I.

In his speech at the RNC accepting the vice-presidential nomination last summer, J.D. Vance said: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” This apparently banal observation has been a rallying cry for conservatives throughout the Trump era. In his 2019 book The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free, National Review’s editor-in-chief Rich Lowry declares that “America is a nation, whose sovereignty and borders are dear to it, whose history and culture are an indispensable glue, whose interests guide her actions (or should).” The conception of America as an idea, Lowry writes, is “one of our most honored national clichés,” but it is “simply wrong as a factual and historical matter.”

Vance, Lowry, and others on the nationalist Right argue that their political opponents are rootless globalists who care more about some gauzy idea of universal solidarity than they care about their fellow citizens. This belief has led to the creation of movements like National Conservatism, which declares in its statement of principles:

We emphasize the idea of the nation because we see a world of independent nations—each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own—as the only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.

Vance made his point about American nationhood at a National Conservatism conference a few days before accepting the vice-presidential nomination. His speech was titled: “America Is a Nation.”