The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Problem with the Propositional Nation ｜ 7⧸24⧸24

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00:00:30.440 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.300 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:34.320 I am Oren McIntyre.

00:00:37.560 J.D. Vance was announced, obviously, as Donald Trump's vice presidential pick.

00:00:44.140 Many people didn't expect this.

00:00:45.800 Vance wasn't on some people's radar.

00:00:47.940 He doesn't secure some kind of obvious advantage for a lot of people.

00:00:52.760 He doesn't bring you necessarily the swing states that some people were hoping for.

00:00:58.080 Or he's not somebody from a minority group that could shore up Trump's chances to win over a certain percentage of people who don't often vote for the Republican Party.

00:01:09.980 He does, in some ways, show you that being a senator from Ohio and the fact that he kind of shores up some of that rust belt.

00:01:17.540 He does identify with a certain percentage of Americans that are part of the Republican base.

00:01:23.540 But he doesn't add to the ticket in the way that some vice presidents are meant to do.

00:01:28.400 And you really have two styles of vice presidential picks.

00:01:31.540 You have vice presidential picks who are chosen because they fill in some hole that the candidate is lacking.

00:01:39.320 You saw this from Mike Pence when Donald Trump ran the first time.

00:01:43.940 However, Mike Pence turned out to be less popular by the end of Donald Trump's administration with the evangelical Christians that he was supposed to shore up for Donald Trump.

00:01:53.560 And Donald Trump actually ended up being far more popular.

00:01:56.820 However, that's one strategy.

00:01:59.620 The vice president brings a state.

00:02:02.100 He brings a demographic.

00:02:03.500 He smooths over some kind of strategic error that the candidate would have, some hole in that candidate's appeal.

00:02:12.800 The other version of this, of course, is kind of the Dick Cheney style pick of vice president, someone who is going to bring some level of practical knowledge or political cunning.

00:02:25.840 Now, I think that J.D. Vance doesn't fit in either one of these.

00:02:29.720 He does have a certain level of political cunning, practical knowledge.

00:02:33.080 But I think more importantly, J.D. Vance represents a direction that Trump's ideology might be moving towards.

00:02:43.660 Trump really doesn't have necessarily an ideology.

00:02:47.680 That's one of his advantages is that as a non-ideological actor, he often is able to choose outside the box things that wouldn't be popular otherwise.

00:02:57.140 With a highly ideological, say, neoconservative establishment inside the Republican Party.

00:03:03.740 He can say things about trade.

00:03:05.180 He can say things about foreign wars.

00:03:07.440 He can say things about immigration because he's not ideological.

00:03:11.160 But eventually, the general American first principles that he's talking about do coalesce around a movement, a direction that you're going.

00:03:19.980 These are the sets of things that, at least for now, benefit Americans or would seem to benefit Americans long term.

00:03:27.580 They're going to put America first.

00:03:29.480 And Vance seems to fit into a lot of that.

00:03:32.680 Vance has economic protectionist policies.

00:03:36.480 He's somebody who resists foreign wars, at least when it comes to Ukraine, a little less on Israel.

00:03:42.760 I wish he was more uniform on all foreign wars as much as possible.

00:03:46.380 But that is something that he generally opposes.

00:03:50.260 He opposes, obviously, open borders.

00:03:53.100 So in many ways, he mirrors a lot of Trump's concern and things that Trump wants to see that will better the lives of Americans.

00:04:02.140 But the final thing that J.D. Vance did was talk about the nation as a people.

00:04:10.160 And this is something that uniformly seemed to scare a lot of commentators.

00:04:14.980 Now, don't get me wrong.

00:04:16.220 There were commentators who had problems with him on the left and the right for many reasons.

00:04:20.760 You had the Vox talking about how J.D. Vance was a naked authoritarian.

00:04:27.680 You can see the post from The Atlantic here up on the screen.

00:04:31.520 Excuse me.

00:04:33.260 About how J.D. Vance is very dangerous because he thinks of the nation as a real people instead of an idea.

00:04:40.260 You had guys on the right, like the National Review crowd, Dan McLaughlin, Eric Erickson.

00:04:49.080 Kind of very funnily, he commented, oh, no, J.D. Vance.

00:04:53.540 You know, he shows that the Reaganites lost and the Buchananites won.

00:04:57.800 Well, awesome.

00:04:58.840 You don't have to sell me on the guy.

00:05:00.460 But, yeah, that would be it would be great if the Buchananites had won something.

00:05:03.820 However, my friend Jeremy Carl was quick to point out that Buchanan himself was a Reaganite.

00:05:09.560 He worked in the Reagan administration and simply tried to hold true a lot of principles that had otherwise been discarded or mutated over time by the Republican Party,

00:05:22.020 who was creating the zombie Reagan rather than anything close to the actual organic coalition of Ronald Reagan, which included the moral majority, the religious right and many others.

00:05:34.300 You know, I think Reagan is far from the deity that many Republicans hold him up to be.

00:05:39.600 But he's obviously a president who I think ultimately did a lot of good, you know, being presiding over the fall of the Soviet Union,

00:05:47.820 whether you're entirely responsible for that or not, is enough to go ahead and put you up there pretty high on the list of solid presidents.

00:05:55.560 But Buchanan is, you know, is is obviously somebody who came out of that revolution.

00:06:00.920 And the fact that Erickson said, oh, well, now it's the Buchanan strain of this that is dominant.

00:06:07.140 Fantastic. Right. Good. Good news.

00:06:08.900 Couldn't be happy to hear this. Charles Koch, another one of these guys from the National Review, had a lot of problems with J.D. Vance, said he was just unelectable.

00:06:16.320 Again, didn't understand the purpose of Vance on that ticket.

00:06:19.940 Vance represents the possible future of the project, puts somebody behind Trump that is theoretically at least scarier than Trump for the left.

00:06:29.540 And as we can, we're going to see from many of these articles that we're going to talk about today.

00:06:33.800 But what they're really scared about, again, is Vance's assertion that America is not just an economic zone.

00:06:41.520 It's not just a collective collection of ideas. It's not just a propositional nation.

00:06:46.240 It's a real nation. It's a real people.

00:06:49.240 This is something that was very scary to both the left and the right.

00:06:52.560 Ben Shapiro also, I wouldn't say was scared, but at the very least was hesitant, concerned, confused about the way that Vance posed the idea of America as a real nation.

00:07:05.620 So what I want to do today is dive into a couple of clips, understand a little bit what each of these people were talking about, why they opposed Vance's idea of America as an actual nation and not just a collection of ideas, not just a proposition.

00:07:21.420 But and I also want to go ahead and explain the problems with the concept of the propositional nation.

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00:08:48.700 So like I said, there were many people who were worried about J.D. Vance, scared about J.D. Vance, hesitant about J.D. Vance as the pick for Donald Trump's VP.

00:09:00.600 Now, the left have to demonize everybody, right?

00:09:02.540 So it didn't matter who he picked.

00:09:05.200 You know, he could have picked Martin Luther King Jr.

00:09:07.360 He could have picked Jesus. 0.65

00:09:08.820 He could have picked Gandhi.

00:09:10.260 He could have picked anybody.

00:09:11.960 It didn't matter.

00:09:13.140 They would have gone after him.

00:09:14.300 They would have tried to destroy whoever Donald Trump had put in the vice presidential slot. 0.82

00:09:19.920 But it's interesting that there was a consistent theme about J.D. Vance.

00:09:24.760 There was a lot of things they didn't like.

00:09:26.000 They talked about, you know, his attitude, his demeanor, where, you know, maybe he's not really a hillbilly.

00:09:32.900 Maybe he didn't really grow up poor, all this stuff, right?

00:09:35.700 They tried to denigrate his life story, everything about him.

00:09:40.580 But one thing that consistently came up across both left and right, like I showed you in that Atlantic article at the beginning,

00:09:47.180 was the idea that there was something dangerous about America as a nation.

