JD Vance’s Neo-Confederate vision of American citizenship

JD Vance gave a speech at the Claremont Institute — current home of insurrectionist and 14th Amendment nullification proponent John Eastman — that is explicit in its opposition to the equal citizenship the Civil War Amendments sought to secure:

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.

To be clear, the argument is that “agreeing with the principles of the Declaration of Independence” is an “underinclusive” approach to defining citizenship because it wouldn’t include JD Vance.

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.

That is a remarkable interlocking series of attacks on the idea of equal citizenship. John Ganz:

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.

The pardoning of the 1/6 insurrectionists and the attempt to nullify the 14th Amendment through executive order are, at this makes clear, one ideologically continuous act. It’s central to how Trump and Vance conceptualize American citizenship.

As Ganz says, there’s also something very telling about Vance delivering this at the fully MAGA Claremont Institute. What was distinctive about “West Coast” Straussianism was precisely its belief that the Declaration of Independence genuinely represented America’s founding ideals and Lincoln’s values and actions embodied them. Vance represents a Republican Party that is fully John Calhoun’s, not Lincoln’s:

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…

[Worth clicking through if you’re unfamiliar!]

…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.

This is painfully correct. And however much it wants to hide behind shadow docket non-even-proceduralism, the Republicans on the Supreme Court have also made clear which side they’re on.