JD Vance dismisses the American idea (Jeff Jacoby, July 23, 2024, Pundicity)
[M]uch of what makes the United States so extraordinary is that for more than two centuries it has also been the homeland of millions of people — immigrants and the children of immigrants — with no lengthy family or property ties in America. At the heart of Americanness is not blood or soil but the embrace of fundamental principles and beliefs. Vance is wrong. America’s greatness is rooted precisely in the ideas that he regards as secondary. His wife’s American identity does not inhere in the burial plot of the family she married into. It is bound up, rather, in the worldview her parents adopted when they left their native India and put down roots in America.
This was a point that Ronald Reagan made frequently, including in his very last speech as president.
On Jan. 19, 1989, in a final ceremony to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Reagan said he wanted to make “an observation about a country which I love.” That observation, simply stated yet profound, isolated a key truth about the United States. “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman,” Reagan said, quoting a letter from a correspondent. “You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
How does a person become an American? By taking on American principles, above all those enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — that we are created equal and endowed from birth with the rights to life and liberty. At the heart of “American exceptionalism” is the recognition that full-fledged membership in our nation — unlike in France, Germany, Turkey, or Japan — is not a matter of birth, blood, ancestry, or soil. America is the embodiment of certain ideas, and to be fully American one need only pledge allegiance to those principles.
The Republican Party used to celebrate American exceptionalism. But Trump explicitly rejects the concept, so it stands to reason that his running mate, having jettisoned so many of his principles to refashion himself as the MAGA heir apparent, would turn his back on this one too.