In the New York Times, Nationhood Lab’s director counters Vice President J.D. Vance’s argument that being American is about having the right ancestry, rather than fealty to the ideals in the Declaration of Independence
In the New York Times opinion section, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard argued America has a widely shared national story, and it’s based on the ideals in the Declaration, not the blood and soil ethnonationalism advocated by Vice President J.D. Vance and other members of the current U.S. administration.
The essay, published Nov. 3, described how the fight over the United States’ story of purpose and belonging has been the central struggle of our history, an eternal battle between defining the country in civic terms — on the ideals in the Declaration — and ethnonationalist ones, whereby people with certain bloodlines are privileged, and those with others are excluded. Woodard pushed back against Vance’s assertions in a formal speech at the Claremont Institute that the Declaration is deficient, and that being fully American is tied to having ancestors who participated in the conquest of Indigenous America and fought in the Civil War.
“If we’re to remain a free society, those committed to the American experiment are going to need to start expressing our civic national ideals as effectively and compellingly as the ethnonationalists articulate theirs,” Woodard wrote, citing Nationhood Lab’s polling showing the vast majority of Americans favor civic over ethnic nationalism.
“If we can come together in defense of the Declaration’s sacred ideas, then we indeed have a chance at revitalizing the civic vision after the challenge of the Trump era,” he concluded.
The essay was reprinted in the print editions of two major regional dailies, Utah’s Salt Lake Tribune and the Minnesota Star-Tribune.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.