 250 years in the future.
Let me illustrate this with a story, if I may. I’m, of course, married to the daughter of South Asian immigrants to this country. Incredible people, people who genuinely have enriched this country in so many ways. Of course, I’m biased because I love my wife and her family but it’s true.
Now when I proposed to my wife, we were in law school and I said, “Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt and a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky. . . .
Now that cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky is near my family’s ancestral home. And like a lot of people, we came from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Now that’s Kentucky coal country, it’s one of the ten poorest counties in the entire United States of America. They are very hardworking people and they’re very good people. They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back, even if they can’t afford enough to eat.
And our media calls them “privileged” and looks down on them. But they love this country, not only 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…
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’ve 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 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 homes. [Emphasis added]
So, which is it? Vance values the depth of his family’s roots. He comes from an old and prickly American tradition; he’s even related to the Hatfields of the famous Hatfield–McCoy blood feud. He knows how to cling to the old soil. But can he not see that people who came here still value their own roots, too? Would he tell an audience of Cuban Americans or Irish Americans or American Jews to forget the generations before them and forsake their own tribe abroad? Does he say it to his wife’s family? It’s fine to remind people that America as a polity must always place America first. But to tell people to scorn their attachments to the old soil is to deny the very urges that Vance places at the center of his own American story.
Americans of varied ethnic groups have always agitated their government to have some solicitude for the land of their heritage. It’s been a feature of our foreign policy for centuries. It shouldn’t dictate or dominate our decisions, but neither should we pretend that this is some novel or nefarious tendency.
Charged by Electric Cords
One of the problems with Vance’s Rustpolitik point of view is that he seems to struggle with the reality that not every American shares the worldview he came from. Jessica Gavora wrote after Vance’s convention speech:
On November 10, 1948, Vladimir Gavora jumped into the frigid waters of the Danube River. That year, a pro-Soviet government had seized power in his native Czechoslovakia. Vladimir was 17 years old, and had been caught tearing down the new government’s propaganda posters. With the secret police on his tail, he decided to escape by swimming to Austria. He finished high school in a refugee camp in West Germany, won a scholarship to come to America, studied at the University of Chicago, and made his way to the then-territory of Alaska. There, he built a successful business and raised a family of nine children — one of them, me. When he died in 2018, he was hailed as the man who did more than any other to shape the development and growth of his corner of the Last Frontier. . . .
Did Dad have the preamble to the Declaration of Independence in mind as he swam across the Danube to freedom? Probably not. Was it the abstraction that “all men are created equal” that kept him company as he huddled in the trunk of a car through the Soviet zone of Austria? Dad never talked with me about what exactly was in his head during that fateful crossing. But I assume it wasn’t the ringing words of Thomas Jefferson. So, okay, Dad may not have been driven by the idea of America. But he was driven by what that idea — the American creed of equal opportunity — created in the American nation. He was driven to find a place where he knew he could control his destiny.
Gavora’s family history, and their American story, is no more or less legitimate than Vance’s. Rather, Vance’s generations buried in the same hills are just not representative of the whole country. Part of it, yes. But many Americans are the children and grandchildren of people who came here comparatively recently because they were drawn to the American idea and the society it created. And they remember their roots.
My family background is more like Gavora’s than like Vance’s: All four of my grandparents came here in 1923 (two from Scotland, one from Ireland, one from England). I live today on Long Island, not where I grew up, but also not so terribly far from where they all got off the boat. I love America because it’s the only home I’ve ever known, but I also grew up thinking of our national history as something I was tied to by the American idea, not because there was some line of patriot graves filled with my forbears. In the First World War, my mother’s father served in the Royal Navy, and my father’s grandfather served in the British Army. I grew up going to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade like any good Irish-American kid (with its various demonstrations of Irish Republicanism) and got a scholarship to high school from the NYPD Emerald Society.
Abraham Lincoln understood the pull of our ancestry and shared history. He appealed to that when he spoke in his First Inaugural of “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone” that make up the nation’s “bonds of affection.” But in a Fourth of July speech three years earlier, before sectional strife had pushed the nativist controversies of the 1850s off the front pages, he explained why blood and soil alone do not hold this country together:
We find a race of men living in [the Founding era] whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for. . . . We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves — we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations. But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole.
There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men — descended by blood from our ancestors — among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe — German, Irish, French and Scandinavian — men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, (loud and long continued applause) and so they are.
That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world. [Emphasis added.]
It is precisely because we are not united by blood, soil, or even by an entirely common history that we need the American idea to hold us together as a continental nation of vast diversity. Contra Vance, while some will fight only for their homeland, the idea can unite those who might otherwise be divided.
Consider the case of Robert E. Lee. Lee was a man of deep loyalties, and few Americans have ever had more reason to attach those loyalties to the nation. His father, “Light Horse Harry” Lee, was a hero of the Revolutionary War, served closely with George Washington himself, went into politics after the war as a Federalist (the more national-minded of the two parties), and gave a famous eulogy for Washington in Congress. Light Horse Harry’s cousin, Richard Henry Lee, was one of the moving forces behind the Declaration of Independence. Robert E. Lee married into the Washington family, eventually inheriting a home in Arlington built as a memorial to the Father of our Country, becoming the executor of the Washington family estate, and generally idolizing Washington. In Lee’s own career, he spent his entire adult life in federal service. He attended West Point, rose to high rank in the army, was deployed up and down the East Coast and on the western frontier, went to war in Mexico, earned the admiration of generals and senators, and was appointed to run the nation’s military academy.
And yet, when the crisis came, and Lee’s loyalty was stirred to side with his roots, he did not find them in the nation. He did not even find them in the South; while he debated whether he would have to resign his commission rather than fight against the seceding states, he would not have joined the Confederacy had Virginia remained in the Union (as for a time it seemed it might). Lee’s patriotic attachment to his roots was powerful — but it bound him to Virginia, not to America. Without the additional glue of ideas, the nation’s various tribes may fight, but they are apt to fight one another.
Arrayed on the Union side, men fought not only for hearth and home. In The Soul of Battle, Victor Davis Hanson wrote about how William Tecumseh Sherman’s army — and George Patton’s, in a later war — were “ideological armies,” charged with zeal for the American idea. Indeed, the officer corps of the Union Army was unusually composed, a good deal more than the Continental Army, by immigrants and mercenaries who were attracted to its cause.
If American elites have forgotten that we are a people, that we have a history, that our nation commands loyalty we do not attach to the rest of the world, and that our roots in our own soil (and yes, in our blood) are things that matter — well, then, they ought to listen to the reminders that Vance is wont to offer. But his vision of America is nonetheless woefully incomplete, and it denies to his fellow Americans the same depth of feeling in their heritage that he himself so prizes.