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On July 5th, Vice President JD Vance accepted a Statesmanship Award from the Claremont Institute and gave a very good and very interesting speech, which is worth not only listening to in full but parsing closely.
In outline, the speech had two interrelated themes: first, the person of Zohran Mamdani as a kind of synecdoche for the future of the Democratic Party; second, the theme of citizenship.
Vance made several observations about Mamdani and the movement that brought him to the position of being the likely next Mayor of New York, contrasting them with the Trump coalition. He noted that the voting coalition that brought Trump to power in 2024 was very racially and socioeconomically diverse. Meanwhile, Mamdani was brought to power on the backs of the votes of college-educated white voters and several specific racial minorities, often at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder; by contrast, Mamdani lost Black voters, Chinese-Americans, and middle class voters. Vance noted that Mamdani's results were strongest in "gentrifying" neighborhoods. (That's some pretty careful results parsing for a national politician from Ohio!)
In other words, Mamdani's key constituency is people with college educations and even elite college educations who aren't doing as well as they thought they would be, and feel resentful against "the system" as a result. After adding that college graduates who feel screwed because a college degree is no longer the promise of prosperity it once was have a legitimate grievance, he emphasized the point that Mamdani is in no way the candidate of the "downtrodden" but of relatively well-off, secure, (but downwardly mobile and dissatisfied) white elites. His movement "is not poor Americans. It is not about dispossession. It is about elite disaffection and elite anger."
Vance then pivoted to the puzzling phenomenon that French intellectuals have called "Islamo-Leftism": why is it that far left movements, which are disproportionately made up of elite white people, proclaim sympathy for Islam and various Islamic movements whose social views are exactly at odds with their beliefs? And he produced, in our view, the correct answer, which is that what brings these seemingly-opposite movements together is hate. And specifically hate for the West.
As an aside, we particularly appreciated the way Vance touched on the topic of race, simultaneously bluntly acknowledging realities that should not be swept aside, without developing some sort of obsession about the issue. It's true that there are a lot of people in America who are straightforwardly animated by racial resentment and even hate of white people. This is a true fact that should not be shied away from just because it's uncomfortable, whereas the people tempted to do so are commentators or political leaders. It is a great thing to see a prominent national political figure like the Vice President of the United States straightforwardly call out and denounce anti-white racism.
At the same time, it is also true that, as Vance noted very rightly, on the one hand, these movements disproportionately feature elite white people, and of course many minorities integrate very well in the American mainstream. The Mamdani coalition is not exactly a New York version of the McGovern/Obama coalition of "elite whites plus brown people." Some minorities supported Mamdani because they share his third world socialist proclivities; other minorities (again, Vance pointed to Black Americans and Chinese Americans) rejected his message because they feel well-integrated in the American mainstream and so remain moderate. (And, implicitly, conversely, MAGA is the multiracial coalition of American patriots of every race who want to preserve what makes America special.)
This led Vance to his pivot to his other big theme, which was citizenship.
The Democrat/Mamdani agenda, which brings together a coalition of the fringes who have nothing in common except a common enelmy, is about "tearing down, not building up." This means that Republicans must contrast this with a positive, constructive agenda.
What is this positive agenda?
First, Vance emphasized, it's about improving the lives of ordinary people. This is (still) an important point to make, because (still) too many conservatives view politics and policy about applying abstract principles. Abstract principles are important, but voters elect politicians to deliver concrete, tangible improvements to their lives.
Secondly, Vance went on, it's about people being made in the image of God. And, he went on, because people are made in the image of God, they care about their nations. We really like this. We are now going beyond Vance's words, but one way in which men are made in the image of God is that they have roots (as the French philosopher Simone Weil explained) and they are relational, and therefore political beings. This goes against what Renaud Camus, the author of The Great Replacement, calls "replacism," which is at bottom, before it is a movement to foster mass migration, a belief system according to which all humans are interchangeable and replaceable cogs. (While Vance didn't explicitly reference Camus, his speech seems informed either directly or indirectly by his thought.)
Hence the importance, Vance went on, of citizenship. And there came the most important part of the speech, which was Vance's rejection of the famous idea of the "Proposition Nation." He pointed out that if all it takes to be an American is to agree with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, then many hundreds of millions, if not billions of people, from all around the world, with very different cultures, would be entitled to move to the US tomorrow. He also pointed out that this ideal which sells itself as inclusive can actually be very exclusive, since many read it as a license to write out of the American family American citizens who don't subscribe to the progressive shibboleth of the day.
So, what does American citizenship mean, then? After saying that he had no claim to provide a comprehensive answer, he pointed to the three following pillars:
Sovereignty. This means "sovereignty of its people, defending them from a world that wants to dissolve borders and national character." American citizens are entitled to a government that represents them and therefore ensures their sovereignty.
Building. This was a part we really liked. Vance harked back to the American heritage of taming the wild frontier, all the way through building the great canals and railroads and skyscrapers, and finally the airplane and Apollo. Building, therefore, should be a fundamental aspect of American citizenship. “You can’t get to the Moon on financial derivatives," he noted. Instead, we should aspire to “leave homes and libraries and factories that our descendants will look at one day and feel a sense of awe.” He also noted that to build, you need all sorts of people. The Apollo Project had PhDs and it had janitors, and it needed both. "Citizenship should mean feeling pride in our heritage, of course, but it should mean understanding milestones like landing on the Moon, not only as products of past national greatness, but as achievements we should surpass by aligning the goals and ambitions of Americans at all levels of society."
