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Last week I got into a brief Twitter debate with JD Vance. I jumped into the fight after Zaid Jilani picked it. Later, Jesse Singal joined in, too. Then Vance quote-tweeted Jesse with this attack:

I hate this smug, self-assured bullshit. “I know I'm right, and people must be dumb or immoral to disagree with me.” It's an easy way to go through life, because then you never have to think seriously about why your worldview is a justification for the mass invasion of the country my ancestors built with their bare hands.

It’s a remarkably un-self-aware dig, given that the second half of Vance’s last sentence is like the Platonic form of “smug, self-assured bullshit” by someone who thinks it’s immoral to disagree with him. But setting that aside, the line about Vance’s ancestors having built America with their bare hands is, in my opinion, revealing.

I’ve written before about the ascendance on the right of what I’ll call “ancestral nationalism,” by which I mean the kind of nationalism that’s rooted in a sense, real or imagined, of a common history, culture and heritage that binds a population together. This is the nationalism that’s probably most familiar to us, because it’s the most primitive form of it and it has also historically been the most explosive. When it mixed a century-and-a-half ago with the pseudoscience of eugenics, it gave shape to the ideologies that upheld the racial order of the Jim Crow South and then spawned Nazism and Japanese imperialism. It was also a central part of the ideology of the “Alt-Right,” if you remember such “philosophers” and influencers as Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern from about a decade ago.

Ancestral nationalism is the ideological waste product of the transition from feudalism to modern nationalism. A relic of nineteenth century Europe, it combines the former’s fixation on bloodlines with the latter’s invention and mobilization of a geographically-rooted collective identity.

The feudal system of hereditary honor and privilege was the function not of a governing system, but the lack of one. European feudalism was the political order that arose, essentially, out of anarchy. The collapse of the western Roman Empire left the lands of Europe in the hands of thousands of dueling petty warlords. To amass armies unto themselves, these warlords secured the loyalties of yet smaller warlords and the soldiers pledged to them by offering physical protection in exchange for fealty. Over time, fealty became, by custom if not by law, hereditary. If your father was sworn to a king, then you were expected to swear yourself to him as well, and to his heir upon the king’s death. In this way, noble and aristocratic dynasties coalesced, with their power and legitimacy a function of their longevity. A family’s honor and prestige was derived from its claims to an ancient and exalted lineage. Ancestry was the chief determinant of social rank.

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American nationalism was the precise inverse of this value system. It emerged as an explicit rejection of the feudal status order. It wasn’t the democratic institutions of self-governance that distinguished the American colonies from the rest of the world; these were directly inherited from rights, customs and practices that had evolved over centuries in medieval England — rights, customs and practices that had, in their own turn, been transplanted from Scandinavia. In America, however, the colonists did more than insist on their individual rights; they rejected the very basis of political authority in one’s family ancestry. The colonists had left Europe to get away from all that. They abandoned their ancient farms and crossed the ocean to acquire cheap land on the new continent that they could own outright, without owing any duties or obligations to some parasitical lord or other. They came here to work with their hands and enjoy the fruits of their labor in their entirety, to do what they wished with their property and pass it along to their children. They came to toil and be left alone.

That was what made American democracy revolutionary — not our system of checks and balances or our particular articulation of individual rights, both of which had their equivalents in the Old World, but our abandonment of the notion that you were born into a social rank derived from your family lineage.

Indeed, little else was shared by colonists from opposite corners of Europe but this rejection of the old ways. With the exception of the Puritan colony in New England, it was private interests, not a common purpose, that had brought the settlers to these shores. Immigrants did not land in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia to build a new nation together. They arrived to carve out a living for themselves and their families that their children could build upon. When English Quakers, Ulster Presbyterians and German Mennonites collided with one another in the New World, their only common ground was this simple, material aspiration. There was little more to bind them — not culture or religion or even language. As they pushed out onto the frontier, as they had children and their children had children and their families were diluted and dissipated into the vagueness of the American experience, these common traits — the private nature of their enterprises and the social equality of their stations of birth — came to define what it meant to be “American,” even as, in other countries around the world, a bizarre hybrid of the feudal idolatry of heritage and the mass identity of nation-statehood came to define their forms of nationalism.

J.D. Vance’s nationalism belongs to that foreign category. His American identity is as fused to the ghosts of his ancestral lineage as the aristocratic identities of European dukes were fused to theirs. He wants this vain, backward-looking mentality to be the basis of a “new” American self-conception because it would establish a spectrum of degrees of citizenhood in place of the singular category of “citizen,” with his own family and those like his at the very top of it. It would make him and a broad section of his political base more American than, say, the native-born children of immigrants from Pakistan or Honduras. It would establish a neo-feudal order of social rank rooted in one’s American bloodlines.

Vance is wrong about his ancestors. They did not come here to “build” America. They came here to build a life for themselves and their children. That doesn’t cheapen their contribution; it honors it. Those humble, private aspirations are what it has always meant to be an American, as opposed to some mythical fetishization of one’s long-dead grandparents and great-grandparents. And those same aspirations have motivated generations of immigrants from poorer parts of the world, from Mexico to Yemen, who the MAGA movement would just as soon exclude from their definition of the American community. And therein lies the political utility of their embrace of this most un-American form of nationalism.