Who's a true American, and who decides? JD Vance has answers

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Who’s a true American, and who decides? JD Vance has answers
JD's 2028 platform, first draft: White supremacists are more American than Zohran Mamdani. Any questions?

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published July 13, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Whether or not he knew it, JD Vance recently waded right into one of the thorniest questions in political philosophy: Who is a citizen and who is not, and who gets to decide?

Above and beyond that question — which is up for grabs right now in the United States in a way it hasn’t been since the late 19th century — lie other, equally difficult, questions: What is a nation, in general, and what is this one in particular? Is it an idea, a creed, a set of laws and customs and shared assumptions that shift with the tides of history? Is it all the people who live within the boundaries of a given territory, whatever their background? Or is it a community of people united by what they perceive as ancient and enduring ties of language, religion, ancestry and ethnicity?

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If Vance’s speech on July 5 at the Claremont Institute — which used to be an intellectually respectable right-wing think tank and is now a factory for MAGA apologetics — was the opening salvo of his presidential campaign, it was both grandly ambitious and profoundly vague. Most of it was devoted to standard-issue Republican left-bashing, in which Vance depicted the entire spectrum of non-Trump or anti-Trump opinion as deranged and dangerous, not to mention devoted to such imaginary policies as “grown men beating up women in girls’ sports” and “a wide open southern border.”

Strikingly, the specific target of Vance’s Two Minute Hate (although it went on considerably longer than that) was Zohran Mamdani, the New York Democratic mayoral nominee who has singlehandedly transfixed and terrified the establishment cadres of both major political parties and the national media. Seriously, whether or not Mamdani wins the general election or can effectively govern a famously disputatious and dysfunctional city, he has already provided an enormous service to democracy by opening a rift in perceived political reality, and manifesting a vision of the future that the guardians of the past unanimously despise.

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As Vance sees it, if the MAGA coalition is to endure beyond the useful life of its nearly-octogenarian godhead, it has to be sliced in two nearly-incompatible directions, with a hint of race war and a somewhat larger dose of class war. His cherry-picked lecture on Mamdani — who definitely did not win New York City’s most affluent neighborhoods, for the record — was meant to contrast “the broad, working- and middle-class coalition” that supposedly elected Trump with the perverse assemblage of “Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites and Big Pharma lobbyists” who collectively comprise the “radicals of the far left.” ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/07/13/whos-a-true-american-and-who-decides-jd-vance-has-answers/