Blood and Soil Aren’t What Binds America Together

As he reached the end of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2024, J. D. Vance’s tone became more intimate. He began to speak of a cemetery in Kentucky where five generations of his family are buried, and where he hopes he and his children will be buried too. The cemetery matters to him because the bones in that graveyard—some belonging, he said, to people born “around the time of the Civil War”—represent a concrete reality, a homeland, a place that he will defend. “People will not fight for abstractions,” Vance said, “but they will fight for their home.” Not “all men are created equal,” in other words, and not “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” but tombstones. Vance believes that blood and soil, not ideas and principles, are what make him American.As it happens, I can compete with the vice president in a race to lay claim to old bones. There is a cemetery in Galveston, Texas, where multiple members of my family are buried, too, actually going back more than five generations. I own a photograph of the great-great-grandmother whose tombstone is there; she is wearing a hat and coat, standing on a chilly beach. Her parents are buried nearby—that is, my great-great-great grandparents, who were born well before the Civil War—plus aunts, uncles, and cousins, some of whom might well have arrived on the Gulf Coast before members of Vance’s family got to Appalachia.But here is where Vance and I differ: I do not think that the presence of my ancestors in a Galveston cemetery makes me American. On the contrary, all of us—me and Vance; Vance’s in-laws, born in India; my great-great-great grandparents, born in Alsace; our respective children and eventual grandchildren—are, were, or will be Americans because we live in the community created by the abstractions that he dismissed in his speech. More important, I am convinced that these abstractions, all of those words vowing to “establish Justice” and “secure the Blessings of Liberty,” are much