A Quote of Note from J. D. Vance's RNC Speech

Here is the part of Vance's speech Thursday night that impressed me the most.  It also impressed Cathy Young at The Bulwark, but for opposite reasons. It sounds Blut-und-Boden to her: "I think it’s fair to say that this portion of Vance’s speech had overtones of blood-and-soil nationalism." Fair? Or scurrilous?

You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. 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.

Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. [I would add: ONLY on our terms.] That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.

Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principle[s]. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home. And if this movement of ours is going to succeed, and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first. (Emphasis added.)

Perhaps I will explain myself tomorrow if  Typepad behaves itself.

........................

OK. It is now 'tomorrow.' (Memo to self: write a post on the use and abuse of temporal indexicals.)

There is a distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism. The former is rooted in blood and soil, language and tradition, the particular. The latter is based on ideas and propositions that purport to be of universal validity.  American nationalism is not wholly civic.  Indeed, it is hard to imagine any nation that could be wholly civic, wholly 'propositional' or wholly based on a set of beliefs and values.  And yet the United States is a proposition nation: the propositions are in the founding documents. This cannot  be reasonably denied. You should now pull out your copy of the Declaration of Independence and carefully re-read its second paragraph. There are plenty of propositions, presuppositions, principles and values there for you to feast your mind on. 

I also don't see how it could be reasonably denied that the discovery and articulation and preservation of classically American principles and values was achieved by people belonging to a certain tradition grounded proximally in our founding documents and ultimately in our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman heritage. 

This has consequences for immigration policy. I take it to be axiomatic that immigration must be to the benefit of the host country, a benefit not to be  defined in merely economic terms. I also take it to be axiomatic that there is no right to immigrate any more than anyone has a right to invade one's domicile and set up camp there. This is why immigrants must be vetted and why the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants must be upheld, along with the related distinction between citizens and non-citizens.  Only those who accept our principles, values, and the like should be let in. 

Although we are, collectively, in steep cultural decline, normative American culture is superior to plenty of other cultures I could mention. If you don't believe that, you are free to leave. Just as there is no right to immigrate, there is no obligation to stay. So there is a sense in which I am for open borders: they ought be be open in the outbound direction.  This is why it is perfectly asinine to liken a southern border wall to the Berlin Wall as more than one prominent Democrat has done. It is entirely fitting that the totemic animal for this once-respectable party  is the jackass. 'Asinine' from L. asinus = ass.  The word is polyvalent, a fact I will exploit in a moment.

We have a culture to restore and defend. There is only one man who is in a position to lead us forward. You know who he is.  So get off your sorry ass and join the fight.  

As for Cathy Young, she is doing what hate-America leftist scum regularly do: she is playing the Nazi card, a card they never leave home without.

Comments

[john doran]

He knows not whereof he speaks.

His country was founded for white European stock, until Hart-Celler, in '65.

And while his family may be able to boast seven generations on American soil, his wife is Indian.

He's just gaslighting the Trumpers (people he used to despise).

[Joe Odegaard]

Nothing wrong at all with what Vance said.

Turn the sound up on this video and salute.
(Hymn to the fallen by John Williams).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omd9_FJnerY

What will you do with your Freedom?

[Dmitri]

Looking to reduce every contemporary political speech to nazi/communist speeches and ideas or trying to find, by force of imagination, shibboleths of this or that odious concept is a favourite past time of journalists and commentators who are looking to create click baiting content and have very little else to say. So Ms Young did it for Vance and Masha Gessen, heavily citing Arendt -- as if these cool sounding words provide an empirical evidence for her trivial anti-Trump scribbles -- did a similar thing reporting from the Republican convention for the NYT. Boring and useless stuff IMHO. Boring but not crazy as the ridiculous suggestions on the fringe left that Trump staged his assassination attempt.

[Ben]

I say scurrilous. A quick search on Blud-und-Boden shows it refers to Nazi ideas of racial Aryan purity and lebensraum, involving genocidal conquest. Now, I know there's been controversy with the Republican party platform, but I don't think it's because Trump and Vance are running on the the idea of invading Mexico or Canada and liquidating the local populations to make way for pure Americans of "white" stock to subdue the now empty land in order to achieve our great national destiny. It seems like another tired, historically-illiterate dogwhistle to denounce Trump and MAGA via argumentum ad hitlerum.

