California generally and the Claremont Institute in particular have produced some of the most profound and revolutionary conservative thinkers of the last half-century.

And for a great many of them, it’s because they understood what’s at stake if we abandon our American identity.

This country is not a contradiction. It’s a nation of countless, extraordinary people across many generations, a land of profound ingenuity and tradition and beauty. But more importantly, it’s home.

And we’re lucky enough to have a few of them, like Michael Anton, now working in the administration with us.

Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams asked me to speak a little bit about statesmanship and, more to the point, about how to respond to some of the challenges our movement will need to confront in the years to come.

It’s an interesting question. And I think it’s useful to reflect on the state of the left in 2025 America.

Mamdani: A harrowing zeitgeist

On July 1, a 33-year-old communist running an insurgent campaign beat a multimillion-dollar establishment machine in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.

I don’t want to harp on a municipal election, but there were two interesting threads that I wanted to highlight. The first is that it drives home how much the voters in each party have changed.

If our victory in 2024 was rooted in a broad, working- and middle-class coalition, Zohran Mamdani’s coalition is the inverse.

Look at his electoral performance, which the left is already talking about as a blueprint for future electoral success. The guy won high-income and college-educated New Yorkers — and especially both young and highly educated voters — but was weakest among black voters and those without a college degree. He did better in Bangladeshi areas of New York and worse in Chinese areas.

Mamdani’s strongest vote share was in New York’s gentrifying neighborhoods, like Ridgewood and Bushwick.

His victory was the product of a lot of young people who live reasonably comfortable lives but see that their elite degrees aren’t really delivering what they expected. And so their own prospects, with all the college debt, may not in fact be greater than those of their parents.

And I think in the results, we can start to see the future of the Democrats: as the party not of dispossession, but of elite disaffection.

RELATED: Exclusive: Vance on Mamdani: ‘Who the hell does he think that he is?’

  Photo by Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The party of highly educated but downwardly mobile elites who compose a highly energetic activist base — one, critically, supplemented by carefully selected ethnic blocs carved out of the electorate, using identity politics as the knife.

That, by the way, explains all of Mamdani’s bizarre appeals to foreign politics intended to signal to one diaspora community or another in New York.

Why is a mayoral candidate in our nation’s biggest city whining about banning Bibi Netanyahu from visiting and threatening to arrest him if he tries? Or attacking Narendra Modi as a “war criminal”? Why is he talking about “globalizing the intifada”? What the hell does that even mean in Manhattan?

But what might seem like a contradiction makes sense if you peel back the onion a bit. Consider: a movement that rails against the billionaire class despite the fact that the billionaire class remains firmly in its corner. It idolizes foreign religions even as it rejects the teachings of those faiths. It rails against white people even as many of its funders and grassroots activists are privileged whites.

America in 2025 is more diverse than it has ever been. And yet the institutions that form culture are also weaker.

I was once comforted by these contradictions. How could privileged whites march around decrying white privilege? How could progressives pretend to love Muslims despite their cultural views on gender and sexuality?

But the answer is obvious, isn’t it? The radicals of the far left don’t need a unifying ideology of what they’re for, because they know very well what they’re against.

What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and Big Pharma lobbyists? It isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even Karl Marx. It’s hatred. They hate the people in this room, they hate the president of the United States, and most of all, they hate the people who voted for him.

This is the animating principle of the American far left. It isn’t true of most of the people who vote for Democrats, of course. Most of them are good people, even if they’re misguided in their politics. But pay attention to what their leadership says outside glossy campaign ads or general election-tested messaging, and it’s obvious that this is what animates the modern Democratic Party.

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Defining the modern left

The far left doesn’t care that Black Lives Matter led to a spike in violent crime in urban black neighborhoods, because it also led to anarchy in middle-class white neighborhoods.

The leftists don’t care that Islamism hates gays and subjugates women, because for now, it is a useful tool of death against Americans.

They don’t care that too many pharmaceutical companies are getting rich from experimental hormonal therapies, because it destroys the “gender binary” that has structured social relations between the genders for the whole of Western civilization.

They don’t care that deporting low-wage immigrants will raise the wages of the native-born, because they don’t mean to create higher living standards for those born and raised here — black, white, or any other skin color. They mean to replace them with people who will listen to their increasingly bizarre ethnic and religious appeals.