00:09:53.380 There is something dangerous about the idea that America is a people united together with a shared identity, a shared past, and a shared future.

00:10:04.020 Specifically in the Atlantic article, they talked about how he gets rid of pluralism, how he may vaguely gesture towards pluralism,

00:10:12.100 but ultimately he really wants to go ahead and create this very sinister situation where there are certain people that belong in America and certain people who don't, that kind of thing, right?

00:10:22.380 And again, this was echoed through a lot of different commentators.

00:10:27.080 This was a very common criticism of Vance, and his kind of assault on the propositional nation seemed to rile some feathers across both aisles.

00:10:36.500 So I want to begin here with a clip from Alice Wagner of MSNBC.

00:10:40.280 We're going to see that Vance and his identifying America as a place where people belong is a problem for her, of course,

00:10:48.120 along with the fact that he's both white and male, the worst things that could ever exist in all of it. 1.00

00:10:54.960 Six generations of his family are buried, and his hope is that his wife and he are eventually laid to rest there,

00:11:02.980 and their kids follow them.

00:11:05.220 And I sort of understand the idea of sharing the burial plot, but it also reveals someone who believes that the history that the family should inherit,

00:11:13.760 and indeed the history that should be determinative in the story of the Vance family,

00:11:18.940 is the history of the Eastern Kentucky Vances.

00:11:21.180 So her first problem is the idea that J.D. Vance and his family have a history.

00:11:30.400 They exist somewhere specific.

00:11:33.120 They're not deracinated people.

00:11:35.600 They're not people who suddenly arrived, but they have roots in the United States and have been here for a long time.

00:11:42.100 And so therefore, if the Vances are going to be buried anywhere, once he and his wife eventually pass, 0.79

00:11:50.420 hopefully many, many years down the road, and his children and everyone else in his family,

00:11:55.240 they will be buried in a common place.

00:11:58.140 Now, down south, this isn't universal to all people in the United States, I guess,

00:12:04.980 but this is a very common thing for a lot of people who are connected to tradition and history.

00:12:09.880 Where your people are buried matters.

00:12:13.860 The graveyard where your people are buried signifies something about your identity,

00:12:20.020 where you're from, where you grew up, how the land has shaped you,

00:12:24.820 how your history has shaped you, how your heritage has shaped you.

00:12:29.360 These are all things that matter to people who have been from a particular place,

00:12:34.920 and they understand this with a certain degree of ownership.

00:12:37.920 This is not new to the United States.

00:12:40.720 It's not specific to Western white culture, I guess.

00:12:44.500 This goes back to many different traditions.

00:12:48.120 Indo-European civilizations, including ancient Greeks and Romans,

00:12:52.700 before they had kind of the pantheon we're familiar with,

00:12:56.260 had a level of ancestor worship that was specifically tied to where their parents were buried,

00:13:01.780 where their families were buried.

00:13:02.940 It was believed that you had property rights, not because you had the right to sell that property,

00:13:07.940 not for any kind of economic gain, but property rights were mainly recognized,

00:13:12.640 as opposed to other traditions like certain Germanic tribes,

00:13:16.680 which would often shuffle the land that someone controlled.

00:13:19.900 Same thing often with, say, Russian peasantry.

00:13:23.100 But in these cultures, it was tied specifically to the family and the property

00:13:29.640 because that's where your family was buried, and that's where you live.

00:13:34.320 That's where if you wanted to honor or worship,

00:13:36.840 if you wanted to give offerings to dead family members,

00:13:40.400 you had to be on the land wherever they were buried,

00:13:42.600 where the graveyard was matter.

00:13:44.600 So this is an ancient idea.

00:13:48.000 This is deeply buried inside humanity.

00:13:52.820 And so it's very normal for J.D. Vance to want his family to be buried in the same place,

00:13:59.740 to carry on that tradition, to be identified not just with some random set of ideas,

00:14:06.640 but saying, this is a plot of land where my people have always been,

00:14:10.760 where even if we move other places, we travel, different things about our lives change,

00:14:17.200 there's a calling back to this area because we are not just some random deracinated people.

00:14:24.060 And not the Vances from San Diego, which is where his wife is from and where her Indian parents are from.

00:14:29.380 But in America, it doesn't always have to be the white male lineage that defines the family history,

00:14:36.420 that that branch of the tree supersedes all else.

00:14:39.240 And I just think the construction of this notion reveals a lot about someone who fundamentally believes

00:14:45.980 in the supremacy of whiteness and masculinity.

00:14:49.440 Yeah. See, if you have any idea of heritage, if you're familiar with the history of your family,

00:14:56.820 if your family has been here more than a generation or two,

00:14:59.680 and you're tied specifically to the land where your family was from,

00:15:04.400 rather than, I don't know, traveling to a distant country and burying yourself or your children there when you die or whatever,

00:15:11.760 if you're tied to this nation, if you're a person in a nation,

00:15:16.560 then, you know, obviously evil white supremacy, right?

00:15:19.700 This kind of unveils the deep bias inside J.D. Vance.

00:15:24.140 He's a very terrible person for understanding that there is a continuity of culture and a continuity of heritage that matters.

00:15:33.280 And it does a lot to define who he is as a person, who his children will be, what his nation will be.

00:15:41.420 But, of course, this is a huge problem, right?

00:15:43.420 You should never favor that.

00:15:44.920 You should never understand that.

00:15:46.500 You should never make any connection to that.

00:15:48.280 And doing so is very nefarious.

00:15:51.280 Now, like I said, this bounced all over the spectrum.

00:15:54.680 There were people on the left.

00:15:56.260 There are plenty of people on the left who had this criticism.

00:15:59.420 But there's also some people on the right who had a problem with this.

00:16:03.540 I want to go ahead and bring up Ben Shapiro here, who is another person who, like I said,

00:16:08.860 he's not hostile to J.D. Vance in this, but he just seems befuddled.

00:16:12.180 The guys in the National Review were actually more aggressively anti-J.D. Vance.

00:16:17.760 I wouldn't say that Shapiro is actively anti-J.D. Vance in what he's talked about,

00:16:26.260 but he doesn't seem to agree with him on certain points, including economic protectionism,

00:16:32.360 the reasons for border security.

00:16:34.480 It was a very strange, nuanced position.

00:16:36.660 He's like, well, you should only make economic arguments for border security,

00:16:40.480 which I guess will lead us into this clip,

00:16:42.860 because if you only think the arguments or if you think all the best arguments for border security

00:16:47.320 are economic, then yes, maybe you would miss what Vance is trying to say here.

00:16:53.040 But let me go ahead and bring up Ben Shapiro's clip.

00:16:56.460 Getting a lot of attention.

00:16:57.740 All right.

00:16:58.020 So he's going to talk about Vance's speech here.

00:17:00.480 So we'll play a little bit at a time because he's going to play the speech.

00:17:03.340 So you want to hear the speech and then his reaction to it.

00:17:06.800 I'll say that the speech that Vance is going to give here,

00:17:10.720 the clips he's going to play from the speech at the Republican National Committee

00:17:14.860 are very similar to the speech that I heard from Vance when I was speaking at NatCon 4.

00:17:24.160 So there's a couple of reasons for that.

00:17:26.680 Probably these are familiar themes for Vance.

00:17:29.080 But also, I'm not sure that Vance was the pick before Trump got shot.

00:17:32.620 I'll never know for sure.

00:17:34.320 But I probably won't unless they come out and just say it directly.

00:17:37.440 But my hunch is that that was not necessarily the case,

00:17:40.060 that he was one of the finalists for many of the reasons I had stated.

00:17:45.360 But once Trump got shot, he recognized the importance of having a successor.

00:17:50.980 You couldn't just slot Marco Rubio or Tim Scott or somebody like that in there.

