Breitbart reports about JD Vance’s speech at the RNC this week:
“One of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that “America is an idea,” Vance said from the podium, adding:
“And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas like the rule of law and religious liberty, things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But 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 is an important distinction that marks him as a paleoconservative. These folks believe that America is not an idea or a proposition, as originally proposed by Lincoln, based primarily on equality. The “propositional nation” approach inevitably leads to cultural Marxism.
Instead, the paleoconservatives hold that America is a real place with real people who founded it and settled it. It is a place with a history, traditions and founding principles.
The other wing of the Republican Party– the neoconservatives– are heavily Jewish influenced, and tend to be rabid military interventionists at the expense of the interests of the American people. They tend to buy into the “propositional nation” claptrap. They also tend to favor open borders and the diminishment of the historic American people. They were in control of the GOP prior to the emergence of Donald Trump.
Interestingly, Rupert Murdoch, who controls Fox News, and Lindsey Graham from South Carolina were scowling when J.D. Vance spoke. Both are from the neoconservative wing of the party.
Here is the speech:
Though in sympathy with the thrust of your analysis (and I like Vance a lot), I quibble with how you lay it out: America is fundamentally about the idea of individual liberty. (The shared history stuff isn’t trivial, but it is characteristic of every nation.) Neocons are the enemies of individual liberty, regardless of what propositional claptrap they spout.
Yes, Healey, individual liberty was at the center of the American project from the outset. It is being taken away from us incrementally.
I agree that the neocons are weak on individual liberty; but they also can be weak on cultural conservativism and fiscal conservatism. We will see how Trump/ Vance delivers if elected.