“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman… But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” Those were the words of President Reagan at a Medal of Freedom presentation ceremony in January 1989.
Reagan continued, “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.”
That anyone can become an American, as President Reagan said, is because America, as we have all come to know, was founded on an idea. That idea was inscribed in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is this idea, not any common ethnicity, ancestry, religion, tradition, or history, that the United States was built on.
As we are about to get ready to mark America’s 250th birthday next year, there is a different view about America being an idea, as espoused by Vice President JD Vance.
It was back in July 2024, while accepting his vice president nomination at the Republican Convention, when Vance first voiced his view: “You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea… 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.”
To illustrate that “shared history,” Vance told the audience about a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky near his family’s ancestral home, and about how in that cemetery, there were people born around the time of the Civil War, seven generations of them. He concluded, “Now that’s not just an idea, my friends… that is a homeland.”
I wondered where Vance was going with his emerging theory that America was not just an idea, but also a shared ancestry, cemetery plot, and seven or more generations in this homeland. In July, Vance spoke again of his theory of America, this time accepting a Statesmanship Award at Claremont Institute in California. “America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”
What particular people? Not obviously the Zohran Mamdani kind. Soon into his remarks, Vance attacked Mamdani, the “33-year-old Communist,” or the self-declared Democratic Socialist member of the New York State Assembly.
Vance quoted Mamdani as saying, “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.” There was no gratitude here, Vance pointed out, and asked, “Who the hell do these people think they are?”
Born in Uganda, Mamdani was seven when his Indian family immigrated to the U.S. from South Africa. At the age of 28, Mamdani was elected to the New York State Assembly. Running on affordability issues with a progressive agenda in June, Mamdani defeated Andrew Cuomo to become the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. That is America. That is a success story of America the idea.
To Vance, however, Mamdani, as a first generation American, should show his gratitude to America by shutting up, making a living, not criticizing America, not running for mayor of the largest American city on politics different from Vance’s own. How dare Mamdani talk about America being contradictory or unfinished?
Vance may have forgotten, but the first sentence of the Preamble of the United States Constitution reads, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…” America is an experiment, an unfinished project, a work in progress, always on the way towards a more perfect union. To say America is imperfect is perfectly American.
But more than disliking Mamdani, Vance wanted to redefine what is American, as he didn’t think it should be purely agreement with America’s creedal principles. He said the most pressing thing to build now is the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century, because America is more diverse and also has less in common than ever.
The American citizenship that Vance seemed to suggest would be one with tiers, based on one’s genealogy in America. The earlier your family became American, even better with an ancestral home and a cemetery plot, the more American you are, and more rights you have in criticizing America. Those who can trace their family to the Mayflower would most likely be the top tier.
I can’t help being reminded of what George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, the political satire novel: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
While President Reagan raved about how America renewed and enriched itself with people from all corners of the world, Vance laments about millions of “imported” foreigners and wants America to be a more about a shared past or ancestry. On that, Vance has proved a worthy follower of Yoram Hazony, Israeli political theorist and author of “The Virtue of Nationalism.”
I hope Vice President Vance knew the story of NYPD officer Didarul Islam, a Bangladeshi immigrant, who recently gave his life on the job protecting New Yorkers from a shooter. Vance could also check out a 60 Minutes interview of John Oliver, the British-American comedian. Responding to the host’s comments that Oliver couldn’t really love America if he criticized it, “That’s ridiculous,” Oliver said, “I criticize it because I love it and want it to be better.”
I wonder where Vice President Vance would put these two first-generation Americans, and not to forget his own in-laws, on the spectrum of the tiered American citizenship he is dangerously scheming about.
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Thank you for this piece, Wendy. You said it elegantly. To be American is an idea, a shared belief, how often dented by Vance-like detractors. We all — so many of us — are less than a generation or at most two from that boat trip.
The theories that Vance puts forward rest entirely on a premise that there are unique “American values” that immigrants due to their cultural heritage cannot possess.
I don’t buy that. I think that this is just a smoke-screen. Give me an example.
I’d expect Vance to fall back to the observation that this country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles by European settlers. Now if that is that case the consequence is that the only immigrants that would meet the criteria of having “American values” would be those of similar background. You can see how this becomes totally arbitrary as an undefined criteria which can be interpreted differently as the situation changes.
The problem with this construct is that there is no singular Judeo-Christian value. The Founding Fathers possessed a breadth of religious beliefs ranging from Deists to traditional Christianity. And one can point to time after time in US history where those common “Judeo-Christian” values had no effect on the actions of the government. The Cherokee were driven from lands in Georgia. The Mormons driven from lands in Illinois. Native Americans were slaughtered. The Civil War which was fought over an economy based upon slave labor invalidates this argument of common “Judeo-Christian” values as both North and South used the Bible to justify their side.
Even today, there is no common “Judeo-Christian” value as you see even within denominations a range of political beliefs. Wisconsin Synod Lutherans are to the extreme right and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Lutherans are to the left.
If there was a “Judeo-Christian” value which was the basis for “American values”, one would expect that the Catholic immigrants from Central America and Mexico would be welcomed. But we know that this in not the case.
What I’d like to hear is how Vance justifies the citizenship of his wife Usha, who was born in the US from immigrant parents from Andhra Pradesh India and is a practicing Hindu.
None of this rings true to me. It has all appearances of a page out of the authoritarian playbook to demonize the other to maintain grips on power.
A message from my 10th and 9th generations back ancestors who were on that rickety ship named Mayflower:
Sit down and close your mouth.
This is a message to jd vance (or whatever his birth name was).
In my haste to yell at him in this comment section – I left that out…oops…angry typing leads to mistakes.
This is an elegant statement. The notion that America is a universal idea is fundamental to our system. It should not be seen as conflicting with our ability to live with respect for other traditions, religions, and histories.
The trick in balancing the aspiration of universality and the reality of intra-group differences is in recognizing that both features must be accepted–that cultural differences must be treasured so long as they are not used as limitations on opportunity–including the opportunity to govern. Ironically, our hillbilly Vice President is compelling proof that the balance is working very well.
Many countries around the world are struggling with similar issues, in the press of demographic problems and massive emigration from the 3rd world.
Vance is a jerk who has made it his business to cultivate idiocy, so it’s easy to push back, but it’s a mistake to treat this entirely in terms of xenophobia. Phobias are irrational fears. If any positive value attached to national identity is irrational, there are a lot of irrational people in the world, and when they start to feel that their society is being swamped with fundamentally different outsiders, you have a potent political hot button.
America has a more diverse national identity, for sure, than say Japan, but it’s there, and of course it has a historical basis, as is the case with every nation. it isn’t just a formula, and you can’t expect people not to care about it.