{"id":986,"date":"2026-07-01T11:40:25","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T11:40:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=986"},"modified":"2026-07-01T11:40:25","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T11:40:25","slug":"blood-and-soil-arent-what-binds-america-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=986","title":{"rendered":"Blood and Soil Aren\u2019t What Binds America Together"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

As he reached<\/span> the end of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2024, J. D. Vance\u2019s tone became more intimate. He began to speak of a cemetery in Kentucky where five generations of his family are buried, and where he hopes he and his children will be buried too. The cemetery matters to him because the bones in that graveyard\u2014some belonging, he said, to people born \u201caround the time of the Civil War\u201d\u2014represent a concrete reality, a homeland, a place that he will defend. \u201cPeople will not fight for abstractions,\u201d Vance said, \u201cbut they will fight for their home.\u201d Not \u201call men are created equal,\u201d in other words, and not \u201cLife, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,\u201d but tombstones. Vance believes that blood and soil, not ideas and principles, are what make him American.<\/p>\n

Read more The Kennedy Center\u2019s Latest Defense Raises a New Mystery<\/a><\/p>\n

As it happens, I can compete with the vice president in a race to lay claim to old bones. There is a cemetery in Galveston, Texas, where multiple members of my family are buried, too, actually going back more than five generations. I own a photograph of the great-great-grandmother whose tombstone is there; she is wearing a hat and coat, standing on a chilly beach. Her parents are buried nearby\u2014that is, my great-great-great grandparents, who were born well before the Civil War\u2014plus aunts, uncles, and cousins, some of whom might well have arrived on the Gulf Coast before members of Vance\u2019s family got to Appalachia.<\/p>\n

But here is where Vance and I differ: I do not think that the presence of my ancestors in a Galveston cemetery makes me American. On the contrary, all of us\u2014me and Vance; Vance\u2019s in-laws, born in India; my great-great-great grandparents, born in Alsace; our respective children and eventual grandchildren\u2014are, were, or will be Americans because we live in the community created by the abstractions that he dismissed in his speech. More important, I am convinced that these abstractions, all of those words vowing to \u201cestablish Justice\u201d and \u201csecure the Blessings of Liberty,\u201d are much stronger, much more powerful than the pull of our respective clans and graveyards. Why? Because they can unite and inspire a nation that contains people with origins and ancestors as radically different as those belonging to me and Vance.<\/p>\n

The lawyers, farmers, plantation owners, and rabble-rousers who wrote our founding documents were well aware that they needed a set of unifying ideas. By the time they got around to composing the Constitution, more than a decade after the independence declaration that we are celebrating this week, they were no longer primarily concerned with liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but with the need to keep 13 separate colonies and people of many divergent views and religions inside a single nation. Unlike the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution does not begin with a universal claim, that \u201call men are created equal.\u201d It begins with the specific need to \u201cform a more perfect union.\u201d That need became more urgent over subsequent centuries, as that union came to include an ever-wider selection of people, among them former slaves and immigrants from Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America.<\/p>\n

To hold the country together, we still require functioning institutions. But we also need symbols: a flag, a national anthem, shared ceremonies that remind us of our founding ideas. Thanksgiving. The Fourth of July. Presidential inaugurations. The State of the Union address. Indeed, convention speeches are traditionally used to invoke unity and \u201cabstract\u201d American values too.<\/p>\n

Since Donald Trump<\/span> and J. D. Vance took office last year, they have set out to destroy both the institutions and the symbols. Vance did not choose to speak about graveyards by accident: Because they believe that only their clan represents America, that only people like them deserve to be considered \u201creal\u201d Americans, and that the American government exists to serve them alone, they need to undermine anything that tells a more unifying story.<\/p>\n

With that goal in mind, Trump has deliberately and methodically defaced the White House, a structure originally designed to evoke the classical virtues\u2014simplicity, modesty, symmetry\u2014that were widely admired at the time of America\u2019s founding. He desecrated the Rose Garden, cultivated by a series of first ladies as a gift to the nation, replacing its grass court with a patio copied from his Florida resort as a gift to himself. He dug up the East Wing to build an even bigger monument to himself, 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 men beating each other into a bloody pulp, acting out performances of dominance and submission.<\/p>\n

Read more What the Supreme Court Rulings Mean for Trump<\/a><\/p>\n

Even his destruction of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall has real significance. He had it redone by people he claimed to know, in a color he preferred, without consulting anyone or going through any formal process. When the renovation proved incompetent, fostering algae, he forced police and the National Guard to pretend that the pool had been vandalized, even to investigate and arrest people who touch the water. This seems a trivial matter, but it is not. Representatives of the American state now have to comply with the president\u2019s personal fictions, however ludicrous, because he and his tribe believe that federal employees work exclusively for them, not for all of us.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, the Trump administration has destroyed the nation\u2019s 250th-anniversary celebrations. I was 11 in 1976, during the bicentennial, and that July 4 I was at a summer camp in North Carolina. I remember celebratory flag-raising and patriotic songs, as well as sparklers in the evening. At the time, we didn\u2019t think there was a permanent cultural divide between red states and blue states. In retrospect, I\u2019m sure some of my fellow campers came from families with views different from mine.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t matter to our celebration of the bicentennial, mostly because we were 11. But it also wouldn\u2019t have mattered even if we were adults, because everyone knew that the bicentennial was for all of us. The tall ships, the fireworks, the Freedom Train that carried a moon rock around the country\u2014all of these were symbols we shared, no matter which part of America we came from. President Gerald Ford didn\u2019t try to make the events of that year about himself or his base, or his tribe, or his bank account.<\/p>\n

This year is different, because the White House is inhabited by people who don\u2019t believe in the \u201cabstractions\u201d that we usually celebrate on the Fourth of July. And this affects the rest of us, whether we want it to or not. Congress\u2019s celebration, planned for a decade, has been usurped by the president\u2019s celebration, funded by private donors and featuring a political speech by himself. Other institutions in and around Washington postponed or reduced their 250th celebrations, so as not to get in the way of the president. Many people who might have participated will not attend, pay attention, or care.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know whether the United States of America will ever reach its tricentennial, but if it does, it will be because the narrow tribe that Trump and Vance represent has been defeated and removed, and because the country is once again governed by people who believe in an American union. This is not a partisan statement: Democrats and Republicans will together have to wrest the state away from people who believe they rule by right of inheritance, and give it back to a nation that still believes that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that the purpose of government is to serve the nation\u2014not to enrich an oligarchic clan.<\/p>\n

Read more A Tough Day for NPR<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you don\u2019t believe in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, celebrating it is difficult.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ideas"],"yoast_head":"\nBlood and Soil Aren\u2019t What Binds America Together - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=986\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Blood and Soil Aren\u2019t What Binds America Together - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If you don\u2019t believe in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, celebrating it is difficult.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=986\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-01T11:40:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=986#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=986\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"Blood and Soil Aren\u2019t What Binds America Together\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-01T11:40:25+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=986\"},\"wordCount\":1344,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=986#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/55579a234264962cde163341a1a12acb.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Ideas\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=986#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=986\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=986\",\"name\":\"Blood and Soil Aren\u2019t What Binds America Together - 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