J.D. Vance's Anti-Declaration

Truths Self-Evident No More

There’s a lot going on in the world, arguably much of it of more material consequence, so readers will be forgiven if they missed J.D. Vance’s speech on July 5th at the Claremont Institute, where he accepted their “Statesmanship Award.” But I think it’s remarkable and worth paying attention because it demonstrates the core of this regime’s project. It’s not notable for being new, but for being old. Vance has articulated this kind of blood and soil nationalism before, and so have his ideological progenitors on the far right. What he’s doing is trying to go back to the foundation of the country and redefine it. He’s trying to abandon the Declaration of Independence, which might be one way to quick way to understand this entire administration, from its would-be monarchism to its assaults on republican liberty and equality. As Josh Kovensky writes in Talking Points Memo:

What Vance expressed to the friendly Claremont audience was a dramatically reduced vision of American citizenship. It’s one in which having ancestors who have lived here for generations entitles you to more; a vision of citizenship that’s long existed around the world, with a notable and aspirational exception in the United States.

“Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence — that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,” Vance said.

He explained that such a definition “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree” with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, dubbing it “the logic of America as a purely creedal nation.”

By the opposite token, Vance said, conceiving of American citizenship “purely as an idea” would “reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,” he said, referencing the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that was founded to combat antisemitism and that, among other activities, tracks far-right groups.

First of all, the reference to the ADL is pretty weird. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they are not exactly progressive these days. He could’ve said the “SPLC,” but didn’t. What they are is Jewish. Basically, this sounds like, “What these Jews call “extremists” I think are realer citizens.” Who is on those lists? Well, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and Klansmen. So, to recap, the problem with the creedal understanding of American citizenship for Vance is that it includes the brown hordes and rejects the white supremacists.

An irony that a casual observer might miss is that this took place at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank founded by the students of Harry V. Jaffa. He would be rolling in his grave: Jafffa was the American right’s most powerful defender of Abraham Lincoln’s interpretation of Jefferson’s Declaration. In particular, Jaffa’s central contention is that “all men are created equal” actually means what it says. His most famous work, Crisis Of The House Divided: An Interpretation Of The Issues In The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, promulgates a thesis that is precisely the opposite of Vance’s. I’d refer Vance and his acolytes to a speech given by Lincoln in Chicago on July 10, 1858, shortly before the Lincoln-Douglas debates began:

We have besides these men---descended by blood from our ancestors---among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe---German, Irish, French and Scandinavian---men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,'' and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, (loud and long continued applause) and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world. [Applause.]

It is this “electric cord” that Vance wants to sever or bury, or say never really existed.

Another irony: Vance points to the graves of Civil War soldiers while his speech spits on them. While invoking the Union dead, his discourse is an exact repudiation of Lincoln at Gettysburg, the greatest consecration of the war dead in our history. As for the Confederates, here is what Jaffa thought of them: “The fact is…that the armies of the Confederacy served the cause of slavery quite as much as the armies of the Third Reich served the cause of Adolf Hitler.”

Neither Vance nor his regime believe one whit in Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” either in the words or deeds. As they try to tear up the 14th Amendment, they are attacking exactly what the men in the Civil War died for. They are desecrating their graves and destroying our nation.