00:17:55.820 You needed somebody who was not just going to pick up a certain demographic or a certain state.

00:18:01.380 You needed an ideological successor.

00:18:03.740 You needed somebody who scared the left so they knew that if for some reason

00:18:07.900 or somehow they managed to get another guy to take a shot at Trump,

00:18:11.840 there would still be somebody behind him that was maybe worse for the left.

00:18:16.740 You need to get an insurance policy, basically.

00:18:19.740 And J.D. Vance is that insurance policy on multiple levels.

00:18:22.580 I know plenty of people are skeptical about J.D. Vance.

00:18:26.540 I think he's a good pick.

00:18:28.400 But this is not my apology tour for Vance.

00:18:30.780 I'm not here to praise him.

00:18:32.320 I want to get into the propositional nation part.

00:18:35.060 So we will talk about J.D. Vance's speech.

00:18:38.240 But the focus here is not necessarily going to be on him as a candidate

00:18:41.600 or his actual loyalty to Trump or some kind of the MAGA movement, any of these things.

00:18:48.240 Though I can also talk about that.

00:18:49.860 But I think the main thing that I want to focus on here is why the propositional nation

00:18:55.960 seems to be a problem for many people, both left and right.

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00:20:27.960 All right.

00:20:28.520 So like I said, Ben's going to play a little bit of this speech,

00:20:30.840 and it's very similar to the one that I heard at NatCon,

00:20:33.220 not just because this is a theme for Vance,

00:20:36.220 but also because I think he was just selected very close to this

00:20:39.660 and may not have had other remarks ready to go.

00:20:42.420 But let's go ahead and hear what Ben thinks about J.D. Vance's speech.

00:20:47.600 Vance's speech is getting a lot of attention, is his point,

00:20:50.060 and it was also made by the World War II veteran who spoke yesterday,

00:20:52.360 that America is not just an idea, it's a homeland,

00:20:54.280 which, of course, is absolutely true.

00:20:56.460 Here is Senator Vance last night.

00:20:58.700 America is not just an idea.

00:21:03.540 It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.

00:21:08.240 It is, in short, a nation.

00:21:11.700 Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers.

00:21:15.020 But when we allow newcomers into our American family, 1.00

00:21:18.480 we allow them on our terms.

00:21:20.240 People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

00:21:25.000 And if this movement of ours is going to succeed,

00:21:28.920 and if this country is going to thrive,

00:21:31.140 our leaders have to remember that America is a nation

00:21:34.500 and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first.

00:21:40.420 Okay, now, again, I agree with everything he's saying.

00:21:43.020 I'm just not sure what he's arguing against.

00:21:45.280 Because, obviously, America is a nation.

00:21:48.920 I'll go ahead and just let Ben know what he's arguing against here.

00:21:53.600 He's arguing against something that we hear over and over again,

00:21:56.860 which is the idea that America is fundamentally a set of ideas or principles.

00:22:04.560 That America is essentially a dream,

00:22:07.340 to take the words from another famous hero of the left and modern right.

00:22:12.940 Less so the left now, I guess.

00:22:14.600 But the point being is it's very common for the United States to be portrayed

00:22:20.720 as this place where people can come and join as long as they go ahead and adhere to an idea.

00:22:29.380 It's the ideas that matter.

00:22:31.580 Hence, the propositional nation.

00:22:33.840 We have a set of propositions that we believe in as a nation.

00:22:38.780 And if you agree to those, then you are American.

00:22:44.040 You can become American.

00:22:45.920 Now, this idea of a propositional nation has a number of implications,

00:22:51.680 many of which bear themselves out in negative ways,

00:22:55.340 have a negative impact on the way that America understands itself,

00:22:59.420 understands its role in the world.

00:23:01.280 So these are huge issues that can develop when you do not understand yourself as a nation,

00:23:09.120 as a people, and instead as a collection of ideologies,

00:23:14.320 a set number of academic exercises that define who you are.

00:23:19.460 If you just go ahead and recite those things, then suddenly you are an American.

00:23:24.520 America is much more than that.

00:23:26.060 And we'll go into that in a second.

00:23:27.640 But I'm just going to go ahead and define for Ben what J.D. Vance is actually talking about here.

00:23:34.260 France is also a nation.

00:23:35.340 Poland is also a nation.

00:23:36.900 And when he says that America is a land, yes, so is literally every other land.

00:23:41.940 That's true.

00:23:42.320 And America happens to be the best land.

00:23:43.700 I mean, it's absolutely incredible.

00:23:45.160 It's the best land and it's the best nation.

00:23:46.560 But why?

00:23:48.420 Why?

00:23:49.020 And the answer is the idea that's connected to those things.

00:23:51.040 So he says that America...

00:23:51.640 So Ben says something here that is really untrue and gets to the heart of the problem.

00:23:57.700 And I think also creates confusion for him when he's trying to understand what Vance is trying to say.

00:24:02.420 He says that, you know, yes, America is a land, but, you know, France is a land.

00:24:07.400 It's a country.

00:24:08.300 There's all these other countries.

00:24:09.980 There's plenty of land around.

00:24:11.960 And that's just, you know, how the world works.

00:24:15.500 And so there's plenty of land.

00:24:17.320 And the only thing that makes the United States the best land, it's the reason because he asserts this is the best land.

00:24:22.700 But it's the ideas in that land that matters.

00:24:25.600 The ideas that matter.

00:24:27.220 No.

00:24:28.180 Wrong.

00:24:28.800 Okay.

00:24:29.500 So there's something that we need to break down first.

00:24:32.100 And the first thing we need to break down is a connection that a lot of people make that is very modern.

00:24:39.560 Okay.

00:24:39.920 When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners?

00:24:49.560 Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag. 1.00

00:24:52.500 Is that from Winners?

00:24:53.700 Ooh.

00:24:54.340 Or that beautiful silk skirt.

00:24:56.240 Did she pay full price?

00:24:57.460 Or those suede sneakers?

00:24:59.040 Or that luggage?

00:25:00.140 Or that trench?

00:25:01.280 Those jeans?

00:25:01.960 That jacket?

00:25:02.700 Those heels? 1.00

00:25:03.560 Is anyone paying full price for anything?

00:25:06.520 Stop wondering.

00:25:07.780 Start winning.

00:25:08.340 Winners.

00:25:09.100 Find fabulous for less.

00:25:10.940 The nation state, as we understand it, the Westvalian order, as we understand it, is relatively new.

00:25:17.980 It's only a few hundred years old, which in the range of history is not that long.

00:25:26.760 And because we are so used to the nation state, we understand these as the same thing.

00:25:33.860 This gets particularly difficult sometimes, unfortunately, for Americans because we call the regions of our country states because they used to be states.

00:25:44.840 They used to be their own governmental entities.

00:25:47.840 So we have a weird relationship with the word state.

00:25:51.640 Normally, state means the government and a nation means the people.

00:25:56.620 And the nation and the state are not the same thing through most of history.

00:26:01.960 For instance, you used to have city states.

00:26:05.920 And in a lot of ways, city states saw themselves as nations.

00:26:10.560 The peoples were confined only to really those who lived in or around a particular city.

00:26:16.260 Your level of social organization that was possible was often only the size of a city.

00:26:20.920 And so in that case, the nation, the people were the city and the city and the state were the same thing.

00:26:28.160 The government and the city were the same thing.

00:26:29.960 The government and the people were the same thing.

00:26:32.140 However, as human organization expanded, we started to get empires.

00:26:37.040 And empires meant that you had one state often, one set of government that is ruling many different peoples or nations.

00:26:49.260 And so the definition usually of an empire are nations, multiple nations ruled by one government, one state.

00:26:56.680 And now, not to get into the, we don't want to get into the weeds of like, yes, in a lot of empires, obviously, you had multiple sub-governments.

00:27:05.780 Often peoples were governed by their traditional kings who then just kicked things up to the empire.