In the quoted passage above, Vance strikes me almost as waxing Burkean: That a nation is a "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." If anything, his hope for his wife of Indian-descent, and for their mixed-race children, to be laid to rest at his old family cemetery plot is not so she can be legitimated as a true American, as Young seems to argue, but indicative that she is already one, deserving all honors and rites of being a Vance, a family that has roots going back several generations in America. It shows that blood doesn't matter in this country because someone from a different race or culture can assimilate, intermarry, and be grafted into the line of an American family with roots that are deeply anchored all the way back to the Civil War. Instead of being an ugly description of race-obsessed "blood-and-soil" politics - thus discrediting MAGA nationalism -- it's a moving testament to the national superpower of taking disparate individuals from varied backgrounds, languages, cultures, religions, races, etc., and in a relatively brief time, cohering them into a singular people, a nation. In short: the Melting Pot -- e pluribus unum.

[Vito B. Caiati]

Bill,

Scurrilous.

Since when does a traditional love of place and family and a sense of the spiritual bonds that link the living and the dead have anything to do with the Nazi notion of “blood and soil’? Go to any one of countless French, Italian, or English village cemeteries, for instance, and you will find familial burial plots and vaults that hold the remains of the deceased for two or more centuries. In the rural Dordogne, where I lived for sixteen years, I have walked through many of these little burial grounds, and the graves, even quite ancient ones, within them are often lovingly cared for and often festooned with flowers, especially on All Soul’s Day, when chrysanthemums are sold everywhere, as they are throughout France and, indeed, Italy. It was once the case, as it still is in parts of rural Europe, that families here too lived in one house or in one town for generations (recall the brilliant holiday homecoming scene in The Great Gatsby), so attachments to place were once and for the lucky few are yet very strong. Also, J.D. Vance, who is very intelligent and well-read, is a Catholic by conversion (2019), a man knows the doctrines of purgatory and the resurrection of the dead, the first of which leads us to remember our dead during each Sunday’s Mass and in our daily prayers and the second of which leads us to be attentive to the burial of the body, which we hope will rise one day. And what better rising that alongside of those whom we loved while still alive or to whom we descended?

As always, l’ignoranza è la madre dell’ignominia

Vito

[Vito B. Caiati]

Ben and Dimitri,

I loved your comments.

Vito

[Hector]

Gentlemen,

I am not American; indeed, I have never even visited America, so please correct me if I am wrong, but reading the excerpt above from Vance’s speech, I can see nothing that would have been considered exceptional, let alone offensive, if it had appeared in a speech by any mainstream American politician up to the presidency of perhaps George H. W. Bush. Indeed, it would seem positively banal coming from a previous era. But somehow it’s being equated with Nazism. If there are concerning things about Vance’s character or ideas this is hardly strong evidence for the prosecution (and I do not know enough about him yet to comment on that beyond my disagreement with his views on the Ukraine War, if they’ve been accurately reported).

My wife and I have a running joke derived from a second-hand copy of The Great Gatsby which she once found whose sole marginal annotation was ‘EVIDENCE OF NAZISM?’. You will of course see the absurdity of the annotation. This seems a good moment to invoke it.

[Hector]

Vito,

Nearly all my mother’s family on her mother’s side as well as many on her father’s side are buried in the windswept churchyard of a small village on the Yorkshire side of the Pennines. The church is on a site which has been a place of worship since the 12th century. It is quite possible my family had lived there since that time or even before, and they have very typical Anglo-Saxon surnames. The house my family lived in for generations is still there, as is the ground where the smithy stood which was their workplace. My mother grew up near by. I wish that I had grown up there too, rather than experiencing the relatively minor deracination of growing up in Manchester, a place with no family connections which my parents had moved to for work.

Some of the people buried in that graveyard suffered directly from the Nazis - the Luftwaffe destroyed my family’s shop in Sheffield and my grandmother used to tell me stories about hiding under the kitchen table as the bombs fell. They knew they were lucky to not suffer more, especially as few of the men saw active combat because they worked in the steel factories. Those that did fought bravely including a cousin of my grandmother who won the Military Cross. I think they’d be very surprised to hear that their attachment to the land was evidence of the very barbarism they were fighting against, rather than the very thing they were fighting to protect. My mother can still tell stories of my great-grandfather’s philosemitism and hostility to racist attitudes.

