America Is More Than an Idea

One of the reasons I was very excited for the JD Vance vice-presidential nomination in 2024 was his RNC address that summer, at which he said:

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.

This struck me as so self-evidently true that it fell into the class of things too often unspoken. But that self-evident truth is not the only reason it is unspoken: The assertion also runs contrary to a certain strain of American civic mythos, which started in a virtuous place (the Declaration of Independence, to be specific) and across two and a half centuries became so stretched that it frequently became unmoored from Burkean circumstance. Americanism is a set of ideas, to be sure, and it is also the case that those ideas required a particular context, people, and history, and they still do.

All this came to mind when reading Allen Guelzo’s “Our American Heritage,” published on July 3 here at National Review. In it, the distinguished historian pens an impassioned defense of America-as-idea, and the Americans as “the offspring of a great idea” rather than a people or culture as understood in Aristotle’s Politics and nearly everywhere else. This is a tall order of exceptionalism, and one understands why Americans enjoy it. Nevertheless, the particulars stop one short. This passage especially demanded further investigation:

In 1863, a Danish-born captain named Hans Peter Jorgensen set out a brief explanation of why he had volunteered for service in the Union army. It had nothing to do with blood or soil, or the English language or the “physical land.” It was much simpler for him: “Freedom is the same everywhere, and I cheerfully give my life in its defense. I would give more if I had it.” His comrades in the 15th Massachusetts buried him in the Evergreen Cemetery at Leominster three weeks after he was killed at Gettysburg. Is there any, even among the most ardent “new heritage” promoters, who will not say that that burial plot is as sacred an American soil as any other acre on the continent?

Well: I won’t say that, and I’m not among “the most ardent ‘new heritage’ promoters.” My mother’s line may go back to the Mayflower (let me know if you’re a descendant of Resolved White), but my father’s goes back to Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas, and not all that long ago. Still, it’s a facile Americanism that reduces itself to an intellectual proposition, or worse, paperwork. The “Danish-born captain named Hans Peter Jorgensen” is an example of the problem at hand. Guelzo argues that his grave is hallowed American ground because he volunteered to fight, and died, in the Union cause in the Civil War. But the Dane, a mid-1850s immigrant to the United States, was apparently not an American citizen, and volunteered to fight for ideological purposes.

This doesn’t get much interrogation by the casual reader, but it should, especially in a civil-war context. A foreigner entering into U.S.-government employ for the purpose of waging war upon Americans — by the lights of the political theory adhered to by the Union government itself — is not an intrinsically good or virtuous phenomenon. That isn’t a disparagement of Hans Peter Jorgensen, who was no doubt personally brave and virtuously committed, but it does showcase the hard limits of America-as-idea. If a government in Washington, D.C., facing civil disorder in an American city, chose to recruit law enforcement or soldiery heavily and explicitly from noncitizens in Michigan, or New York, or California, on the grounds that they are conceptually American, actual Americans would respond with revulsion at best — and properly so.

This is what the “heritage American” boomlet is about in its defensible forms, and those forms — including the now-vice president’s — are correct. The late Peter Schramm had a moving personal story about being “born American, but in the wrong place,” and Ronald Reagan in his final presidential address quoted a correspondent writing that “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” But that Americanness is not simply about a love of liberty untethered to any particulars. Schramm was not, in fact, American until he became a citizen and committed himself to the stewardship of the whole deposit of the inheritance in which he flourished. (Those who knew him all affirm that he succeeded in this better than most native-born Americans.) If that’s what being American is, then any foreigner may be comfortably American in their own nation without need to come here. But they do come here.

They come here because of what the Americans built. What we do now is inconceivable without the labors of our fathers, and that chain of inheritance passes back unto the ages. At its root is a particular people and inheritance, anchored in a particular culture and religion. It is capacious and catholic not despite those specifics, but because of them. When we lose that remembrance, and that base — we lose ourselves.