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.