Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

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