00:27:11.460 All this is true.

00:27:12.820 Let's not get bogged down in that, though.

00:27:14.440 I'm just trying to give us a general understanding of a problem with the idea of the nation state as we understand it right now.

00:27:19.800 And so often, you know, a king, for instance, or an emperor would govern multiple peoples that would be brought under the rule of a particular government.

00:27:31.060 You often had peoples who sometimes saw themselves as individual and sometimes as one nation.

00:27:39.780 For instance, you know, Hellenic society, Greek society.

00:27:43.560 Originally, they only saw themselves as individual nation states, the Athenian and the Lacedaemonian, the Spartan.

00:27:52.100 They didn't see themselves as the same people in some ways.

00:27:55.780 They were very different peoples unless they were united against the Persians, in which case they understood that the Hellenic culture was different.

00:28:04.060 They were a nation in that way.

00:28:05.880 They were a people in that way.

00:28:07.460 And so they bound together to defend themselves against the Persians.

00:28:11.380 So this is not always a super solid concept.

00:28:15.640 It's not some hard border.

00:28:18.080 The idea of the nation, the people, can often shift and change a little bit.

00:28:24.120 It tends to have a lot of things determine it.

00:28:27.380 Of course, the heritage is a big one, but also language, religion.

00:28:32.860 In fact, Samuel Huntington focuses very much on religion as the key binding agent for civilizational blocks, which I think is a reasonable point. 1.00

00:28:44.420 The thing being is that the identity of nations can shift somewhat.

00:28:49.780 It's not hard built on just one thing.

00:28:52.640 It's not simply a relation, a familial relation.

00:28:56.560 It's not simply language.

00:28:58.700 It's not simply religion.

00:29:00.560 It's not simply folk ways.

00:29:02.460 But all of these things tend to define what a nation is.

00:29:06.860 And the idea that a nation and a state, that a nation and a government are the same thing, is not necessarily true throughout most of history.

00:29:16.920 It's relatively new.

00:29:18.400 In fact, one of the big things that happened after World War I and the dismantling of so many of these kingdoms was to create a lot of nation states, which seemed like a good idea at the time.

00:29:32.540 Every people gets its own state, and then every people has its own self-determination.

00:29:38.400 The nation and the state become the same thing.

00:29:41.400 You're a group of people.

00:29:42.460 You have a common language, a common heritage, a common culture, a common religion.

00:29:48.040 You see the world the same way.

00:29:49.760 And now you have self-determination because you're also a state.

00:29:52.560 So that is the nation state, right?

00:29:54.700 But what has happened is that now we have focused and we've created the state as the defining feature of what the actual people are.

00:30:07.080 And that is, ironically, in many ways, somewhat fascist.

00:30:12.840 I know, not to be too particular about the term, but it subordinates the identity into the state rather than the organic identity of the people.

00:30:23.100 And this is something that I don't think is super healthy.

00:30:27.600 This particularly becomes a problem when you try to identify the state with an ideology, with a proposition.

00:30:37.640 Because now what identifies you with a state or without a state is the propositions, the ideas of that state.

00:30:47.900 But that's not what happens for the vast majority of other countries.

00:30:50.980 A Frenchman is not a Frenchman because of his ideas, right? 0.99

00:30:55.060 Someone from Japan is not Japanese because of his principles. 0.99

00:30:59.820 Someone from, you know, I don't know, Saudi Arabia is not Saudi Arabian because simply because of their religion.

00:31:07.160 There are plenty of people who have their religion.

00:31:09.500 There's something more to this, right?

00:31:11.620 And so it's not just the ideas.

00:31:13.520 It's not even just a religion.

00:31:14.880 There's something beyond these things that matters when you're trying to identify a people.

00:31:20.540 But the problem is when you just say, well, all these other nations are just like the United States.

00:31:25.560 Well, no, they're not because you would identify those people as people from those nations.

00:31:30.400 But when you get to the United States, all of a sudden the United States is special because it has ideas.

00:31:36.120 Well, a lot of nations have ideas.

00:31:38.920 So let's delve a little deeper into Ben's confusion here, but we'll go deeper into the propositional nation.

00:31:45.100 America is not just an idea.

00:31:46.220 And of course, that's true.

00:31:47.620 I think the thing that he's arguing against, and here I agree with him.

00:31:50.440 I think the thing he's arguing against is this sort of abstracted idea that Joe Biden uses all the time where he says it's not who we are.

00:31:56.640 And what he means by that is it's not who the left is.

00:31:58.780 Hey, the attempt to universalize American values in the sense that they can either be exported to Iraq or imported from Guatemala.

00:32:07.600 That's silly.

00:32:08.500 And now I agree with Ben here entirely.

00:32:10.840 He's right.

00:32:11.460 That is silly.

00:32:12.280 The idea that these ideas are universal, that they can be exported to a foreign nation and build that nation like there's little Thomas Jefferson's and, you know, George Washington's running around Afghanistan or Iraq.

00:32:25.720 Or that we could just take any idea from another nation and bring it in with the people.

00:32:32.400 And then suddenly that becomes an American idea.

00:32:35.160 He's right.

00:32:35.580 That is ridiculous.

00:32:36.920 But the thing that Ben is saying reveals something deeper, even though he doesn't recognize it.

00:32:43.560 The thing Ben is saying says something important.

00:32:47.180 These ideas aren't universal for a reason because they don't apply to everyone.

00:32:53.640 If the ideas were universal, if it was just the ideas that made America the best, then you could just take the ideas somewhere else and make that country the best.

00:33:03.580 So if Afghanistan or France or, you know, Ethiopia went ahead and adopted America's ideas because they're the best ideas and that's what makes America the very best land, then those would become the very best land. 0.57

00:33:16.820 But he just says here that that's ridiculous.

00:33:19.760 And he's right.

00:33:20.500 It's ridiculous.

00:33:21.180 But that does not jive with the other things that he said.

00:33:24.400 He also points out that you can't just bring in ideas from other nations and then they suddenly become American.

00:33:31.340 And that's true.

00:33:32.000 But the reason he talks about Guatemala is he also knows that there's a lot of Guatemalans coming into the United States.

00:33:38.880 Those ideas are tied to people.

00:33:40.320 And what Ben is really explaining here is this very classically liberal idea that peoples are blank slates, that there's nothing particular about any group of people, that they don't carry with them any folk ways, traditions, any kind of heritage, ancestry, any kind of religion or any of these things.

00:34:02.380 They don't carry those things with them.

00:34:04.220 They're just blank slates.

00:34:05.280 And so, you know, the ideas are the only thing that matter, but they're not.

00:34:10.840 That can't be true for the very reason that Ben Shapiro just said.

00:34:15.000 He said it's ridiculous to believe that if we have the very best eyes in America and we take those very best ideas and put them into Iraq or we put them into Liberia or something, that all of a sudden it creates a perfect nation, just like the United States.

00:34:33.340 If that was true, then Liberia would have been great, right? 0.99

00:34:37.860 Because they copied so many of the ideas from the United States.

00:34:41.220 My buddy Ernst Van Zell from South Africa often points to the fact that the South African constitution has been called a masterpiece.

00:34:49.900 It has the very best ideas.

00:34:51.620 It makes all these amazing promises about what the country is going to be.

00:34:55.340 And South Africa is still a mess because the ideas are not enough.

00:35:00.100 It is not the ideas by themselves sealed away somewhere in the constitution of South Africa or the United States that makes the country what it is.

00:35:10.500 It was the people of the United States who went ahead and enshrined their way of being, their life, their understanding of who they were as a people into the constitution.

00:35:23.340 Those ideas look great because the people made them great.

00:35:28.200 Because the lifestyle of those people, that folk way, that moral vision, that understanding of who they were mattered.

00:35:36.260 And that is what formed the country.

00:35:38.300 The country is not an idea.

