Royalists Are On The March
Grover Norquist merely fantasized about returning to the McKinley era. A Gilded Age wealth gap, few regulations on industry, weak labor protections, tariffs not taxes, etc. But that was when Norquist was in his heyday and showing out as Republicans’ radical fringe. Today’s conservative fringe yawns at McKinley. They want to return to feudalism.
Josh Kovensky writes at TPM about a speech J.D. Vance gave last weekend at the Claremont Institute that amounts to a repudiation of the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence:
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.”
No one is proposing that, but Vance is not one to let facts get in the way of erecting a strawman he can knock down. He alleges (without evidence) that the left wants to exclude from citizenship people with nonprogressive politics the way he alleged last year that Haitians were eating cats and dogs. His point is that agreeing to an American creed is insufficient to define citizenship. Vance want to see a more blood-and-soil definition.
“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he concluded.
Kovensky writes:
Vance wasn’t talking about an America that’s entirely closed off to new immigrants; rather, it’s an America where “heritage” counts as much as values.
Watching this, it’s easy to go too far down the opposite path: thinking that what Vance is describing is a leap towards something new; assuming that America has always found a way to offer people citizenship based on values and not descent from some old stock.
He’s not.
For all Vance’s — and those on the new right’s — talk of imposing a new order on American politics, they’re still reactionaries of a very old variety. Birthright citizenship, after all, was enshrined in the Constitution after those Union soldiers’ victory in the Civil War. What he described on Saturday was fundamentally regressive: a vision of American citizenship anchored far in the past.
This reasoning has natural appeal to many people, sadly. People from region to region across this vast continent make claims to special status based on ancestry. First Peoples do it as well as white people: we were here first. But there is also an element of pre-modern, magical thinking to it that Vance echoes here, a kind of geographical astrology. Something about being born in this place and not that one somehow makes one a super-citizen with special privileges and unique values and insights that inmigrants can never fully enjoy. And if your “people” have resided in the area for X generations, you are a super-super citizen. That’s where Project 2025, Trump, Vance, et al. want to take the country with their immigrant purges and naturalized citizen purges to come. That old “America was founded on an idea” notion rooted in equality is one they never accepted.
This is not remotely an American framing. (Multiple signers of the Declaration were born outside the 13 colonies, as were framers of the Constitution.) Nor is it a view Lincoln would accept. But it is a very old-Europe notion. A feudal one, even, from the age of unreason.
As John Ganz (Unpopular Front) sees it:
He’s trying to abandon the Declaration of Independence, which one 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.
Kovensky concludes:
For all Vance’s — and those on the new right’s — talk of imposing a new order on American politics, they’re still reactionaries of a very old variety. Birthright citizenship, after all, was enshrined in the Constitution after those Union soldiers’ victory in the Civil War. What he described on Saturday was fundamentally regressive: a vision of American citizenship anchored far in the past.
Theirs is a vision for Americans in name only. The Constitution protects them too.
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