Christmas with the Presidents
Jerry Newcombe
Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance made quite a splash with his speech at the RNC earlier this month. Vance stated that America is not simply an idea—it is a nation. America is not an abstract concept—it is a nation of flesh-and-blood people who have shared history upon this land and, likewise, share a future here.
You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty—things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.
Vance illustrated this point with a moving description of his family history, along with the struggles they faced and the pride they had in our nation. He concluded, speaking of his desire to eventually be buried in his family cemetery:
Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.
Now. Now 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 abstractions, but they will fight for their home. And if this movement of ours is going to succeed, and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first.
The response to Vance’s comments has been as ridiculous as they are shrill. One MSNBC host said that Vance’s comments were indicative of his belief in the “supremacy of whiteness and masculinity” because he hoped to be buried in his family plot, not in “San Diego which is where his wife is from and where her Indian parents are from.” (The white supremacy charge will be a common one—no surprise there. Another MSNBC contributor said that Vance, the father of three half-Indian children, is pro-family because it is part of the “authoritarian playbook” and code for “more white children.”).
The Atlantic said that Vance’s characterization of America as a people rather than an idea,
[is] much more sinister than perhaps it sounds at first listen. If America is a creedal nation, then anyone can be an American. But if real Americans are those who share a specific history, then some of us are more American than others.
That is to say, the reason Vance’s comments are terrifying is because they suggest that our government is responsible to particular people—its natural born citizens—and not others. But, of course, that is exactly the case—and this idea of America as a particular people is fully enshrined in our founding documents.
The Declaration of Independence states, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed… to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The entire basis of government as construed by our founders is the affirmative consent of the governed. Indeed, the very justification for declaring independence was that, “[I]t is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish [government], and to institute new Government” whenever their leaders act in a manner that is “destructive” of the “Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness” of their living and actual constituents.
This notion of representative rule is a biblical principle. All legitimate rule and authority is representative and covenantal authority. Theologically, we speak of Adam as the “federal head” of the human race; when we are represented by Adam, we remain fallen in our sinful nature that derives from him. By faith in Christ, Christians are transferred out of the fallen Adamic race, receiving Christ as our new federal head. Likewise, the Bible speaks of heads of household, the high priest, the king, etc., as representatives of those under their sphere of particular influence—their family or tribe, or the nation. As Samuel Rutherford describes at length in Lex Rex, the Bible regularly affirms the idea that while God anoints a man king, it is the people who make men kings through their consent (e.g. 1 Chron. 12:38).
As such, our Protestant founders established representative rule in the United States, where the President, as Federal Executive, is the chief agent tasked with pursuing the good of his people on the world stage. The President is empowered by the consent of the states and animated toward pursuing their immediate good. Nations, properly speaking, are more like bodies than ideas, and the whole body thrives or dies together. A government that only acts to extract vitality from its own people is like an autoimmune disorder, where a body wars against itself. A government that seeks to uplift all others but their own populace is an illegitimate, tyrannical government.
A government that seeks to uplift all others but their own citizens is an illegitimate, tyrannical government.
The reality is that America has, from the first, been a distinctly Christian and Protestant nation, and not a secularist nation of universal ideals. The ideals represented in the Constitution and displayed in the character of our founding states are not universal ideals in any real sense; their very presence is the specific fruit of Christian theological reflection over the course of a millennium.
No nation’s ideals arise in a vacuum; they are the reflection of the actual lives of the people who constitute that nation. Our nations are us—not ideas that are distinct from us. France is France because of the French. Italy is Italy because of the Italians. Japan is Japan because of the Japanese. This is why the particular ideals enshrined in the American system are distinct from every other nation—no one but us would have done what we did.
Even militant secularists like Richard Dawkins are coming to recognize this; after spending his life seeking to dismantle any faith in God, Dawkins is now arguing in favor of cultural Christianity due to the rising Islamic population in the U.K. Dawkins understands that Islam shares few of the Christian ideals that have been the basis of British life. He’s realized that ideals are not abstract from the people. He’s right to fear—a nation that turns from the Lord Jesus to Muhammad for guidance in organizing civic life will look radically different. This is obviously true.
It is for this reason that the “America as an idea” concept which undergirds the multiculturalism regime that holds sway in the West must be rejected—and why our current governments are so terrified of the rise of populist, nationalist movements. Our governments have all become more concerned with “global citizenship” and globalist money-changing than they are with securing the actual good of their own constituents. This means any rising nationalist consciousness—peoples recognizing themselves as distinct nations and pursuing their own particular good—must be cast as dangerous, framing this as Hitlerian and fascistic.