00:35:39.620 The country is not a proposition.

00:35:41.660 It's not the very best ideas.

00:35:44.020 And Ben Shapiro, after saying the country is the very best ideas, turns around and says, actually, it turns out it's not.

00:35:50.860 Because you can't just export those ideas.

00:35:52.820 That would be silly, which, of course, is correct.

00:35:54.960 But again, it just does not jive with his original explanation of what the problem he has with Vance's speeches.

00:36:02.780 It's wrong.

00:36:03.380 And I think that's what he is saying right there.

00:36:05.420 But when he says that people don't fight for ideas, obviously, that's not true.

00:36:08.040 So that's certainly not true.

00:36:10.940 I mean, I'm sorry.

00:36:11.980 The Cold War was a war of ideas.

00:36:13.480 It turns out it was not just a war of territories.

00:36:16.920 So this one's a little more hit miss.

00:36:18.160 I'll give him a little bit of this one.

00:36:19.500 People do die for ideas.

00:36:21.880 People absolutely die for ideas.

00:36:23.700 Now, I don't think that in general, most people who went to war for either the Soviet Union or for the United States in any given conflict did so for the ideology.

00:36:37.860 Like, yes, they said, oh, we're brothers, we're comrades.

00:36:42.680 You know, we're fighting for the glorious revolution of the Soviet Union.

00:36:46.880 You know, the Americans were fighting for liberal democracy.

00:36:49.760 We're fighting for freedom.

00:36:51.200 But you notice they both managed to, despite these very different ideologies and theory, fight the same enemy, which was the Axis powers, which was mainly, obviously, Germany and Italy and Japan.

00:37:04.940 And despite the fact that they had radically different ideas and ideologies, they still managed to fight.

00:37:11.040 And the Soviet Union lost way more people.

00:37:13.700 They lost way more people.

00:37:15.040 So were their ideas better?

00:37:16.640 Did they care more about their ideas?

00:37:18.400 Were they more dedicated to their ideas?

00:37:21.340 I don't really think so.

00:37:23.100 But the point is that there's something beyond those ideas that those people fought for.

00:37:27.560 Otherwise, they wouldn't have found a common enemy if their ideas are so radically opposed to each other that they later on created the Cold War, which,

00:37:34.940 to be fair, was more ideological.

00:37:37.060 Ben is right about that.

00:37:38.000 I'll get into that in a second.

00:37:39.300 But the idea that that's what they primarily fought for, I think, is just incorrect.

00:37:43.140 I think both sides fought for their homeland.

00:37:45.480 And whether you feel that their homelands were in danger or not, whatever, that's not the debate here.

00:37:51.040 The point being is they both believed, both of those nations and the people who sacrificed on their behalf believed that their nation mattered, that their people mattered, and that the safety and freedom and future of the people that they had at home mattered.

00:38:09.640 And so some of them were directly defending their homelands, and some of them were defending areas that they felt connected to because so many of, say, people in the United States felt the connection to Europe, felt a special relationship because so many of them had come from Europe.

00:38:25.240 But either way, they were most certainly not just dying for an idea.

00:38:30.020 Now, the Cold War was more ideological.

00:38:32.860 But again, I think this is more of an aberration.

00:38:35.400 And again, to appeal to Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations theory, one of the things he points out in that book is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we started to see a return to real politics again, the politics of who are we?

00:38:51.880 So that was a bigger question.

00:38:54.080 That was what everyone was trying to figure out.

00:38:56.540 And reminder, Samuel Huntington is a very mainstream, down-the-middle guy.

00:39:00.360 He's not some radical right guy, some radical historian on the right, some way-off political reactionary thinker.

00:39:08.400 He's somebody who held a chair at one of America's premier universities.

00:39:12.520 So this is a guy who's well-respected.

00:39:14.240 But his point was, the Soviet Union, the United States, they're kind of locking down the entire world around these two ideas of kind of capitalism versus communism. 0.85

00:39:27.300 That was a very particular moment in history that only lasted a few decades.

00:39:31.780 And then we started going back to what history has been through most of the centuries, which is more a question of who are we, what do we believe as a religion, what do we share as a culture, what is a civilization or our goals?

00:39:47.160 These are the things that people really return to.

00:39:49.760 And so once again, it's more about the people and the nation than it is the ideology.

00:39:54.700 So it's not correct to say no one dies for an idea, but I think it is correct to say that people rarely die just for an idea.

00:40:03.080 And that means that America, simply as an idea, is insufficient to go ahead and motivate people to go ahead and fight for the country.

00:40:11.540 And in case you were wondering if that's true, check out the military recruitment right now, particularly among heritage Americans.

00:40:18.920 People of European descent tend to now enter the military at a much lower level after everything that has been happening, especially them being demonized.

00:40:30.200 So America, as an idea, is no longer sufficient to motivate them.

00:40:35.240 They no longer feel part of the country.

00:40:38.340 It is not of their people anymore. 0.92

00:40:40.920 And so therefore, they are not as motivated to defend it.

00:40:43.860 The ideology itself, the ideas, the propositional nation is not sufficient.

00:40:48.920 To go ahead and motivate those enlistment numbers.

00:40:52.240 So I think there's plenty of evidence to point out that while Ben makes somewhat of a good point there on the, you know, not just the idea, ideas are not sufficient to explain the behavior of people here.

00:41:05.380 There is something much deeper in the nation.

00:41:07.040 Otherwise, it would be like most European wars, which are wars of territory.

00:41:10.280 Turns out that people fight for America fought a lot of wars of territory.

00:41:14.600 Sorry, but that's just ridiculous.

00:41:16.100 America fought a lot of wars of territory.

00:41:19.220 Sorry, but if you think like the Spanish-American war is a war of ideology, if you think the American, the Mexican-American war, these are wars of ideology.

00:41:26.900 I don't know what to tell you.

00:41:28.540 You know, yeah, there's some ideological window dressing on a lot of these.

00:41:31.980 But America fought plenty of wars of territory.

00:41:36.040 The idea that the only war that America has ever fought is the Cold War, the one, like, somewhat ideological war, which never even actually broke out to a hot war between the major combatants.

00:41:48.820 That's quite a bit of history that we are forgetting here.

00:41:52.820 Ideas all the time.

00:41:53.740 The idea is connected to the home.

00:41:55.400 That's what America, that's what makes America a nation.

00:41:59.800 So this is a very strange thing to say.

00:42:03.480 The idea is connected to the home, and that's what makes America a nation.

00:42:07.240 Again, why wouldn't that be true of any of those other nations?

00:42:11.240 And if the idea is connected to this home, could it not be connected to another home?

00:42:15.220 And if not, why?

00:42:16.100 Why can't I take these very best ideas and connect them to another country and make that country the United States?

00:42:24.280 Why can't I just take this over to Bangladesh and turn that into the United States? 1.00

00:42:29.680 What is stopping me?

00:42:31.480 What is the factor that I can't just export?

00:42:35.880 Because I can export the ideas, but it's not just the ideas.

00:42:40.200 The ideas are connected to a people.

00:42:42.860 The people live those ideas.

00:42:44.980 Those ideas came from those people.

00:42:48.440 It is part of their tradition.

00:42:50.140 It is part of their religion.

00:42:51.760 It is born of their language.

00:42:53.620 It is part of their heritage.

00:42:55.460 These are lived experiences tied to a specific way of being.

00:42:59.480 Now, J.D. Vance goes out of his way, correctly, in my estimation, to say that part of America

00:43:06.580 has always been the ability of some people to join the United States, to join us as a people.

00:43:14.980 And I know this is going to make some people angry, but historically, this is, of course, true.

00:43:20.140 A lot of societies are very closed, but there are usually some level at which people could join societies.

00:43:26.460 They could become part of a people.

00:43:28.080 A foreigner might be a foreigner when they first enter in a community.

