Vice President JD Vance used his September 10 speech at the Republican Party’s midterm convention to deliver a masterclass in the politics of innuendo, name-calling, and division. In Trumpian fashion, he made his address about himself and his grievances, talking at length about his children and insults directed at his grandfather, but also offering a disturbing picture of who does and does not have a right to claim the “birthright” that comes with being an American.
Along the way, he accused Democrats of “hating” America and appealed to a populist tradition that is fueled by “popular rage and resentment.” One got a taste of that early in his speech when the vice president said, “To the radicals who wish to abolish my family or any other, we say: Stay the hell away from my kids. I want my son to… live in a country where you don’t need a Ph.D. in chemistry to understand the ingredient list on your groceries and where doctors answer to parents and the Hippocratic oath, not far-left bureaucrats.”
Former Senator Joe McCarthy, who made a career out of accusing Hollywood elites and government bureaucrats of being un-American, and former Alabama Governor George Wallace, who “attracted white working-class people who reveled in how he defied the norms for public behavior…(and) encouraged an ‘us-against-them’ mentality,” would have been proud of Vance’s performance.
But the throughline of Vance’s remarks was his effort to say who the real birthright citizens are in this country. And lest there be any doubt, the citizens whose birthright he stood up for are not those who recently came here as immigrants.
It was, instead, “every American child.” And as Vance put it, “that birthright… is what this November is all about.”
He is right, or at least that is what he wants it to be about, not corruption, inflation, or the war in Iran. Those, Vance noted, are mere policy differences. As he put it, “Don’t give the country over to a bunch of crazy people because you happen to disagree with us on a policy issue here or there.” Don’t give it over to those who reject our “shared birthright as Americans.”
Vance urged voters to “send a message this November that the country does not belong to the radicals. It does not belong to the bureaucrats. It does not belong to the highest bidder. This country was handed down to us by our parents and their parents before them….We received this national birthright, and we are gonna fight for it…..”
The November election will give voters a chance to reject Vance’s effort to distract them from corruption, inflation, and war by fanning the fires of division and fear. They should take that chance and register not only their desires for new policies, but also their rejection of Vance’s claims about who can properly claim to be “birthright” citizens in this country.
The vice president told the Republican Convention, “We have inherited, we are entitled to inherit something straight from God the Father. I believe that our founders built this nation on a promise that echoes our creator, that every American child is born an heir, is born with a birthright, born with the right to inherit the blessings of the greatest country on earth, not because of who their parents are, not because of what they look like or where they come from, but because they are Americans, and this is our country.”
This ingenious rhetorical appropriation of the phrase “birthright” citizen hinted that, in Vance’s view, the administration’s battle over birthright citizenship, having been lost in the courts, should now be waged in the political arena. It is a battle to save “our country” from immigrant invaders and their left-wing allies, who stake their own claim to birthright citizenship.
Vance suggested that America is ours not because we believe in the “promise” to which he referred but because Americans are God’s real chosen people, occupying our own promised land. As Boston University Professor, Stephen Prothero observes, “…in recent times, this notion of a covenant between God and America has led us to imagine that God is on our side, no matter what we do.”
Listening to Vance on Thursday suggests that the vice president fully subscribes to that view.
But what he said then was not the first time Vance described what does and does not make America “our country.” Last year, in an address to the ultra-conservative Claremont Institute, he argued that “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.”
“If you think about it,” Vance continued, “identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, …is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.”
“Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you.” And “that answer would also reject a lot of people…(some) would label domestic extremists, even though their own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War.”
At Claremont, Vance defined American citizenship as “belonging to a nation that guards the sovereignty of its people, especially from a modern world that’s hellbent on dissolving borders and differences in national character.”
He suggested that “what unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and Big Pharma lobbyists… isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even Karl Marx. It’s hatred. They hate the people in this room, they hate the president of the United States, and most of all, they hate the people who voted for him.”
Vance returned to that theme on Thursday.
Referring to the Democratic Party, he said, “I think that what's new about them is what motivates them is a new type of hardcore hatred…..(They) are the party of hatred.”
“They,” Vance added, “are the party that despises America and the people who built it…. let's never forget that America belongs to those who love it, not those who hate it.”
It is “our country,” not theirs.
Such talk exemplifies a deeply dangerous and destructive tendency in American politics, what Professor Eli Finkel and his colleagues label “political sectarianism—the tendency to adopt a moralized identification with one political group and against another….(T)he foundational metaphor for political sectarianism,” they explain “is religion, which evokes analogies focusing less on genetic relatedness than on strong faith in the moral correctness and superiority of one’s sect…(and to view) opposing partisans as iniquitous.”
That view justifies extreme action, as does seeing politics as about the “birthright” of one group and the threat to that birthright posed by another. It justifies doing everything one can to ensure that that other group, in this case, crazy, America-hating Democrats who threaten the birthright of this country’s children, are not allowed to gain power, even if it means rigging elections or refusing to accept election results.
Perhaps that is what the vice president meant when he made the following ominous promise: “(B)ecause the Democrats have become such a nightmare, we can never, we will never let them win.”
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
