Does America Go Blood-and-Soil?

JD Vance's speech and the colossal philosophical shift in US politics

Not too long ago, the post-war ideological lines in US political discourse were firmly in place. At the root of it all: the liberal idea of individual rights and freedom, based on a holy document, the constitution, as the identity-crystallizing reference point. On that foundation, conservatives and progressives have, over time, built different ideological structures.

The progressives expanded the definition of individual rights so that, economically, they extend to things such as a right to health care, housing, social security, and so on; socially, that they extend to behavior, kinks and sexualities formerly universally condemned as perverted and immoral—to the point that individual freedom means that anything goes. In the wake of human-rights-liberalism, furthermore, they have universalized the idea of individual rights so that it applies to non-citizens and outsiders as well.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have become focussed on “economic freedom” ever since later liberal thinkers emphasized the nexus between the economy and individual freedom: any economic meddling by the state, so the thesis goes, automatically puts us on the road to serfdom. In other words, individual rights are looked at through the free market lens. Socially, conservatives have taken individual rights to mean, first and foremost, the right to be left alone: let us have our conservative communities, and you can have your progressive nonsense, as long as you don’t bother us with it.

Now, for all their differences, both the progressive and the conservative structure share a certain universalism that is conducive to globalism: under universal individual rights, there is little reason to resist vast flows of migrants, including illegal migrants, that then inevitably provide cheap labor. And under the free market dogma, borders are wide open economically, leading to a globalized “market place” that has little to do with the picturesque market metaphor. Meanwhile, defining conservatism not as a set of positive visions but rather as an abstract “right to be left alone” is a recipe for those who do have a vision, such as the progressives with their universal human-rights-to-everything regime, to take over.

As we can clearly see today, the contradictions and problems in this theoretical framework are heavy indeed: to the degree it has been successful in holding society together, it only worked because of various (often unconscious) assumptions outside the constitution and individual rights-discourse. The postwar consensus worked, in other words, because people thought and lived in a similar-enough way as to not cause too much friction. They shared certain basic ideas and common-sense views. The economy was doing great. Which is why nobody noticed the problems with the American narrative, the liberal myth. This is not even a critique of liberalism: every society runs on a myth—a myth that always contains issues and contradictions that will play themselves out eventually.

At first, people will try to patch them up, using ever-more convoluted discourse to bridge the gaps. And so you’ll find free market guys arguing that globalization actually isn’t a real free market, or that we should live in conservative homogenous “business units” competing with each other free-market style, or that the free market means you don’t have to serve gay customers, and so on. You’ll find people arguing that constitutional rights are tied to citizenship and therefore aren’t universal, and so we need to focus on conditions for citizenship (meritocracy, immigration tests etc.), or that while we need cheap housing, this can be done non-socialistically by, well, somehow. But before too long, thinking all of this through to the end, you will reach the limits of the current narrative framework, you’ll uncover the contradictions, and you will be forced to toy around with ideas that, if taken seriously, would destroy the current consensus.

And so, here we are again, at the inevitable end of the current dialectical cycle. It just happened.

JD Vance breaks with the liberal tradition

During the Republican National Convention, the old narrative just might have died together with the old GOP.

JD Vance’s speech started rather weak. He just reiterated a few standard talking points that Don Jr. had already made better and more eloquently. Curiously, Vance saw the need to emphasize that he’s married to an immigrant, that everybody is welcome “whatever the color of their skin,” and so on. Not exactly what you would expect from an author and intellectual familiar with dissident right ideas. But we soon found out why.

You see, for this particular audience, he had to sandwich his narrative-busting ideas with enough elements of the liberal myth to make them more digestible. Because towards the end, he transformed from the somewhat insecure cheap edition of Trump Jr. to a captivating speaker whose whole body language changed: you could tell he now spoke about things he truly cares about. Here are some key excerpts, with my short analysis:

We will put the citizens of America first, whatever the color of their skin, we will in short make America great again. 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.

