When he reached the end of it acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention, JD Vance’s voice grew closer. He started talking about the cemetery in Kentucky where five generations of his family are buried, and where he hopes he and his children will be buried as well. The cemetery is important to him because the bones in the cemetery—he said, some of the people born “during the Civil War”—represent the real truth, the homeland, the place he will defend. “People will not fight for secession,” Vance said, “but they will fight for their home.” Not “all men are created equal,” in other words, and not “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” but tombstones. Vance believes that blood and soil, not ideas and principles, make him an American.
If it happens, I can compete with the vice president in a race to claim the old bones. There is a cemetery in Galveston, Texas, where many of my family members are buried, too, actually going back more than five generations. I own a picture of the grandmother whose tombstone is there; wearing a hat and jacket, standing on a cold beach. His parents are buried nearby—namely, my grandparents, who were born before the Civil War—along with aunts, uncles, and cousins, some of whom may have arrived on the Gulf Coast before members of the Vance family arrived in Appalachia.
But this is where Vance and I differ: I don’t think the presence of my ancestors in a Galveston cemetery makes me an American. On the contrary, both of us—Vance and I; Vance’s in-laws, born in India; my grandparents, born in Alsace; our respective children and eventually grandchildren—are, were, or will be Americans because we live in a society founded on the acronyms he ignored in his speech. More importantly, I am convinced that these acronyms, all those words that swear to “stand up for Justice” and “protect the Blessings of Liberty,” are stronger, stronger than the pull of our respective clans and graves. Why? Because they can unite and inspire a nation that has people with a completely different background and ancestry than mine and Vance’s.
The lawyers, farmers, plantation owners, and rebels who wrote our founding documents knew very well that they needed a unifying set of ideas. By the time of drafting the Constitution, more than a decade after the declaration of independence that we celebrate this week, they were no longer concerned with freedom and the pursuit of happiness, but with the need to keep 13 different colonies and people of many different views and religions within one nation. Unlike the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution does not begin with the claim of all men, that “all men are created equal.” It begins with the specific need to “create a more perfect union.” The need became more urgent in the following centuries, when the union came to include a larger selection of people, among them slaves and immigrants from Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America.
To keep the country together, we still need institutions that work. But we also need symbols: the flag, the national anthem, the collective celebrations that remind us of our fundamental ideas. Thank you. Fourth of July. Inauguration of the President. State of the Union Address. Indeed, convention speeches are traditionally used to invoke unity and “quintessentially” American values as well.
Since Donald Trump and JD Vance took over last year, they have set out to destroy institutions and brands. Vance didn’t choose to talk about cemeteries by accident: Because they believe that only their lineage represents America, that only people like them deserve to be considered “real” Americans, and that the American government exists to serve them alone, they need to undermine anything that tells a more unifying story.
With that goal in mind, Trump has deliberately and methodically destroyed the White House, a structure originally designed to evoke the traditional virtues—simplicity, decorum, symmetry—that were so lauded during America’s founding. He desecrated the Rose Garden, cultivated by a succession of first ladies as a gift to the nation, and replaced its lawn with a patio copied from his Florida resort as a gift to himself. He dug up the East Wing to build himself an even bigger tower, accepting hundreds of millions of dollars from private donors to do so, while secretly demanding hundreds of millions more from taxpayers as well. He defaced the South Lawn with a spectacle of half-naked people beat each other in a pool of blood, acting out displays of dominance and submission.
Even his destruction of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall has real significance. He redid it with people he claimed to know, in the color he preferred, without consulting anyone or going through any formal process. When the repairs proved ineffective, and the algae grew, he forced the police and National Guard to pretend the dam was damaged, even investigating and arresting people touching the water. This seems like a small thing, but it is not. America’s state representatives now have to pay attention to the president’s personal stories, however ridiculous they are, because he and his tribe believe that federal workers are only working for them, not the rest of us.
Of course, the Trump administration has ruined the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations. I was 11 years old in 1976, during the bicentennial, and that July 4th I was at summer camp in North Carolina. I remember the flag-raising and patriotic songs, as well as the glittering songs in the evening. At the time, we didn’t think there was a permanent cultural divide between red states and blue states. In retrospect, I’m sure some of my fellow campers came from families with different views than mine.
It didn’t matter about our bicentennial, mostly because we were 11. But it also wouldn’t matter if we were adults, because everyone knew that the bicentennial belonged to all of us. Tall ships, fireworks, the Freedom Train carrying a moonstone across the country—all these were symbols we shared, no matter what part of America we came from. President Gerald Ford did not try to make the events of the year about himself or his base, or his tribe, or his bank account.
This year is different, because the White House is occupied by people who do not believe in the “abbreviations” that we usually celebrate on the Fourth of July. And this affects the rest of us, whether we want it or not. The Congress party, planned for a decade, has been confiscated for the president’s partyfunded by private donors and featuring political speech alone. Other institutions in and around Washington postponed or reduced their 250th celebrations, so as not to interfere with the president. Most people who might have participated won’t attend, pay attention, or care.
I don’t know if the United States will ever reach three years, but if it does, it will be because the narrow race that Trump and Vance represent has been defeated and removed, and because the country is once again ruled by people who believe in the United States. This is not a statement of privilege: Democrats and Republicans alike will have to wrest government from people who believe they rule by hereditary right, and return it to a nation that still believes that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that the purpose of government is to serve the nation – not to enrich an oligarchic dynasty.