00:43:31.840 And it would often take a multi-generational project to go ahead and have his family join if they wanted to.

00:43:40.080 That's the big difference, right?

00:43:41.860 Is today we act like you can just walk into the country, raise your hand, recite a couple of facts about the United States,

00:43:49.140 and boom, you're American.

00:43:50.440 You've touched the magic soil, you've said the magic words, everything is done.

00:43:54.940 But no, being part of a nation, being part of a people, again, is many things.

00:44:00.300 Heritage is one of them, but it's also language, it's also religion, it's also folkways, custom.

00:44:06.660 All of these things are what makes the people who they are.

00:44:09.540 And so if over several generations an immigrant is dedicated to becoming part of a new people, that can eventually happen.

00:44:22.300 They often have to intermarry, they have to join the religion, they have to know the language, 0.99

00:44:26.480 but most importantly, they have to live the life of the people who are in that region, the area, that nation for their entire lives,

00:44:36.500 and often their children, and their children's children also have to be kind of on the outside until they eventually integrate.

00:44:43.460 That's what real integration looks like.

00:44:45.320 Real integration is a multi-generational project.

00:44:49.020 And especially in the United States, where unfortunately we went very far down the road of this poisonous multicultural ideology. 1.00

00:44:57.140 If we're ever going to come back together as a people, we will need to have some level of understanding of assimilation and integration that will have to happen.

00:45:05.680 However, that assimilation has to be to something.

00:45:10.640 And it's not just an idea.

00:45:12.460 It's not just a set of ideas.

00:45:14.480 It is more than that.

00:45:15.700 It is religion, it is custom, it is language, and it is so much more.

00:45:20.300 And the only way you can do that is, again, by having a majority culture, a majority identity for people to go ahead and assimilate to.

00:45:28.780 If you don't have anything to assimilate to, if America is simply a list of things that I learned in civics class that I read out loud, then you can never have assimilation.

00:45:39.900 And the founding culture of the United States is undeniably both Anglo and Protestant.

00:45:45.440 Now, that does not mean that everyone in the United States was Anglo or Protestant, and it doesn't mean that many people who joined later were not able to go ahead and become American despite not being Anglo or Protestant.

00:46:01.220 But they had to go ahead and conform to this baseline understanding of an Anglo-Protestant United States.

00:46:09.500 That is who the American people were.

00:46:12.120 And that is how, even if you were, say, a Catholic coming in, you still had to understand this was going to be an Anglo-Protestant country, and it was going to go ahead and lead you in a particular direction.

00:46:22.860 It was going to live in a certain way.

00:46:24.540 Now, everyone, again, in the country is not entirely Anglo or Protestant.

00:46:28.160 I'm a Protestant, and I'm a little Anglo, but I'm also German and Irish and Native American.

00:46:35.360 These things, you know, it's not everybody, right?

00:46:38.120 Most Americans are not just those things.

00:46:41.040 But that was still the core of the American identity.

00:46:44.020 And if you want to go ahead and assimilate to the United States, you have to assimilate to that way of life.

00:46:50.740 And slowly over time, the different parts of you that aren't, you know, conforming to that culture do, because you get used to living in this way.

00:47:01.640 That's why the propositional nation is not sufficient.

00:47:05.640 It does not actually allow even immigrants to assimilate, because there is nothing for them to actually join.

00:47:12.580 You've destroyed the culture, telling people that all that matters is the ideology.

00:47:17.480 The ideology is the only thing that defines us.

00:47:19.760 And I think that's why Ben is confused here, because I think he believes in the propositional nation.

00:47:24.680 And so he's like, well, it's what the left says, that's not who we are, and that we can bring all these other things in.

00:47:29.980 But he never thinks about kind of the implications of what that means.

00:47:32.760 But let's play a little more here.

00:47:35.380 And I think that's what he's trying to say.

00:47:37.460 I hope that's what he's trying to say.

00:47:39.080 Because otherwise, I'm not sure what the exact kind of what is he arguing against?

00:47:45.180 That's really the question that I'm asking here.

00:47:46.820 And I know there are a lot of people online who are taking, like, significant pleasure in this particular line.

00:47:52.320 But it's obviously self-evident.

00:47:53.580 America is not just an idea.

00:47:55.400 It's actually not self-evident.

00:47:57.420 And in fact, many people in the conservative movement have been very clear that they don't think it's self-evident.

00:48:03.740 That they do think that America is simply a set of ideas.

00:48:06.860 That anyone can come in and join at any time.

00:48:09.180 And it doesn't matter as long as you go ahead and choose to be part of the nation, you choose the proposition, then the ideology, then you can be an American.

00:48:20.160 But here's the problem with the propositional nation.

00:48:22.820 And if you would like to, I'll give you the quick argument tip.

00:48:26.200 I don't usually do this.

00:48:27.080 But in 30 seconds, dismantle anybody who believes in the propositional nation.

00:48:32.500 When they tell you, okay, I believe in the propositional nation, America is an idea, America is a set of principles, not a nation in the European sense or anything like that.

00:48:44.940 But it's an ideology, whatever.

00:48:47.540 When they say that, when they say it's a propositional nation, it's a set of principles.

00:48:51.640 And anyone who goes ahead and agrees with those principles can join.

00:48:55.980 The first thing you ask them is, all right, well, what if those people don't agree with those principles?

00:49:00.840 What if there's someone here?

00:49:01.780 What if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, I don't believe in the principles anymore.

00:49:06.620 Can I deport her immediately?

00:49:09.460 What about all the blue-haired libs who don't agree with Ben on the principles of the United States?

00:49:15.660 Can we deport all of them?

00:49:18.620 Anybody who comes into the country and brings another country's flag, can I immediately deport them? 1.00

00:49:26.280 Like, if anybody changes a little bit of their ideology to no longer hold to the proposition of this nation, do we just expel them?

00:49:38.220 And the answer will uniformly be no.

00:49:40.380 Because one of our principles is that you have free speech and you have freedom of conscience and you can choose your ideology.

00:49:47.280 You can choose your belief system.

00:49:48.980 So you have a contradiction inside the heart of the propositional nation.

00:49:53.400 You can't have a propositional nation and say, well, the nation is just a set of ideas.

00:49:58.360 But also say, but one of those ideas is anybody can go ahead and, you know, crap on those ideas, discard these ideas at any time.

00:50:06.920 But they still get to hang out and be here.

00:50:08.940 Because what you're saying is, well, basically everyone's an American all the time.

00:50:12.800 The entire world is just, they're just potential Americans who just haven't crossed the border yet. 1.00

00:50:18.340 Because they don't need to hold the ideology of the United States.

00:50:21.660 And if they manage to hold it for 10 seconds and raise their hand and then immediately go back to living their lives with the beliefs and the principles and everything else of the foreign nation. 0.91

00:50:32.120 Well, it doesn't matter because they're already American and they're still here. 1.00

00:50:34.480 And this is a real problem because that is actually happening in the United States.

00:50:39.380 We have country, we have areas in this country where the flag is being switched basically to the Somali flag because of the number of people being imported into that area who still hold the identity of the countries they came from.

00:50:53.560 And when you are only a propositional nation, when you're a nation is just an idea or just a land with the best ideas, then you have no idea what's happening to you when you are being replaced.

00:51:06.840 When the federal government, as J.D. Vance pointed out in a speech later in that speech, brings in to a town of 60,000 people, 20,000 Somalis.

00:51:18.300 So 60,000 people live in the city and they drop 20,000 Somalis into that city. 0.79

00:51:25.660 I don't care if every one of those people loves the American dream, which they don't, to be clear.

00:51:31.960 That's not who got dropped there.

00:51:33.580 But every one of them holds to every idea of the propositional nation.

00:51:40.080 That entire community is fundamentally transformed.

00:51:43.240 Because even if those people do hold to those ideas, they have not lived them.

