Opinion | Decoding JD Vance’s Brand of Nationalism

Is America an idea or a homeland? That question lies at the heart of this roller coaster of a presidential race. It’s about whether we Americans should continue to set our sights on global leadership and enforcing universal principles or instead hunker down and take care of our own.

President Biden, in his speech on Wednesday explaining why he withdrew his candidacy, described America as “the most powerful idea in the history of the world.” In language echoing legacy Republicans like Ronald Reagan, Mr. Biden said that it was “an idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant.”

But Donald Trump’s Republican Party is turning away from that kind of language. At the Republican convention, JD Vance, his running mate, made a point of saying that America is “not just an idea” but a “homeland,” evoking a mountain cemetery in Eastern Kentucky where he said his ancestors are buried and where he hopes that he and his children will be buried as well.

Some of his critics immediately denounced those references to his family’s land and lineage as coded “blood and soil” nationalism, the ideology of Nazis. In The Atlantic, Adam Serwer accused Mr. Vance of signaling an “exclusivist vision of America to his far-right allies” when he asserted that America is a country made up of people who share a history rather than a “creedal nation” — one primarily based on ideas like freedom and equality. “If America is a creedal nation, then anyone can be an American,” Mr. Serwer wrote. “But if real Americans are those who share a specific history, then some of us are more American than others.”

These critiques ignore the sense of duty that human beings everywhere feel to the places and people that raised us. Americans are no exception. And dismissing the intense debate about whether America is a creedal nation versus a specific place of specific people who share land, history and culture misses a chance to understand something important about the MAGA movement’s appeal.

People who speak of America as an idea tend to have a global outlook, arguing for more immigration, free trade and a robust role for the United States around the world. Those who emphasize that it’s also a homeland see the country’s resources as being squandered on outsiders, while the needs of citizens are brushed aside.