Who’s a true American, and who decides? JD Vance has answers

Whether or not he knew it, JD Vance recently waded right into one of the thorniest questions in political philosophy: Who is a citizen and who is not, and who gets to decide?

Above and beyond that question — which is up for grabs right now in the United States in a way it hasn’t been since the late 19th century — lie other, equally difficult, questions: What is a nation, in general, and what is this one in particular? Is it an idea, a creed, a set of laws and customs and shared assumptions that shift with the tides of history? Is it all the people who live within the boundaries of a given territory, whatever their background? Or is it a community of people united by what they perceive as ancient and enduring ties of language, religion, ancestry and ethnicity?

I’m willing to bet our vice president is well aware of these questions, and possesses some understanding of the unresolved tension between what are known in political theory as the “republican” and “liberal” conceptions of citizenship. (More on those below.) Unlike his boss in the Oval Office, Vance is neither a dimwit nor an ignoramus. He’s a shameless, power-hungry hypocrite, which is almost certainly worse, and he sees himself as the most plausible heir to the MAGA throne, whether or not Donald Trump demolishes the constitutional order badly enough to allow himself to run for a third term in 2028.

If Vance’s speech on July 5 at the Claremont Institute — which used to be an intellectually respectable right-wing think tank and is now a factory for MAGA apologetics — was the opening salvo of his presidential campaign, it was both grandly ambitious and profoundly vague. Most of it was devoted to standard-issue Republican left-bashing, in which Vance depicted the entire spectrum of non-Trump or anti-Trump opinion as deranged and dangerous, not to mention devoted to such imaginary policies as “grown men beating up women in girls’ sports” and “a wide open southern border.”

Strikingly, the specific target of Vance’s Two Minute Hate (although it went on considerably longer than that) was Zohran Mamdani, the New York Democratic mayoral nominee who has singlehandedly transfixed and terrified the establishment cadres of both major political parties and the national media. Seriously, whether or not Mamdani wins the general election or can effectively govern a famously disputatious and dysfunctional city, he has already provided an enormous service to democracy by opening a rift in perceived political reality, and manifesting a vision of the future that the guardians of the past unanimously despise.

Most progressive commentary on Vance’s Claremont speech has focused, understandably enough, on what sounded an awful lot like a blood-and-soil notion of American citizenship, dropped almost in passing. That’s not entirely wrong, but it might be a little too easy. Vance did indeed suggest, in an especially baffling passage, that “a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists” but whose ancestors had fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War “have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”

It’s impossible not to read that as a shout-out to white supremacists, “sovereign citizens,” Three Percenters and other permanently disgruntled members of the Jan. 6 coalition who don’t want “a purely creedal nation” defined by the Declaration of Independence but also “don’t agree with progressive liberalism in 2025.” Those being the only options, I guess? The lack of precision, like the tangled syntax, seems deliberate.

But Vance did not actually say that only white people with many generations of North American ancestry should be citizens, and I’m confident he would claim that wasn’t what he meant. Furthermore, his attack on Mamdani as a product of “elite disaffection and elite anger” whose core constituency is “high-income and college-educated New Yorkers” serves as both context and prologue to Vance’s deliberately ambiguous remarks on the meaning of American-ness.

As Vance sees it, if the MAGA coalition is to endure beyond the useful life of its nearly-octogenarian godhead, it has to be sliced in two nearly-incompatible directions, with a hint of race war and a somewhat larger dose of class war. His cherry-picked lecture on Mamdani — who definitely did not win New York City’s most affluent neighborhoods, for the record — was meant to contrast “the broad, working- and middle-class coalition” that supposedly elected Trump with the perverse assemblage of “Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites and Big Pharma lobbyists” who collectively comprise the “radicals of the far left.”

(Yeah, I was surprised by the presence of those lobbyists among the identitarian left, and I bet they were too. Vance and other right-wing hysterics claim to believe that pharmaceutical companies are pushing a pro-trans agenda in order to reap vast fortunes off hormone therapies and other medications related to gender transition.)

Notice that other than “Islamists” — an ominous but nearly meaningless term in the American context, which may or may not be synonymous with Muslims in general — the rest of the supposed radical left is coded as self-hating, virtue-signaling and/or hypocritical white people. This, I think, is crucial: Vance is telling himself, and may actually believe, that this Halloween coalition of precious, privileged, America-haters are the people unworthy of citizenship in the America being made Great Again. Like his boss, he is among the least racist people you’ll ever meet, and only the pronoun-obsessed monks of wokeness, with their “increasingly bizarre ethnic and religious appeals,” would claim otherwise.

It’s quite a stretch to describe a candidate as relentlessly upbeat as Mamdani, who has virtually never been photographed without a smile on his face, as the de facto leader of a hate movement that wants to lower living standards, destroy the “gender binary that has structured social relations between the sexes for the whole of Western civilization” and sow “anarchy in middle-class white neighborhoods.” Except, wait — what did he just say? All that imaginary hate is just standard-issue MAGA projection and displacement, but at this point in Vance’s speech we finally hear the nickel fall into the slot.

Vance’s musings about “the crisis of Western liberalism” — yes, he uses that phrase, though it’s just a drive-by reference — and the paradoxical nature of American citizenship pretty much flow from his grotesque portrait of the Zohran-centric left. “[S]omething about the liberal project,” he intones, “is broken,” and while he never quite tells us what that something is, it seems to boil down to too much immigration, not enough mandatory patriotism and too many ungrateful and overprivileged (yet somehow downwardly mobile) radical brats who want to kill their parents and destroy capitalism.

I’m sure it’s a point of pride for the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” that he has not been to Williamsburg or Bushwick or Dumbo or the other Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods that went heavily for Mamdani. Here’s the spoiler alert: They are full of middle-class white people (along with people of other colors), entrepreneurial capitalism is thriving and anarchy is in effect only as a logo on T-shirts and skateboards.

Anyway, maybe that random assortment of people Vance castigates as irredeemable America-haters shouldn’t be citizens at all, or should be lower-status citizens than the Lee Greenwood fans, or something? Again, he doesn’t say. We already know that the Trump administration wants to end birthright citizenship, despite 150 years of constitutional practice and the seemingly plain language of the 14th Amendment.

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Vance never directly mentions that issue, but he’s clearly not a fan of the liberal model of citizenship as an ever-expanding umbrella of legal rights, privileges and responsibilities. MAGA doctrine holds that has gone much too far, of course, and must be dialed back. On the other hand, Vance knows better than to openly call for a return to the “republican” model advocated by Aristotle, Machiavelli and Rousseau, where citizenship belongs only to a select group of wise, enlightened and reasonable men — to an elite, in other words — who actively participate in deliberation, decision-making and self-government.

That is pretty close to the outcome Vance imagines for America, although he wouldn’t put it in precisely those terms. We’re done with liberal democracy; that much is clear. What we need instead, perhaps, is a carefully managed, two-tier democracy, in which responsible, patriotic and endlessly grateful citizens, who are trained to blubber on cue for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, can be trusted to vote for leaders who, ahem, reflect their values — and can then be trusted to ignore everything those leaders actually do at the behest of their oligarch overlords.

What becomes of those among us, in JD Vance’s deep-MAGA future, who decline to enlist in this newly constructed robot caste of illiberal but not-quite-republican citizenship? I’m guessing that JD feels kind of bad about that question, and isn’t quite sure. But people around him definitely have ideas.

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