00:51:48.540 They have not lived the experience.

00:51:51.220 They have not become part of the community.

00:51:53.420 It is not their folkways.

00:51:54.680 It is not their traditions.

00:51:55.960 It is not their culture.

00:51:56.960 It is not their language.

00:51:58.440 It may not be their religion.

00:52:00.140 It is not their shared moral vision.

00:52:01.900 It certainly is not their shared history and heritage.

00:52:04.180 These are all things that actually make a nation what it is.

00:52:07.600 And instead, you're just like, well, maybe they've got the, you know, they read the Constitution one time.

00:52:12.420 They're great.

00:52:13.000 Good to go.

00:52:13.880 And 10 minutes later, if they say, oh, well, I don't agree in the proposition, they still get to stay here forever.

00:52:20.080 The propositional nation is a farce.

00:52:21.680 No one actually believes in it.

00:52:23.380 If you ask anybody what makes a people a people outside the United States, they will not tell you its ideas.

00:52:30.920 And if they tell you its ideas inside the United States and you ask them, well, what happens if someone stops believing in the ideas?

00:52:35.540 They immediately tell you, oh, well, our principles say they have to be able to stay here and disagree with us.

00:52:39.540 So nothing about this is correct.

00:52:41.880 And again, if we had a nation that was defined by our ideas and adherence to those ideas, that ironically would be the most fascist nation available.

00:52:52.640 Because it would subordinate identity and community to the ideology of the state, which is basically like the definition of this totalitarian central government that we don't want.

00:53:06.000 So the idea that everyone needs to adhere to this ideology, this proposition to maintain their citizenship, to maintain their membership in the community, is itself a terrifying and very anti-American way to understand us as a country, as a nation.

00:53:25.360 So let's play the rest here, just in case.

00:53:28.460 Lots of things are just an idea.

00:53:30.960 Quantum physics is just an idea.

00:53:32.800 It's not a nation.

00:53:33.620 It's not a home.

00:53:34.700 And obviously that's true.

00:53:36.200 Obviously that's true.

00:53:37.360 But the point of the American idea is even stated by J.D. Vance there, which is you can join.

00:53:42.020 If America were only a nation, or if it were only a home, how would you join it?

00:53:48.080 Again, that makes no sense.

00:53:50.340 Throughout history, plenty of people have joined nations.

00:53:53.600 Plenty of people have joined homelands.

00:53:56.560 Yes, homelands were for specific people, and it was difficult.

00:53:59.940 And often an outsider was not welcome right away.

00:54:02.640 But there are plenty of examples throughout history, across many different cultures and nations, where people join.

00:54:09.240 So the idea that, well, you can only join if it's an ideology, you can only join if it's an idea, well, that's not true.

00:54:15.380 That is simply not the case.

00:54:17.280 A basic familiarity with any point of history will tell you that's not how it works.

00:54:23.860 So asserting that, well, we have to be an ideological country if anyone's ever going to be able to join, that's just not the case.

00:54:29.800 And also, I would like to make it very clear, the ability of people to join the United States is not what makes it a good country or a moral country.

00:54:37.500 Now, I think it is possible for people to join.

00:54:39.300 I think it is possible for people to assimilate.

00:54:41.240 But a very small amount of people, if any at all, over generations, it should not be some instantaneous thing.

00:54:48.780 And it is not incumbent on the United States to be a place where everybody can join.

00:54:53.840 Sorry, no.

00:54:55.240 That's not how any other nation works.

00:54:58.020 That's not how any other nation exists.

00:55:01.440 And I'm sorry, but this aspect is not what makes America great.

00:55:05.380 America is not made great by everybody's ability to join ideology, ideologically.

00:55:10.460 And if that was the case, then you would simply be able to export that ideology to a foreign country, and it would be as great as the United States.

00:55:17.180 It simply does not hold.

00:55:18.780 There's too many factors involved.

00:55:20.760 It is not just an idea.

00:55:22.480 Obviously, he thinks you can join it, which means that the idea is very much in contention.

00:55:28.660 If what he means is like baseline patriotism, wave the flag, this land matters, it matters where I'm born and where I die.

00:55:34.160 Obviously agree.

00:55:35.280 Obviously agree.

00:55:37.160 I assume that's what he means by that.

00:55:38.860 Again, I think he means a lot more than that.

00:55:42.080 Hopefully, that's clarifying for people the problems with the propositional nation.

00:55:47.080 I think the points that Ben was missing here.

00:55:49.020 Again, I just thought this was interesting because across the spectrum, there are several different ways that Jay Vance was opposed.

00:55:58.560 But we saw this through line left and right about the problem of him approaching the nation as a real nation, as a real people, and not just an economic zone or an ideological community.

00:56:12.480 And I think that the confusion from Ben here really underlies, and again, he's not openly hostile to Vance.

00:56:19.700 That's not the issue.

00:56:21.340 It's not like a leftist who's screaming at Vance the whole time about his racism and sexism or whatever.

00:56:26.120 But the inability to kind of grasp Vance's point, or at least, you know, Ben's a pretty smart guy.

00:56:34.260 I've got a feeling he knows what Vance was hinting at.

00:56:37.360 But the fact that he's not addressing really what Vance was saying there, that's why I wanted to drill down into this.

00:56:43.360 Because I think it's important to go ahead and talk about what does make a nation.

00:56:48.360 Because as we try to figure this out, as we try to heal, hopefully, after the defeat of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, then I think it's critical to be able to identify what binds us together and what will allow us to heal if that's going to be able to happen.

00:57:04.300 All right, let's go ahead and move over to the questions of the people real quick here.

00:57:09.500 Creeper Weirdo says,

00:57:10.640 But if we're people, then we can't be an economic right zone and just freedoms all over the place.

00:57:16.520 We can't have that.

00:57:17.260 Yeah, I should have brought up also rights.

00:57:19.400 Good point there, Creeper Weirdo.

00:57:21.200 It's not just the economic zone.

00:57:23.120 It's also the rights zone.

00:57:24.740 Once you pass into America, you get all these rights.

00:57:27.500 And that's what makes you an American.

00:57:29.380 Again, those things are not, that's not how it works.

00:57:32.540 You don't suddenly obtain the rights by passing onto the magic dirt.

00:57:35.700 The rights were something that the American people demanded due to a long history that was attached to a particular way that they lived their lives and a tradition.

00:57:46.340 Should have gone into more explanation there.

00:57:50.400 Tiny Stupid Demon says, 1.00

00:57:51.900 The ancestors of all four of my grandparents settled in Western Virginia and North Carolina before the American Revolution.

00:58:00.220 I look forward to nothing less than total hillbilly victory.

00:58:03.800 Yeah, most of my family is from Tennessee and South Carolina.

00:58:06.920 So I hear you.

00:58:08.220 Let's see here.

00:58:09.500 Roberto says,

00:58:10.160 How could J.D. Vance care about a place and his family's place in it?

00:58:14.000 What a weirdo.

00:58:14.680 Am I right?

00:58:15.360 Yeah, that really does seem to be the consensus of people who were bringing charges against him.

00:58:23.780 He's always trying to test me here.

00:58:26.280 I can usually say this just fine.

00:58:29.000 Perspicacious heretic. 0.99

00:58:30.220 There we go.

00:58:31.000 People change what ideas they believe all the time.

00:58:33.800 The only thing that really doesn't change is where people live and where they tend to fight for.

00:58:39.000 Again, this is so much so true, right?

00:58:41.480 There's been large ideological shifts.

00:58:44.180 I mean, just think about the shift between czarist Russia and Soviet Russia, right?

00:58:50.080 That is literally the biggest revolution you can imagine.

00:58:53.020 The most radical change from kind of this peasant farmer society attached to this longstanding czar, that structure, that feudal structure into this kind of radical attempt at egalitarian modernization and centralization.

