Nine years ago this month, America was introduced to what was then called the “alt-right” and is now pretty much just “the right.” On Aug. 11, 2017, we witnessed what had been advertised as a “Unite the Right” rally in which a large group of young white men marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil!” The next day, a young counterprotester named Heather Heyer was killed by an alt-right participant who drove his car through the crowd at high speed. President Donald Trump famously announced that there were “very fine people on both sides,” and it was clear to many Americans just where he and the Republican Party were heading.
It was startling at the time to hear those chants. They seemed like something out of the history books. Such open antisemitism was a vestige of the Klan and neo-Nazi marches of the past, and the words “blood and soil” had no American antecedent at all, at least not the specific term. They are associated with the Nazis, derived from the German völkisch movement, which romantically valorized the agrarian people as the backbone of society and evolved into the eugenics and ethnic cleansing programs under Adolf Hitler.
A large faction of the modern American right has now adopted this idea to promote nativism and white nationalism, calling it “Heritage American” and basically positing the idea that only people of European ancestry are appropriate to live in the United States. But it’s actually even more specific than that. A true heritage American would be able to trace their ancestry to the colonial period, to Anglo-Protestant and Scotch-Irish early settlers. (Some admit that Native Americans and descendants of enslaved peoples of the period might be heritage Americans as well, although there is debate on that subject.)
The most famous of those pushing the Heritage American idea is Vice President JD Vance, although he doesn’t use the term. In his speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention, he declared, “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history.” Referring to the many generations of his forebears buried in a cemetery on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky, he said, “That’s not just an idea, my friends, that’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstraction, but they will fight for their home.”
Vance has said that he looks forward to being buried in that old cemetery himself, as will his children. But as political analyst Mona Charen noted, “his children are the product of a marriage between himself and the daughter of recent immigrants. Her ancestors are buried in India. Is that their ‘homeland’? Are his children less American than he [is]?”
Americans have fought for “abstractions” plenty of times, including two bloody World Wars, both of which were fought on foreign shores.
Aside from that important point, what Vance says is simply not true. Americans have fought for “abstractions” plenty of times, including two bloody World Wars, both of which were fought on foreign shores. If you ever had the chance to talk to World War II veterans, you know they believed they were fighting for “freedom” against the scourge of fascism. Setting aside Pearl Harbor, any real threat to the “homeland” was mostly an abstraction in itself. And all the literature about the American Revolution itself is rife with the passionate cries for liberty and equality, not paeans to “the land.”
Vance was arguing against the idea that America is a “creedal nation,” a concept that most of us have grown up with and assumed was settled — the idea that we are a country bound together by a set of ideals rather than “blood and soil.” The late Gordon Wood, the preeminent scholar of the revolutionary period, explained that there was no common lineage, even at the nation’s founding. Hence, these “Heritage Americans,” thinking they are the one true bloodline, are deluded. There were three quarters of a million people of African descent, thousands of Native Americans, people from every European nation and quite a few from elsewhere. The country was always a nation of immigrants and, according to Wood, a widespread concern at the time was that forming a national identity could be difficult.
But we did — around the Declaration of Independence and the belief in individual liberty and equality, as formalized in the Bill of Rights. America is the only country on earth that organized itself this way, but as Wood pointed out, we had no choice. Unlike other countries, we were literally not “a people” until we became a nation.
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Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch — one of the justices who voted in the minority in Trump v. Barbara, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment does not guarantee automatic birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors — was quizzed heavily on the idea of America as a creedal nation when he recently made the rounds flogging his children’s book. His response caused much agita among the Heritage American types. “Our nation is not founded on a religion,” Gorsuch said. “It’s not based on a common culture even, or heritage. It’s based on those ideas. We’re a creedal nation. And I hope we take a moment to reflect on that and to recommit ourselves to that.”
The justice’s mention of religion is what struck a nerve because the insistence that the country was founded explicitly as a Christian nation is fundamental to the Heritage American belief system. That specific argument has been going on forever, and Vance and others — like Tucker Carlson — who have jumped on this bandwagon, know it to be a potent signal to the powerful evangelical bloc. To have an avatar of far-right jurisprudence espouse the belief that America is, in fact, a creedal nation and was not founded on Christianity was a welcome shock.
It will be interesting to see the outcome of the latest attempts to delegitimize newer citizens in favor of the “natural born” when the lawsuits eventually reach the high court, as they are all but certain to do. As the Atlantic’s Toluse Olorunnipa reported, various red states are now attempting to pass laws disallowing naturalized citizens from holding office, essentially creating a group of second-class citizens. This is yet another attempt to create a “blood and soil” nation out of one that was built on something else entirely.
America has never perfectly lived up to those ideals, and the struggle to do so continues to be painful for those who have yet to fully benefit from the nation’s promise. It’s always two steps forward, one step back. But attempting to redefine the country as white nationalist völkism is a fool’s errand. Wait until Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito discovers that he doesn’t qualify because his family didn’t emigrate to the U.S. until the 20th century, and Donald Trump will be mighty disappointed to find out that he and four of his five children are not true Americans because their mothers were born in another country. Once you start pulling on this thread, the whole thing starts to unravel.
As Wood wrote, “since the whole world is in the U.S., nothing but the ideals coming out of the Revolution and their subsequent rich and contentious history can turn such an assortment of different individuals into the ‘one people’ that the Declaration says we are. To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”
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