In other words, to hell with those who worship the constitution as a universalist philosophical declaration of the right of man. We are a nation, a people, a Volk, with shared ancestry, shared mores, shared traditions and shared ties. Only if we acknowledge this do we have a future as a people.

Now, that cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky is near my family’s ancestral home, and like a lot of people, we came from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
… Now, it’s one of the 10 poorest counties in the entire United States of America. They’re very hardworking people and they’re very good people. They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat. And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them, but they love this country not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home and it will be their children’s home and they would die fighting to protect it. That is the source of America’s greatness. As a United States senator, I get to represent millions of people in the great state of Ohio with similar stories, and it is the great honor of my life. Now, in that cemetery, there are people who are 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 principles. 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.

Although he phrases it very carefully, in a blatant act of heresy Vance establishes here a sort of blood-and-soil take on the nation: yes, we welcome newcomers to an extent, and look I’m even married to one, but the thing that those newcomers marry into, or attach themselves to, is based on a land and a people, a home, a Heimat as the Germans say. For Europeans, a definition of the nation in terms of land and ancestry has been completely uncontroversial for a very long time (until the US melting pot idea, together with the neoliberal package, started taking root here, too), but for America, this represents a fundamental breaking point in the narrative.

Anything resembling a blood and soil definition of the nation used to be beyond the pale; it was all about the American project as an idea, where everyone is free, where everyone is welcome who subscribes to the idea. With the implication that there is no difference between people: between a “native” and a “newcomer,” between a “host” and a “guest,” between a European immigrant and an Arab immigrant—as long as everybody subscribes to the “idea.”

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One might argue that this “idea” concept is a great ideal, a great vision for a society, but it is increasingly difficult to argue that it doesn’t ignore a huge chunk of reality, of lived experience. It might have been easier to uphold at a time when, again, people had much more in common, and society was much more homogenous along various dimensions. But once the two structures built on the foundation of individual rights-liberalism diverge too much, and society needs to accommodate too many diverse groups, the abstract and simplistic nature of the concept will become more and more apparent.

JD Vance is perhaps the first high-profile politician, soon to have not only executive power but the ear of the next president and his entourage, who verbalizes what has been simmering under the surface, in obscure substacks and online chats: the post-liberal reality. The break with the old myth and the need for a new one. The reevaluation of the Enlightenment narrative, of the liberal historiography, of the story about our roots in modernity.

Interestingly, Vance has also said this, further testing the established discourse boundaries on the Republican right:

And our movement is about single moms like mine who struggled with money and addiction, but never gave up. …

And our movement, ladies and gentlemen, it’s about grandparents all across this country, who are living on social security and raising grandchildren they didn’t expect to raise.

Vance here leaves the terrain of simplistic conservatism that likes to scold what it takes to be the morally inferior instead of trying to find solutions. To such a conservatism, single moms brought it upon themselves because of their loose morals, or the dads are to blame for leaving the girl they impregnated, the remedy to which can only be a moral lecture. And of course, you shouldn’t hand free money to anyone, including impoverished grandparents, cause road to serfdom and all that.

Holier-than-thou conservatism doesn’t appeal to most voters. They want intelligent, wise solutions to problems that actually help people and society. While the combination of “nationalism” and “socialism” will forever be tainted by Hitler’s shenanigans, the truth is that it is widely popular: not in the sense of Nazi ideology, but in the sense of putting the interests of people, as individuals and as a people, first, and letting policies flow from there instead of from nerdy ideologies.

As I have argued before, neither a return to the pre-liberal world nor a resurrection of classical liberalism will do, for the simple reason that this is not possible; it’s not how history works. It might take a while until a new myth emerges that can hold society together, if, that is, the forces desperately clinging to the neoliberal/neoconservative status quo won’t blow up the economy or whatever out of sheer spite and desperation. Indeed, a lot more than political theory is up in the air: we are at a metaphysical nexus, dealing with a seismic shift, a cosmic wave approaching from the distance of which we are merely seeing the initial signs.

As the Chinese curse goes: may we live in interesting times.

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