They are arsonists, and they will make common cause with anyone else willing to light the match. It’s why Mamdani himself is such an appealing instrument to the left. He captures so many of the movement’s apparent contradictions in a single human being: a guy who describes the Palestinian cause as “central” to his identity, yet holds views — abortion on demand and using taxpayer money to fund transgender surgeries for minors, for example — that would be incomprehensible on the streets of Gaza.

This politics doesn’t make sense as a positive political program. But it’s very effective at tearing down the things the left hates.

The right’s answer: Create

One task of statesmanship is to recognize what the left wishes to do to American society. But the most important thing is to be for something. And that’s the second thread I want to touch on today: If the left wishes to destroy, we must create.

The most obvious way to do that is to ensure that the people we serve have a better life in the country their grandparents built. This is why the president cares so much about tariffs — in a globalized economy, we must be willing to penalize those who would build outside our own nation.

And it’s why he worked so hard to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — if tariffs are the stick, then lower taxes and regulations are the carrots. We want to make it easy to save and invest in America, to build a business in America, and most of all to work a dignified job and earn the kind of wage that can support a family in comfort.

But this is not a purely material question, because we are not just producers and consumers. We are human beings, made in the image of God, who love our home not just because we earn a living here but because we discover our purpose and meaning here.

Every Western society has demographic problems. There is something about Western liberalism that is socially suicidal or parasitic — that tends to feed off a healthy host until there’s nothing left.

The radicals of the far left don’t need a unifying ideology of what they’re for, because they know very well what they’re against.

America in 2025 is more diverse than it has ever been. And yet the institutions that form culture are also weaker. We are confronted with a society that has less in common than ever and whose cultural leaders seem totally uninterested in fixing that.

Just four years ago, we had people promoting alternative national anthems at one of the few remaining national pastimes that transcend ethnic and cultural differences. Too many of our current crop of statesmen remain unable to break out of that moment, destined to erode the very thing that makes Americans put on a uniform and sacrifice their lives for something.

Part of the solution — the most important part of the solution — is to stop the bleeding. This is why President Trump’s immigration policies are so important. Social bonds form among people who have something in common. If you stop importing millions of foreigners, you allow social cohesion to form naturally.

But even so: If you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, very few of our leaders would have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America?

That definition is overinclusive and underinclusive. It would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreigners. Must we admit them tomorrow? But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people the Anti-Defamation League would label domestic extremists, even though their own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War.

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What American citizenship means

So perhaps the most pressing thing to build now is the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century.

The right needs to do a better job of articulating what that means. And while I don’t have a comprehensive answer for you, there are a few things I’d suggest off the top of my head.

For one, it means sovereignty. More precisely, American citizenship must mean belonging to a nation that guards the sovereignty of its people, especially from a modern world that’s hell-bent on dissolving borders and differences in national character.

That means having a government that vigorously defends the basic qualities of sovereignty — that secures the border from foreign invasion; that protects its citizens and their enterprises against unfair foreign tax schemes; that erects tariff walls and similar barriers to protect its people’s industry; that avoids needlessly entangling them in prolonged, distant wars.

It also means preserving the basic legal privileges of citizenship — things like voting, including in state and local elections, or access to public benefits like certain state-run health care programs — for citizens. When states start handing these out to illegal aliens, they cheapen the very meaning of citizenship. And a nation that refuses to make that distinction won’t stay a nation for very long.

I’d also say that citizenship in the 21st century necessarily means building.

America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.

Our ancestors realized that to carve a successful nation from a new land meant creating new, tangible things. New homes, new towns, new infrastructure to tame a wild continent. That attitude enabled us to build the world’s greatest cities, its tallest skyscrapers, the most impressive dams and canals.

Over time, it expanded the horizons of what we even thought possible as human beings, with Americans taking our species into the air and, just a generation later, into Earth’s orbit. Our innovations revolutionized communications, medicine, and agriculture, extending human life spans decades at a time.

None of that would be possible if our citizens believed we lived in a postindustrial era. Or an era when our finest minds just went to what are essentially speculative trades or to writing software that makes us more efficient consumers.

We need to build. We need to make great things here, for the betterment of our fellow Americans but also for our posterity. We need to continue to invent groundbreaking innovations and to leave homes and libraries and factories that our descendants will look at someday and feel awe.