00:59:11.760 But they were still Russians. 0.66

00:59:14.560 I mean, obviously, Soviet Union exists, extend beyond Russia.

00:59:18.240 But you understand what I'm saying.

00:59:19.640 They continue to be the same peoples, even though they radically change their ideology.

00:59:24.840 And this is my problem, again, with the ideology trying to define what a nation is.

00:59:30.960 It simply does not make sense.

00:59:32.420 It's an abstraction that is only really foisted upon the United States over and over again.

00:59:39.120 Life of Brian says,

00:59:39.960 Is the GOP full of Vance?

00:59:41.880 Does Shapiro go full crystal?

00:59:44.540 You know, like I said, I feel like Shapiro was not openly hostile to Vance here.

00:59:52.580 Shapiro is a pretty traditional neoconservative.

00:59:56.880 You know, he has adjusted some of those opinions, I think, with the Times.

01:00:00.720 But, you know, he tends to have those beliefs.

01:00:03.640 But he has shown a willingness to kind of adapt and move the direction that the party or, you know, the right is going to some degree.

01:00:13.040 So he has all the objections you would think of Vance.

01:00:17.400 But I don't think he's going to go full Never Trumper crystal style.

01:00:22.100 There's a lot of these guys who kind of tend to get nervous.

01:00:25.440 They tend to act like they're going to bolt.

01:00:27.580 But they always kind of come back to home base.

01:00:29.280 And I feel that's kind of where Shapiro is on that.

01:00:36.580 Joshua Beebe says,

01:00:37.700 Ah, Ben Shapiro, the hero of the battle of.

01:00:39.880 He knows what inspires men to war.

01:00:42.460 Our intellectuals are eight cowards.

01:00:46.580 Our warriors need a place at the table. 0.68

01:00:49.640 Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, Ben is probably not a guy who's been involved in a lot of physical conflict.

01:00:57.900 But to be fair, I've never served in the military.

01:00:59.780 So I'm not here to rag on anybody for that.

01:01:03.080 I would say that ultimately you are right, though.

01:01:05.380 Even though I am somebody who comes from, obviously, a little more of the intellectual bent, I do think that more often we need a warrior's understanding of certain scenarios.

01:01:15.860 I think we do need more lions at the table. 0.58

01:01:18.960 It should not just be it should not be foxes all the time.

01:01:23.880 Life of Brian says Shapiro embodies the neocon paradox.

01:01:26.820 Pump patriotism cynically to push useless foreign wars.

01:01:29.880 It was doomed.

01:01:30.920 Now the woke push anti-patriotism to enlistees to destroy the nation, including the United States.

01:01:36.520 Yeah, again, I think Shapiro is far more comfortable than with foreign adventurism than I am.

01:01:42.760 Certainly one of the things that he opposes Vance on, at least to some degree.

01:01:48.220 And it is very clear that the United States military has shifted ideologically to promoting all kinds of things that attack the core of the American identity.

01:01:59.920 And we saw recently the DOD presentation where they were saying that pro-life groups are a problem.

01:02:06.060 Why is the American military talking about domestic American politics and who might be an enemy of the state?

01:02:12.220 There's only reason, only one reason for them to do that.

01:02:15.360 And it's not good at all.

01:02:18.260 Let's see.

01:02:18.980 Elijah Timon says the Mexican-American war took place before World War II.

01:02:24.220 Ben reveals that he considers the origin of America to be World War II Cold War, kind of like progressives do.

01:02:29.640 Yeah, I honestly, I think that is a fair point.

01:02:32.360 There really is the post-war consensus that so many on the right have bought into.

01:02:37.340 So many, especially those with a neocon bent, have kind of bought into is the idea that history really began for the United States.

01:02:45.760 Like we had the revolution and then it kind of just jumped to World War II.

01:02:49.680 And that's where all of our identity and all of our principles were really founded.

01:02:54.220 Let's see.

01:02:55.480 Ronald McNugget says America should look at the U.S. government as subject nations.

01:02:59.000 looked at the U.S.S.R. as a hostile regime over them rather than identifying with and supporting it.

01:03:05.920 There's a level of truth to that, though I will say this.

01:03:09.880 I think that there are still factions inside the U.S. government, or I should say inside the wider American political complex,

01:03:19.200 that do still care about the country and are still fighting for American well-being in a way that the Soviet Union probably did not have.

01:03:28.480 I think you're right that in general people are too invested in the idea that the American government is actually serving the well-being of the American people.

01:03:38.360 In many ways, it is not.

01:03:39.680 But I would say, for instance, the left would not be going to the lengths it's going to, to basically wipe out all of the choices that Americans had,

01:03:50.840 both for the Democratic and Republican candidates, if there wasn't still some truth to the American system,

01:03:57.880 some animating principle behind the government elections.

01:04:01.080 Otherwise, they would just, you know, they would just drop Joe Biden down a chute and, you know, put Donald Trump in prison.

01:04:07.740 That'd be the end of it.

01:04:09.300 Let's see here.

01:04:10.520 Creeper Weirdo says,

01:04:11.420 If the propositional nation meant I get to deport destiny, then I'd agree. 1.00

01:04:15.540 It doesn't, though, so we'll need an actual nation.

01:04:18.240 Sorry.

01:04:19.120 An excellent point.

01:04:20.400 An excellent point.

01:04:22.220 The Heritaker joins us.

01:04:24.700 I just joined a gym, so now I'm suddenly in shape.

01:04:28.040 Yeah, right.

01:04:28.840 It's the same as I've crossed into the nation and said the words, and so now I'm suddenly an American.

01:04:33.760 Joining the gym, just like stating American principles, is perhaps a good first step in your goal.

01:04:40.580 But it is not sufficient.

01:04:42.560 You'll put in a lot of time, a lot of work, if you want to make that happen.

01:04:47.620 Joshua Beebe says,

01:04:48.580 It's not that Ben doesn't understand.

01:04:50.040 It's that his feelings don't care about the facts.

01:04:53.420 Yeah, honestly, I kind of have to agree with that here.

01:04:56.120 Again, I think he's a pretty intelligent guy.

01:04:58.600 I don't think it completely escapes Ben what J.D. Vance is getting at here.

01:05:04.500 I think he would just rather it not be the case.

01:05:07.400 And he doesn't really want to explain why, because that would be a far more messy delve into, I guess, history and why he feels that way.

01:05:16.480 But I don't want to speak in his place.

01:05:17.740 Maybe he just genuinely didn't understand it.

01:05:19.340 If he didn't, then great.

01:05:21.020 Hopefully, then this episode will clarify that for him and he'll be able to go ahead and make his decision from there.

01:05:27.820 Phil says,

01:05:29.120 We know why Benny is willing to trade away America for a few extra dollars, but Eric Erickson is the actual trader here.

01:05:34.880 Always willing to cut his own flesh and people off at the knees to benefit Third World and Libs. 1.00

01:05:40.960 You know, I really don't know a whole lot about Eric Erickson other than he's constantly just kind of pouting old National Review neocon talking points.

01:05:51.960 So I can't really speak a lot to Eric Erickson's past and everything he's believed in.

01:05:57.920 I just know that whenever I encounter Eric Erickson, he's saying something that is very much the classic, like, you know, we can just export democracy and maybe open borders are good for the country.

01:06:08.660 And maybe we should, you know, fight every war we see out there.

01:06:12.160 Talking points that are old, that are dead, that are no longer part, I think, of the right, thankfully.

01:06:16.840 Points that have lost all of their real power on the right, which is a fantastic development.

01:06:23.140 Something I didn't know if I'd ever see in my lifetime.

01:06:25.600 And I'm very happy to see as a positive movement in our direction.

01:06:31.240 All right, guys, I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up.

01:06:33.060 Thank you so much for watching.

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01:07:16.160 I'll see you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - July 24, 2024

The Problem with the Propositional Nation ｜ 7⧸24⧸24

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