When pro-Hamas rioters on Wednesday ripped down and burned the American flag outside Union Station in Washington, D.C., and defaced nearby monuments with antisemitic, Islamic terrorist graffiti, they unintentionally made a case for what Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance said at the RNC last week: that America isn’t just an idea, but a place and a people with a shared history and a common future.
Vance ruffled some feathers when he said that, provoking instant outrage and, predictably, vague accusations of racism. Even Vance’s simple desire to be buried in his family cemetery in Kentucky — a commonplace of human existence across millennia — was greeted with sneers from the corporate press about how it was an “Easter egg of white nationalism,” as one MSNBC pundit said.
But what he said wasn’t racist, it was simply common sense — or at least it once was. We’ve become accustomed to thinking and speaking about America as if it’s merely an idea, nothing more than an abstract proposition divorced from a particular people’s history and culture. One might charitably call this the Ellis Islander view of America, that anyone from anywhere in the world can come here and become an American because we aren’t defined by ethnicity or tribe or ancestry, but by creed. If you accept the creed, you can become an American.
In a narrow sense, this is at least partly true. We are a propositional nation, but as I noted at the NatCon conference earlier this month, most people who invoke that idea
