Why JD Vance and the MAGA GOP Do Not Represent the True Idea of America & Our Core Values

The work of our day is to restore the idea of America — an egalitarian democratic republic — and then help it realize its full potential after all these many long years…

The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.

What is the “idea” of America? The core of the American identity?

Trump, Vance, and the GOP say they’re all about patriotism; in fact, they’re promoting a white Christian identity form of nationalism, which is an entirely different thing.

A dark, dangerous, and deadly thing. Incompatible with our Founders’ idea of America.

French President Emmanuel Macron got it right when he recently said, “patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism.” He added:

“[N]ationalism is a betrayal; by pursuing our own interests first with no regard to others, we erase the very thing that a nation holds most precious, that which gives it life and makes it great: it’s moral values.”

The French, having experienced the horrors created by Hitler shifting Germany from patriotism to nationalism in the 1930s, understand this difference well. The late French President Charles de Gaulle put it clearly:

“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”

President Abraham Lincoln, who steered America to victory against the white Christian nationalist Confederate movement, made clear his embrace of patriotism — loyalty to the idea of America — and his rejection of white Christian nationalism in his Gettysburg Address:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. …

“It is rather for us to … highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Vance aimed his fire straight at Lincoln when he proclaimed, at the Republican National Convention, his explicit rejection of our Founders’ and Lincoln’s ideals with his embrace of white Christian nationalism:

“You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. …  But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. …

“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.”

That’s one of the clearest expositions of nationalism you’ll find. It rejects the concept that has made America unique for over 240 years, which is that we’re literally the only country on Earth founded on an idea instead of DNA, culture, race, or geography.

The idea of rule of, by, and for We the People. The idea that the rule of law applies to all, from the highest the lowest. The idea that free expressions of opinion and an independent press must be protected at all costs.

JD Vance presented, in his acceptance speech, the opposite of the idea of America. It was naked nationalism.

— Patriotism expresses love and devotion to one’s country as a whole, including all of its people. Nationalism, on the other hand, focuses on devotion to a specific ethnic, cultural, or “national” group within a country.

— Patriotism refers to “our country”; nationalism refers to “our homeland.”

— Patriotism requires both tolerance and appreciation of other countries and cultures. Nationalism instead preaches superiority over other nations or groups.

— Patriots can accept criticism of their country and seek improvements. Nationalists reject criticism and believe their nation is beyond reproach: “My leader, right or wrong.”

When Rudolf Hess introduced Adolf Hitler at the 1937 Nuremberg Rally, he switched from the traditional, patriotic Vaterland (“Fatherland”) to the nationalistic, using the German word Heimat, which translates loosely into Homeland:

“Thanks to your leadership, Germany will become a Homeland, being the Homeland to all Germans throughout the world!”

“Homeland,” after all, invokes blood and soil. It’s where your ancestors lived and died. Where your family came from. It’s the place that holds the core of your racial, religious, and national identity. It makes sense when the Zionist movement uses the term to describe Israel, for example, as they have for over a century; it makes no sense when Americans use it to describe our pluralistic, multi-racial, multi-religious, secularly- and democratically-governed nation.

I lived in Germany back in the 1980s and knew quite well several actual Nazis and ex-Nazis, so when George W. Bush started using that word “homeland” it sent chills down my spine. In my entire lifetime, prior to 2001, I’d never heard an American politician refer to our country as a “homeland”; only Native Americans should have the right to use the word.

Look back at old speeches and old newscasts. Before George Bush started using the word, it never appeared on radio, television, or in print, in any major venue. It was altogether new to America, outside of its use by the Nazi “America First” movement in the 1930s.

Bush’s speechwriter cracked the door to such nationalist rhetoric in an attempt to build a patriotic fervor around him just months after his popularity had been crashing because the Supreme Court had handed him the election; the meme has now metastasized so badly that his party is fully embracing toxic white Christian nationalism.

The people who founded this nation and wrote our founding documents, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, were of a different mind than Trump and Vance; they were very much children of the Enlightenment.

They believed that ideas could transform societies and sought to create a nation based on a concept, an idea, that had largely lain fallow in the “civilized world” for around 3,000 years: democracy.

For a democracy to work, every adult citizen in a nation must have an equal franchise, equal access to the ballot, and an equal ability to compete in the workplace and marketplace. Everybody’s worth and history must be acknowledged.

That goal, first stated in 1776, has never been fully realized in this country, but every generation sees a significant and positive step toward it. And so will this generation.

That, though, is not the America that Trump, Vance, and the white Christian nationalist MAGA GOP envision.

They want African Americans’ history and the stories of queer people erased from school textbooks. They regularly pass laws to make it harder and harder for retired people (whose drivers’ licenses have expired), students, and low-income people to vote. They complain about efforts to give support to groups that have been politically and economically marginalized and discriminated against, using DEI and similar terms as slurs.

They ridiculed President Biden when he recently said:

“America is an idea — an idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant.  It’s the most powerful idea in the history of the world. That idea is that we hold these truths to be self-evident;  we’re all created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.”

Instead, as JD Vance told us during his acceptance speech at the RNC, Republicans believe America is its people. Specifically, its white people. Like his seven generations of white Appalachian relatives.

According to MAGA ideology, America was created by and exclusively for white Christian men (along with the women and children those men own). Everybody else came from a “shithole country” and should, as Donald Trump told several African American and Hispanic members of the Democratic Party in 2019, “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came….”

To accomplish their remaking of America from a patriotic nation into a “homeland” of fear and hate, Republicans are taking several steps:

— First, they want to break our ideals- and professional/credentialed-based bureaucratic governmental system and replace it with a spoils system like Andrew Jackson instituted in the 1830s and was replaced in 1883 with the Pendleton Civil Service System. They plan to do this through Trump’s and Project 2025’s “Schedule F,” firing the top levels of the civil service and replacing them with party hacks. Loyalty to country is replaced with loyalty to the leader and his party.

— Next, they’re working to fully legalize political bribery, a step that five Republicans on the Supreme Court got 80% accomplished with Citizens United and their bizarre Snyder ruling this year that said when bribes are paid after the vote is cast or the judge’s decision is rendered they’re merely “tips.”  When everybody’s corrupt, nobody’s corrupt.

— Then they work to destroy our faith in the rule of law. To this end they’ve selected a rapist, fraudster, con man, and convicted criminal for the presidency, holding him up as a role model for the rest of America. The Republicans on the Supreme Court lent a helping hand by ruling that his crimes can’t be prosecuted if done when he was in office. The law is for thee, but not for me.

— Finally, they want us to lose trust in the institutions of America like a free, open, and honest press. Hitler called the media of his day the Lügenpresse or “lying press.” Trump calls them “fake news.” The effect is the same — preparing the cultural ground for unlimited lies and gaslighting — and entirely intentional. As Hannah Arendt wrote:

“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.

“A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.

“And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”

Our national motto, E pluribus unum (“out of many, we have become one”) summarizes the idea of America.

Trump’s motto, Go back to your shithole country, expresses, to paraphrase Macron, its exact opposite.

The work of our day is to restore the idea of America — an egalitarian democratic republic — and then help it realize its full potential after all these many long years.