It is a very powerful spiritual experience to feel a connection to a place such as I’ve described and surely most people aspire to a home so permanent. I am lucky to know it. I hope to be buried there too.

[Vito B. Caiati]

Hector,

Thanks so much for your comment. The story of your family and one burial ground in Yorkshire, beautifully told by you, perfectly illustrates the crux of my argument on family and place. You are lucky to know of this place and have it relatively close at hand. In the case of my own family, this link was broken because of the great southern Italian diaspora of the late 19th and early 20th century, so while my parents, who were first generation Americans, and then all of us of the next generation, heard stories of those left behind in Palermo and Bitonto (Puglia), our communication with the living and our physical link with the dead were severed. You are very fortunate to have it as part of your heritage.

Vito

[BV]

John Doran,

You are just thoughtlessly going to the other extreme. But what can we expect from a Holocaust denier? No more comments from you.

Dmitri,

Do you have link to Masha Gessen's coverage of the RNC that does not require me to sign up at NYT?

[Dmitri]

Hi Bill

This link to Gessen's article is supposed to get you beyond paywall:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/opinion/biden-trump-campaign-reality.html?smid=url-share

[BV]

Thanks, Dmitri. But of course I already had found that link. They want an e-mail address, but I am loathe to give them that. As you may have noticed, many NYT articles are mirrored on a free, instantly accessible site, although its name escapes me at the moment.

[Jan]

One such site is archive.org:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240723003524/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/opinion/biden-trump-campaign-reality.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/opinion/biden-trump-campaign-reality.html">https://web.archive.org/web/20240723003524/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/opinion/biden-trump-campaign-reality.html

“A second Trump administration seems likely to bring what the Hungarian sociologist Balint Magyar has termed an “autocratic breakthrough” — structural political change that is impossible to reverse by electoral means.”

Now, for a political system that has long achieved an oligarchic breakthrough as defined here, an autocratic (i.e. personal) challenge is by definition the only threat. Hence, the fear of the Orange Man and his natural charisma.

With the senile pretend-leader isolated in his dacha by the party elements and resigning without showing his face, by a letter he most certainly did not write himself, and on social media for which he probably doesn’t even have passwords — nothing new under the sun.

[BV]

Thanks, Jan, but that link is no good. It sends us to the WayBack Machine.

And who are you quoting? Gessen? It seems so from this 2020 article by Gessen in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/by-declaring-victory-donald-trump-is-attempting-an-autocratic-breakthrough

From the New Yorker article:

>>These changes usually include packing the constitutional court (the Supreme Court, in the case of the U.S.) with judges loyal to the autocrat; packing and weakening the courts in general; appointing a chief prosecutor (the Attorney General) who is loyal to the autocrat and will enforce the law selectively on his behalf; changing the rules on the appointment of civil servants; weakening local governments; unilaterally changing electoral rules (to accommodate gerrymandering, for instance); and changing the Constitution to expand the powers of the executive.<<

A beautiful description of what the DEMOCRATS want to do, are doing, and have done!

Jan comments: >>Now, for a political system that has long achieved an oligarchic breakthrough as defined here, an autocratic (i.e. personal) challenge is by definition the only threat. Hence, the fear of the Orange Man and his natural charisma.<<

I take your point to be that the Biden admin achieved oligarchic/autocratic breakthrough, and that the only way to combat it is autocratically, by an 'Orange' autocratic reversal, and not by a return or restoration of our constitutionally-based democratic republic.

Is that what you are saying?

Thanks for the comment.

[Jan]

It was a link to the wayback machine indeed, it pierces the NYT paywall. Posting the comment somehow broke its formatting, it was being displayed properly in the preview mode.

The quote was from the recent Gessen's article that Dmitri linked to. I meant that the power that constitutionally belongs to the office of the President has been steadily leaking away to an external oligarchic ("rule of the few") structure. This has been happening far longer than the Biden admin, that’s just when it’s reached cabaret levels — the ‘commander-in-chief’ unable to form a coherent sentence without a teleprompter.

To restore the full presidential control of the executive branch would I believe require temporary autocratic power, a state of exception. The courts would try to stop it, and then Trump, or anyone in this position, can only address the demos asking directly for support.