Understanding J.D. Vance’s ‘National Conservatism’ Convention Speech
“America is not just an idea,” says Trump VP pick. Here’s why that matters.
THE MOST COMMON SLAM AT J.D. VANCE, Donald Trump’s running mate and Wednesday night’s big star at the Republican National Convention, is that the 39-year-old junior senator from Ohio is a cynical opportunist, a turncoat who refashioned himself from a “Never Trump” conservative into an ardent Trump loyalist to secure his ascent in the MAGAfied GOP. There is no question that Vance’s transformation has been drastic—and, as some have noted, he hasn’t changed his views on Trump alone: Vance’s current portrayal of America’s struggling working-class communities—such as the one he was born into—as victims of a callous and globalist “ruling class” contrasts sharply with his account in Hillbilly Elegy, which was blunt about the role dysfunctional culture and self-destructive behavior play in these communities’ woes.
Is this a fake self-reinvention? Or is it, as Vance-friendly commentators argue, a sincere evolution—a combination of genuine shifts on policy and normal compromise on Trump? Ultimately, no one can say but Vance himself. The rest of us can only judge him by his publicly articulated views—which will likely come under greater scrutiny than ever before, now that he is running for national office.
So let’s start with his convention address. Buried amid usual boilerplate—the autobiography, the broadsides against the elites, the critiques of the Biden record—was a passage that goes to the core of Vance’s current political philosophy, one in which Vance challenged the view that America is “an idea”:
You know, 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.
Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.
To illustrate his point, Vance acknowledges his wife’s background as a daughter of immigrants and praises her South-Asian immigrant parents (“incredible people . . . who genuinely have enriched this country in so many ways”), then segues into a story about his family’s “cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky” and explains why place matters:
Now in that cemetery, there are people who were 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. Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principle[s]. 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.
Some of Vance’s claims here are fairly uncontroversial. It’s self-evidently true (so to speak) that America is not just a set of ideas but a “nation”—“a group of people with a shared history and a common future”—living in a “homeland.” Of course any American, whether native-born or immigrant, who loves the “idea” of America must also have an investment in its history and an attachment to its people, culture, and places. Of course we expect people coming to the United States to follow American laws and broadly defined norms. And of course there’s nothing wrong with having a deep attachment to a cemetery where members of your family are buried.
But Vance’s reference to his wife’s immigrant family as a lead-in to the image of the cemetery with generations under the ground as a symbol of the American “homeland” has some disturbing overtones. The message seems to be that immigrants and their descendants achieve true Americanness by being admitted to kinship with Americans whose families have been on American soil here for generations—in the language of nationalists, “legacy Americans.” Until they’ve been absorbed into that lineage, his rhetoric implies, immigrants are guests who are here on “our” sufferance.
To call this an “Easter egg of white nationalism,” as one MSNBC host put it, certainly goes too far. But it’s also not a simple discussion of wanting to be buried in the family plot, and I think it’s fair to say that this portion of Vance’s speech had overtones of blood-and-soil nationalism. Which brings us to some important facts about Vance’s intellectual and political commitments.
Vance’s ideological home, for the past few years, has been among the so-called “national conservatives”; he was a speaker at the inaugural National Conservatism Conference in 2019 (giving a talk titled “Getting Beyond Libertarianism”), a keynote speaker at the 2021 conference, and a featured speaker just this month at the 2024 conference in Washington, D.C. Hostility to the concept of America as an idea-based nation is a key argument in national conservative ideology (as articulated, for instance, by its intellectual father Yoram Hazony). In addition to its nativist leanings, national conservatism also tends to support a muscular state that unabashedly promotes a conservative cultural agenda.
That last part is also essential to Vance’s worldview. An outspoken admirer of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Trump’s running mate certainly hasn’t been shy about his interest in using the power of the state to promote conservative goals. As Reason’s Stephanie Slade noted two years ago during Vance’s Senate campaign:
If anything, he has been more willing than most on the New Right to openly declare his intent to use the state in obviously extralegal ways, telling Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, for example, that conservatives should employ the taxation power to “seize” the assets of “woke, leftist” nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation and universities such as Harvard.
Vance’s discussion of America the “idea” vs. America the “nation” and “homeland” has another ironic aspect. Notice that, in conceding that America was founded on “brilliant ideas,” Vance specifically mentions “the rule of law” as something “written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation.” But this is the same guy who, in a 2021 interview (with far-right podcaster Jack Murphy) suggested that if Trump returns to the White House in 2025, “we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes,” firing all the civil servants and replacing them with “our people”—and that if the Supreme Court objects, Trump should defy it. (He also cited Andrew Jackson’s apocryphal remark, “The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”) Vance also told Ross Douthat just last month that, had he been vice president in January 2021, he would have declined to certify the election results until alternate, pro-Trump slates of electors were allowed. Sure, it would have caused a constitutional crisis, but “at least we would have had a debate.”
Vance also suggested to Douthat that “tech censorship” of the Hunter Biden story was a legitimate reason to contest the 2020 election results. Never mind that the brief attempt to minimize the story’s social media reach ended up getting it more attention (or that, by those standards, Hillary Clinton had every right to cry election fraud four years earlier because of the massive publicity given false claims, generated by Wikileaks with help from Russian hackers, that the Democratic National Committee rigged the primaries in her favor and robbed Bernie Sanders). Vance surely knows that there is absolutely nothing in American election law that would allow the validity of a vote to be challenged on the grounds of alleged media bias.
So much for the rule of law.
FOR THE JOURNALISTS who will now start digging into Vance’s words and deeds, his record is an embarrassment of riches. Take his 2022 comments mocking the “childless cat ladies” who allegedly run the Democratic party, with two women and a gay man cited as examples. Or his argument in a 2021 talk to a right-wing group that conservatives should defend conspiracy-theory king Alex Jones. (He has certainly come a long way from Hillbilly Elegy, where he deplored hillbilly culture’s “bizarre sexism,” homophobia, and distrust of the mainstream media.) His various statements on Ukraine, which reflect not only a staunch opposition to U.S. assistance for Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression but a tendency to parrot pro-Kremlin, anti-Ukraine spin (for instance, about alleged religious persecution in Ukraine), will get a new look as well. And we should hear more about Vance’s connections to “neoreactionary” pseudointellectual Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. “Mencius Moldbug”), from whom he got the fire-all-civil-servants idea and whom he cites as an ideologically congenial guru in a recent Tablet magazine interview. (Yarvin is, if nothing else, quite candid about his odious views: He openly argues that political liberty is a failed experiment and scribbles weird fantasies about a new world order in which Vladimir Putin is given a free hand to stamp out liberalism in Europe.)
Never mind the charge that Vance is an opportunistic phony. In this case, the scary option is that he is actually sincere in his ideological conversion—and is gearing up to take over as the smarter, more ideas-oriented, less volatile, and more polished leader of Trumpism without Trump.