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

Whether or not he knew it JD Vance of late 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 th century lie other equally demanding 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 public 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 particular 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 bulk 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 If Vance s speech on July 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 The majority 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 confines Related Zohran and democracy Three days that shook the world 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 balloting or can effectively govern a famously disputatious and dysfunctional city he has already provided an enormous arrangement 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 The majority 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 coalition who don t want a purely creedal nation defined by the Declaration of Independence but also don t agree with progressive liberalism in Those being the only options I guess The lack of precision like the tangled syntax seems deliberate As Vance sees it if the MAGA coalition is to endure beyond the useful life of its founder and godhead it has to be sliced in two directions with a hint of race war and a somewhat larger dose of class war But Vance did not definitely say that only white people with several 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 bulk 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 authentically 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 We need your help to stay independent Subscribe this day to advocacy Andrew O Hehir s column 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 completely hear the nickel fall into the slot Vance s musings about the dilemma 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 several ungrateful and overprivileged yet somehow downwardly mobile radical brats who want to kill their parents and destroy capitalism Something about the liberal project Vance intones is broken He never quite tells us what that is but it boils down to too much immigration not enough mandatory patriotism and too various ungrateful and overprivileged yet somehow downwardly mobile radical brats 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 years of constitutional practice and the seemingly plain language of the th Amendment Want more sharp takes on politics Sign up for our free newsletter Standing Room Only by Amanda Marcotte also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts 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 class 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 precisely 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 in fact 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 Read more from Andrew O Hehir Alligator Alcatraz American history from the dark side Is London burning Britain s sudden political meltdown and ours Is centrism making a comeback OK sort of but blink and you ll miss it The post Who s a true American and who decides JD Vance has answers appeared first on Salon com