This country is not a contradiction. It’s a nation of countless extraordinary people across many generations, a land of profound ingenuity and tradition and beauty.

And we need to build together. Getting to the moon required a lot of brilliant scientists working on what were effectively pocket calculators. But it also required a national system of education that produced that level of genius and inspired young graduates to want to design new rockets on behalf of their nation. And it required a ton of phenomenally talented engineers and welders and custodians to manufacture cutting-edge engines and keep the facilities that housed them spotless. It was a national project in the truest sense of the phrase.

To be a citizen in the 21st century, I think, should mean seeking out similar projects. Citizenship should mean feeling pride in our heritage, of course. But it should also mean understanding milestones like the moon landings not only as the product of past national greatness but as an achievement we should surpass by aligning the goals and ambitions of Americans at all levels of society.

Lastly, I’d say citizenship must mean recognizing the unique relationship, and especially the unique obligations, you share with your fellow Americans.

You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect America to remain unchanged. In the same way, you can’t export our Constitution to a random country and expect it to take hold.

That’s not something to lament but to take pride in. The founders understood that our shared qualities — our heritage, our values, our manners and customs — confer a special and indispensable advantage. A decisive one, even, in rebellion against the world’s greatest military power at the time.

That means something today. Citizenship — true citizenship — is not just about rights. In a world of globalized commerce and communication, it’s also about obligations, including to your countrymen. It’s about recognizing that your fellow citizens are not interchangeable cogs in the global economy, nor, in law or commerce, should they be treated that way.

And I think it’s impossible to feel a sense of obligation to something without having gratitude for it. We should demand that our people, whether first- or 10th-generation Americans, have gratitude for this country. We should be skeptical of anyone who lacks it, especially if they purport to lead it.

And that brings me back to the likely next mayor of New York. Today is July 5, 2025, which means that yesterday we celebrated the 249th anniversary of the birth of our nation.

The person who wishes to lead our largest city had, according to media reports, never once publicly mentioned America’s Independence Day in earnest. But when he did so this year, this is what he said.

America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.

There is no gratitude here. No sense of owing something to this land and the people who turned its wilderness into the most powerful nation in the world.

Zohran Mamdani’s father fled Uganda when the tyrant Idi Amin decided to ethnically cleanse his nation’s Indian population. Mamdani’s family fled violent racial hatred only for him to come to this country — a country built by people he never knew, overflowing with generosity to his family, offering a haven from the kind of violent ethnic conflict that is commonplace in world history.

And he dares, on its 249th birthday, to congratulate it by paying homage to its incompleteness and to its, as he calls it, “contradiction.” Has he ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts they’d never see again? Has he ever visited a gravesite of a loved one who gave his life to build the kind of society where his family could escape theft and violence? Has he ever looked in the mirror and recognized that he might not be alive were it not for the generosity of a country he dares to insult on its most sacred day?

Who the hell do these people think they are?

  Photo by Unsplash

Make America Great Again

Yesterday, I visited the construction site for the Teddy Roosevelt presidential library. We went hiking in the badlands of North Dakota. My 5-year-old so desperately wanted to see a buffalo, and he saw a dozen of them. My 8-year-old spotted a bald eagle perched on a low cliff. And my 3-year-old brought me a dandelion.

Her little lungs weren’t strong enough to send the dandelion seeds over the hillside, so she asked me to do it. Watching her face light up as she watched those seeds blow over the hills, I felt a profound sense of gratitude for this country. For its natural beauty, the settlers who carved a civilization out of the wilderness. For making the love story of that little girl’s mother and father possible. For the common yet profound joy of watching a 3-year-old’s beautiful eyes light up as she watches a dandelion’s seeds dance in the wind against an ancient rock formation.

This country is not a contradiction. It’s a nation of countless extraordinary people across many generations, a land of profound ingenuity and tradition and beauty. But more importantly, it’s home. For the vast bulk of Americans, it’s where we’re born, it’s where we will raise our children and grandchildren, and it’s where we ourselves will one day be buried. And when that day comes, I hope my kids can take solace in knowing that their inheritance as Americans is not some unfinished or contradictory project, but a home that provided their parents shelter, and sustenance, and endless amounts of love.

Thank you, and God bless you.

Editor’s note: This article was adapted from JD Vance’s address to the Claremont Institute on July 5, 2025, and published originally at the American Mind.