Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected. J.D. Vance Where the elite meet. Margo Channing I “You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea.” So said J.D. Vance in his bootlicking acceptance speech at the Republican convention last summer. I sat up, because I suspected that an important admission was about to be made, and because I am one of the idea-of-America people whom he was about to assail. He continued: “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.” Of course American ideas are not what we mean by the idea of America. We mean an ideal that, for all its abstraction, is sufficiently true and just to serve as the basis of a permanent allegiance, a profound patriotism. Vance, by contrast, promoted an entirely different foundation for his love of country. “America is not just an idea,” proclaimed the opportunist with the temerity to lecture others about conviction. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” And a nation, he went on, is “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.” It did not occur to Vance’s shallow and self-congratulatory mind that a nation is not coterminous with a homeland, because history often forces nations out of homelands. The imagination of exile is too much to ask of the apostle of rootedness. He was preaching a doctrine of hillbilly Heimat, and disguising the most odious form of Western nationalism as the wisdom of Appalachia. Vance, who grew up in Ohio, gave as his proof the moist example of a graveyard in eastern Kentucky that is “near my family’s ancestral home.” Like a lot of people, we came from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. 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. The account of this graveyard was designed to fill the hall with pathos. It filled me with alarm, and I want to explain why. I respect the man’s family history but I abhor his inference from it. For a start, people will most certainly fight for abstractions. Americans will, and Americans have — Americans, the notoriously practical people. The cemeteries of Normandy (pardon the shopworn illustration, but we are in the kingdom of first principles) are filled with Americans who died in the struggle to defend admirable ideals, admirable abstractions. I have no idea if Vance would have supported that war; it was quite inconsistent with the spirit of Milwaukee. Those Americans fought for the homes of other people, because their homes and our homes shared a philosophy about how human beings should live together and distribute power. Vance suffers from a coarse notion about the relationship of the abstract to the concrete. He believes that they are contradictions. Like the universal and the particular, however, the abstract and the concrete are partners, friends, lovers; they need each other, they long for each other. The abstract is instantiated in the concrete, and gives it its reasons; the concrete rescues the abstract from preciosity and irrelevance, and vindicates the abstract (or not, as the case may be) in the means by which it absorbs it into individual and social life. Call it dialectical, except that the interpenetration, the reciprocal impact, is so plain. Even hillbilly life is suffused with concepts! Vance was propounding one of its imbecilities of our age, which is the worship of the local. It is the pendant to another one of the imbecilities, which is the worship of the global. Historians have abundantly documented the inadequacy of these categories — the simultaneous workings of the local, the regional, the national, and the global in human affairs — the blessings and the curses that the dimensions constantly visit upon each other. The local is never only local. It is never all there is or the sole source of significance. The local is itself always shaped by influences from outside, positively or negatively. Even local sanctities have alien beginnings: “Kentucky” is an Iroquoian or Algonquian word and Jesus never preached in the Bluegrass. Conservatives and reactionaries have always recoiled from the porousness of human boundaries, but it is precisely this unwanted seepage which educates us ethically and makes co-existence possible. What is an education if not an expansion? Tradition needs to be protected, but not in a way that will petrify it and render it unpalatable to the age into which we aim to transmit it. Tradition is not solely a form of time travel. It is almost never entirely local. And the death of tradition is too high a price to pay for a fanatical loyalty to an early version of it. A perfect insularity, which is a dangerous fairy tale, would bespeak not only a great fidelity, as the localists believe, but also a great insecurity; and if the insecurity is felt by the majority in a society, terrible actions against the imaginary threats of the minority may ensue. (Perhaps minorities have a more plausible claim upon the uses of insularity, in the way that some medieval Jews prudently demanded a
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