Gratitude. Finally, Vance said, citizenship should be about gratitude. We also liked this very much since, of course, gratitude is the fundamental conservative emotion. He noted that, of course, immigration has in the past enriched America, pointing to his wife's parents. So how do we tell the difference between a good immigrant and a bad immigrant? A good place to start is gratitude. And this allowed him to come back full circle to Mamdani whose family, he noted, fled third world ethnic conflict to come to an America that allowed them to have peace and thrive—and yet Mamdani feels no gratitude.
Overall it was, we believe, a very important speech, one which set important parameters for the future of American politics. It's not directly related to policy (indeed, there was more policy stuff in the speech than in our gloss, but we chose to skip over it), but it has powerful implications for policy. A Democratic coalition of resentful elites and select resentful minorities, versus a broad Republican multiracial, socioeconomically diverse, alliance of the broad middle and everyone outside the broad middle who wants an America built on a renewed compact of citizenship, which includes a democratically-responsive government dedicated to things like national sovereignty, improving the lives of the average person in concrete ways, building great new things, and fostering a sense of gratitude for American history and values. It's a big program.
SEE ALSO: Vance-onomics Explained
Policy News You Need To Know
#Trade #Tariffs #Chyna — China’s share of US imports fell to 7.1% in May, the lowest since 2001, and less than half of the 14.8% in September 2024, Bloomberg reports. That seems like very good news.
#Trade #Tariffs — Buried among all the other trade news, but significant nonetheless: on July 14, the Trump Administration is set to impose a 21-percent antidumping tariff on imports of fresh tomatoes from Mexico, terminating the Tomato Suspension Agreement (TSA) last renewed in 2019. According to analysis by Jacob Jensen, Trade Policy Analyst at the American Action Forum, the forthcoming tariff would increase prices of tomatoes by 7%.
#Liberty #Merica — The Trump Administration ended the TSA's "shoes off" policy. Freedom, screaming eagles, fireworks, the stars and stripes.
#EconomicNationalism #Chyna — Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has taken a public stand against ownership of US farmland by Chinese nationals. We'll see if any actual policy comes out of this…
#EndTheFed — The Administration is stepping up pressure on the Fed to cut interest rates. As we noted previously, Fed Chair Jerome Powell created this mess for himself by essentially taking a policy stand of claiming that the only reason not to cut rates is the Trump Administration's tariffs, even though tariffs are not a monetary operation and inflation is a monetary phenomenon. So new disclosures about the Chair's role in a $3 billion (!) revamp of the Fed's headquarters could prove particularly damaging. As Professor Andrew T. Levin of Dartmouth details in an article, Chair Powell made a number of misleading or outright false statements about the project to Congress, which of course is potentially a crime.
#MAHA #TheScience — NPR has an interesting story about how in spite of RFK, Jr.'s warnings about microplastics, the EPA cut a key study on microplastics.
#ArtificialArtificialIntelligence — There's a running joke in Silicon Valley that "AI" stands for "Actually Indians." There's a number of sketchy AI startups out there who claim to do "AI" but most of the "AI" is actually outsourced cheap workers. Relatedly: you may have seen recent news and commentary about "The Velvet Sundown," a band that came out of nowhere to get roughly 400,000 listeners on Spotify, in spite of being entirely AI-generated. Well, it turns out…it's not. AI is definitely a very real and very significant trend, but it's not quite at the level of the hype. At least not yet.
#RuleOfLaw — "Former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey are under criminal investigation for potential wrongdoing related to the Trump–Russia probe, including allegedly making false statements to Congress," Brooke Singman at Fox News Digital reported.
#RuleOfLaw #CivilRights — Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant AG for Civil Rights, who has done a very impressive job in the past six months of fighting wokeness and DEI, gave a long interview to the Washington Examiner. "More than half of the division’s attorneys left during the first quarter of this year, Dhillon said, clearing the way to rebuild the division from the ground up on the promise of sweeping changes under Trump. New hiring of career lawyers and political appointees is underway to align the department’s civil rights enforcement with what Dhillon elucidated as the plain text of the law and the trajectory set by the Supreme Court."
#VibeShift — Google co-founder Sergey Brin called the U.N. “transparently antisemitic” in an internal forum for employees, WaPo reports. Given that Google has been ground zero for wokeness in Silicon Valley, this is an interesting marker in our ongoing monitoring of the "vibe shift."
#TechRight — Very interesting proposal from Ryan Girdusky, a political consultant and author of the must-read National Populism newsletter, for how Elon Musk can force Congress to rein in spending without engaging in the doomed and counterproductive endeavor of starting his own third party: "Rather than starting his own party, Elon could look to the states to pass a constitutional amendment forcing the federal government to have a balanced budget. While passing a constitutional amendment is a long and ardeous process, but states have been working on a balanced budget amendment for years and 27 states have active, unrescinded resolutions calling for a constitutional convention to propose a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. These resolutions are part of an effort to reach the 34-state threshold needed to trigger such a convention."
Chart of the Day
Russ Greene of Stand Together has published this very eye-opening chart.