Donald Trump is a racist demagogue because he wants to build a wall to stem the tide of illegal immigration, which has detrimental effects on US citizens. French politician Marine Le Pen is a fascist because she recognizes that the mass migration of Muslim men has been a net negative for France as a whole. Viktor Orban is a Nazi precisely because he has sought to secure the good of the Hungarian people rather than acquiesce to the mass migration policies of the rest of Western Europe.
A clear pattern emerges here: the only people who have a right to identify as a specific people and to act for their own, particular good, are those who do not have a Western European heritage. The French cannot advocate for the French; Hungarians cannot advocate for Hungarians; and the natural-born citizens of the United States cannot be allowed to advocate for themselves, either. This is the perspective of Western governments, even as 70% of Europeans believe their countries are taking in far more immigrants than their countries can handle.
As Stephen Wolfe said in his recent lecture on the failures of multiculturalism at the New Christendom Press conference, we have made America a
no-place—a geographic space, an economic zone for any and all… [For] those who trace our ancestry to Western Europe, whose roots [in the United States] extend beyond the Immigration Act of 1965 and Ellis Island, and [who] unite to this soil… we are not permitted in this New America to have a people or a place that is distinctly ours… [T]he country that our ancestors built is no longer for us.
So too with the rest of Western Europe.
Because of this ahistorical vision of the United States, our government, like a leech, has grown to treat the natural citizens of our country as hosts, extracting every possible economic resource from us in order to divert those resources to non-citizens and foreign governments. As of April 2024, we have given $175 billion to Ukraine. From 2012 to 2022, the U.S. gave out $640 billion in foreign aid. Heck, it’s only just being reported that we even accidentally gave $239 million dollars to the Taliban due to a “failure of vetting” by the State Department. If we are giving so much money away, one would expect that the United States is booming economically. In reality, 76% of all income taxes collected in June of this year was spent on interest payments on our $35 trillion dollars of debt.
The White House regularly speaks of the great job creation and booming economic development they are overseeing. But when one actually looks at employment statistics since July 2018, native born citizens saw a net of zero job growth. Indeed, the only increase in employment went to immigrants, legal and illegal. Yet, while all the jobs have gone to immigrants, 51% of “immigrant-led” households receive one form of welfare or another—a figure that increases to 76% if that household includes children. This far exceeds the number of natural-born citizens receiving welfare.
Residents in Chicago recently protested their local government, rightly outraged that their community facilities were being shut down and millions of dollars of local resources were being diverted to house and support illegal aliens. In the midst of a housing crisis affecting the entire country, one would think a key pillar in achieving affordable housing for citizens would be in reversing the flow of illegal residency and approving new construction of housing. Instead, cities are building apartment complexes exclusively for use by immigrants, whose rent is also paid for with tax funding.
We are told that things are going well simply because the stock market is up and jobs appear to be increasing. But these macroeconomic measures don’t reflect the economic health of the citizens for whom our government bears exclusive responsibility; instead, all they show is that replacement migration is working to prop up our economy as citizens themselves experience the negative impacts. They tell us the great replacement is a conspiracy, but feel free to peruse the 177 page UN document on using replacement migration as a solution to aging populations and low birth rates.
How severe is the problem of immigration? A recent study by Yale has argued that the number of illegal aliens living in our country is over twenty-two million people, which is double the official government estimates. To put that into perspective, only California, Texas, and Florida have populations exceeding twenty-two million. (Important to note, this study was conducted before the recent term of the Biden administration which has allowed millions more to enter).
The presence of millions of aliens within our country has significant political ramifications. Because we do not differentiate between illegals and citizens in our census, this means that the states with the most illegals will see expanded electoral college votes, along with additional seats in the House of Representatives. Based on the 2020 census, each House seat represents approximately 761,000 people, meaning that twenty-two million illegal aliens represent twenty-eight additional electoral college votes and seats in the House.
If we are going to counter the continued economic and social degradation our country is facing, we must reclaim a deep sense of ourselves as a people, not as an abstract idea. And we have every right to demand that our government recognize their particular, covenantal duties to us, their patrons. The government of the United States exists for the good of the people of the United States, and no other.
We, the natural born citizens of these United States, are the basis of all legitimate governing authority in our nation.
We, as a people, have a right to pursue our particular good within the bounds of our homeland.
We, as a people, are not morally obligated to accept the complete transformation of our society and electorate through the program of replacement migration being perpetrated against us by our own government.
We, as a people—and the neighbors we’ve been called to love—do not exist to have our resources extracted from us and our livelihoods diminished in order to bankroll the lives of non-citizens here and abroad.
And it is not racist to say so.
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