Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
In July, the right-wing Claremont Institute hosted Vice-President J.D. Vance at its annual Statesmanship Award dinner, where he proceeded to tell his audience that all their fears were coming true. The left was on the move. New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani and his supporters “hate the people in this room, they hate the president of the United States, and most of all, they hate the people who voted for him,” Vance said. He offered no proof, but he didn’t have to; it wasn’t the sort of crowd that needed it. They’d come to hear red-meat oratory, and he delivered. Mamdani was “ungrateful” to the land and to the people who settled it, Vance said. Because Mamdani called our great nation “contradictory” and “unfinished” even as he praised its beauty, he tarnished it and those who died for it. “Who the hell do these people think they are?” Vance wondered.
As the vice-president would have it, Mamdani is an interloper whose rise threatens a redefinition of “American citizenship” along far-right and nationalist lines.
Vance has long rejected America as an idea in favor of America as a blood-and-soil nation, built on the bones of our (presumably European) ancestors. America “is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation,” he said when he addressed the Republican National Convention in 2024. Vance’s America is the eastern Kentucky cemetery where he wants to rest with his wife, and eventually his children, who would be the seventh generation of his family entombed there. His family “built” America, made things in America, would fight and die for America, and that “is a homeland,” in his words. That rhetoric is an implicit threat, too. If the homeland is in trouble from the likes of Mamdani, as Vance now says, we must defend it and finish the project the vice-president’s ancestors allegedly began.
A few days after Vance spoke to the Claremont Institute, the Department of Homeland Security posted a painting to its social-media accounts. American Progress,by John Gast, depicts an angelic white woman in flowing robes floating over the American West as settlers bring the light of civilization to a shadowed continent. The image might be familiar; it often illustrates school lessons or articles on Manifest Destiny. After publisher George Crofutt commissioned the work from Gast in 1872, he advertised the result in patriotic terms: “This great national picture” shows “in the most artistic manner all the gigantic results of American brains and hands.” Many Americans agreed. To them, settlers had a divine mission to conquer western land along with the Native people who lived on it; in fact, America could only realize its true greatness through displacement and murder.
It’s not hard to understand why Manifest Destiny might appeal to the Trump administration, and particularly its Department of Homeland Security, whose agents carry out another act of conquest, a purge they justify in the name of Western civilization. The administration has occupied the streets of Washington, D.C., because it wants to punish the people who live there, because it wants to remove immigrants that it does not like, and because it sees itself as a conquering force. The streets properly belong to it, and not to locals. Manifest Destiny was about blood and soil, too. “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending,” as DHS wrote in its post of Gast’s work. Trump even used the term in his inaugural address this year.
“Our ancestors realized that to carve a successful nation from a new land meant creating new, tangible things,” Vance said at Claremont in July. Settlers built “new homes, new towns, new infrastructure” so they could “tame a wild continent.” Vance never specifies what — or who — made the continent “wild,” but we can infer his meaning. He also does not explain what “new, tangible things” today’s citizens might create, though he previously said that American manufacturers need protection, so that we do not “lose a fundamental part of who we are as a people.” He added, “Making things, building things, working with our hands is America’s heritage,” which is a strikingly funny line given that Vance does not make things, or build things, or work with his hands. The Yale Law graduate doesn’t seem to do any work at all, unless posting on X is a job. Since Trump assumed office in January, Vance has gone on vacations to Vermont and Disneyland and his native Ohio, where the Army Corps of Engineers changed the outflow of Caesar Creek Lake to create “ideal kayaking conditions,” or so one anonymous source told the Guardian. Then he traveled to the United Kingdom, where he vacationed in the Cotswolds before proceeding to Scotland.
Vance may continue his life of leisure for the indefinite future, but what about everyone else? No one carves cities out of the forest now, and manufacturing jobs are not returning under Vance and his boss, either, but neither fact matters to the vice-president or his allies. People need to fill the jobs our expanding police state might create. Manifest Destiny was less a specific policy than a justification for a violent national expansion that sought new territory as it enforced a social, economic, and racial hierarchy. Even now, the world Vance wants to build cannot exist without conformity and control.
From Intelligencer - Daily News, Politics, Business, and Tech via this RSS feed