Spirit resembles a wedge driven into life, a wedge whose goal is to tear it in half or, less metaphorically expressed, to deprive the body of soul, to deprive the soul of body, and in this way to kill life itself. —Klages

It’s Christmastime in the wastes of Old Vinland. The sun has recessed, the land has died and shriveled upon itself, and deep verdant green slumbers in anticipation of the coming salvific thaw. We have a few lovely traditions to help us cope with such an environment, if not celebrate it: amber lights about the roof to shine when the sun cannot, brandy to warm the cold body—songs, merriment, family… Apparently such a foreign sight has left someone feeling homesick, for in the second year in a row, Vivek Ramaswamy has elected this sacred time of seasons-turning to be when he judiciously scalpels the concept of an American.

Many of us recall that fateful day when Vivek took whatever faith the common American had in him, rolled it into a ball of dung, and threw it into a crowd of horrified patrons. You can find it very easily by simply searching “Vivek Christmas tweet”, as he has (sincerely bravely) left the tweet up. We learned from this post that the sorry state of Old Vinland was none other than our fault; see, we just weren’t studying hard enough and watched far too much Boy Meets World. His people, on the contrary, they never had Boy Meets World. His people ate gruel on the way here (complimentary Southwest Airlines pretzels), they understood suffering, hard work! Those are American values, and that’s why he’s just as American as you are. That’s why, with more of these real Americans on the way, Vinland will once again have its “Sputnik moment”.

It was a bizarre experience for many of us, to have our warm celebration of ancient traditions interrupted by some political interlocuter lecturing us that we, despite our opposition to mass migration and other transgressions against the culture we celebrated that day, had no one but ourselves to blame and better start saying sorry to this class of New Americans who will take us back to outer space. What was worse about it was the obvious ethnic resentment, the loathing of non-fungible American traditions right as we were engaging in the annual procession of them. More specifically, that it was this very happiness that had costed us our nation—thus sprach Ramaswamy. Vivek, arguably, has never recovered from it. Certainly not in our spheres, not the people who saw that. There is an argument that this post expedited his removal from the White House as an advisor and association with the DOGE program, and right into a campaign for Governor of Ohio. Today, he is polling even with an unknown Democratic candidate for that race, a state Trump won by almost twelve percent.

It’s Christmastime in the wastes of Old Vinland, and Vivek is at it again. We all have our own traditions this time of year. This time he has taken to the opinion section of the New York Times in an article titled What Is an American?, in an effort to once again give lecture on his preferred conception of American identity. It’s a fairly short article, and interestingly, one that can’t seem to find an substantive argument. It is more of a wine tasting, asserting different notes on the label in the hopes to provoke a reaction. Much of it is wasted on tone-policing “The Groypers” for antisemitism or other racialized remarks, as if this assessment in the negative does anything in service to the title’s ambition of telling us what an American is, not merely what we would like it to be.

As a matter of fact, this is the entire impetus of Vivek’s reasoning. He is not presenting a useful categorical delineation between American and foreigner that can be readily applied to any civic or legal understanding, rather he is merely professing what he wishes it was. These of course are two entirely different arguments: one will promote the readily available centuries of historical precedent before 1965 and present this as the factual basis of our inherited identity, the other will merely assert what one wishes this identity should become. The following from Vivek’s article is the essential presentation of such an identity:

The alternative (and, in my view, correct) vision of American identity is based on ideals.

Americanness isn’t a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry. It’s binary: Either you’re an American or you’re not. You are an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation.

As Ronald Reagan quipped, you can go to live in France, but you can’t become a Frenchman; but anyone from any corner of the world can come to live in the United States and become an American. No matter your ancestry, if you wait your turn and obtain citizenship, you are every bit as American as a Mayflower descendant, as long as you subscribe to the creed of the American founding and the culture that was born of it. This is what makes American exceptionalism possible.

By the time this will be published I am sure there will be dozens of responses published in far more advertised places, leaning on the obvious counterarguments: quotes from the Founders, text from any immigration bill prior to Hart-Celler, and so on. I wish to draw the reader's attention to something more granular, a bit of dust hidden in Vivek's short article that actually serves as the whole basis of his philosophy: “You are an American if you believe”.

What Vivek wants is actually an American religion, a type of creed which—like much of the rest of the liberal project—bears faint residues of the crucifix of yore. The American is granted by faith alone, which is only later evidenced by his promised works. The American is identified by his profession of belief in The Idea™—who's idea?—We don't know, it's just some sort of aethereal Logos that descended upon the continent many unquantifiable years ago. Vivek would be more accurate if he called his vision of that of an “American spirit”, a spectral poltergeist which can be summoned or banished with the right incantations. In short, Vivek's American is air.

The essential drive of the liberal project is to boil all of humanity into one repugnant stew—a melting pot, if you will—where the same essential “ideas” lather over the whole of the Earth, which now rejoices in its newfound unity. You need only to believe—believe in law, in merit, the Constitution, and “the dream”. That whosoever believeth in It shall not perish in Mogadishu or Mumbai, but have everlasting opportunity (Jalandhar 3:16). If he hath sin too much, let him be purified in the cleansing purgatory that is the naturalization classroom. He needs only to wait in line! Vivek is not presenting a binary here at all, actually, he is not presenting a categorical delineation anywhere. An American is someone who believes in what it means to be an American. Do you see an actual definition of what an American is anywhere in this nonsense? A categorization that is plausibly everything is, in fact, plausibly nothing. Perhaps this is the point: once everyone is an American, no one is.

Believe in these ideas!—Who's ideas? Yours or the Founders? Vivek's entire thesis is upon the basis that blood is a scalar quantity while belief is binary, but any inquiry into “belief” at all immediately reveals how absurd this conception is. Blood can be quantified, measured and referred to upon its physical existence. Soil can be dug and cupped in the palm of your hand, the ecology of the American landscape pressing you into an indelible shape. But belief? Belief can be anything. Let us believe in the Constitution, the 14th Amendment above all others, which grants a woman the right to tear her unborn child’s head off its shoulders and Wong Kim Ark the right to birthright citizenship. Let us believe in freedom of expression, starting with the right of Zoomers to be critical of Israel or make fun of India. Let us believe in the colorblind meritocracy of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., and by God let us never falter from the American Dream of stock market investments and sensible interest rates. Are we so sure we have the same America in mind? Why is yours, Vivek, so different from mine; since you assert this is a binary, which of us is the American?

Not only is there profound disagreement between Americans as to what any of these things actually mean, but the way we derive the delusion of “consensus” upon any of these matters is radically altered by the increasing presence of foreigners and foreign communities who have been granted the privileges of citizenship. It is the quintessential tragedy of President Reagan, who Vivek champions, that his philia for foreigners and the mythos of transformative citizenship played no small role in the transformation of California from a place that believed in these ideals to a place that rejected them utterly. They were not dispossessed and repossessed by warring spirits, it was the people themselves—the body politic—that changed.

I am not interested in Vivek’s American Geist, which is nothing more than a wisp of the wind. I am interested in the American people, the nation, and the ways in which its character is expressed from its physical body. I encourage the reader to meditate further on the etymology of nation, which derives from the Latin gnatus—natal birth, breed, to spring forth from the womb. To go even further, this Latin word derives from none other than *gene. Ergo, when a naturalized foreigner refers to himself as “a patriot for this great American nation”, he has doubly lied to himself by erroneously declaring this place to be the place of his Mother and his Father. No, a people is not an idea, that is an inversion of the very concept! A people is a population, with a physical presence within a particular place. The American is an autochthone, someone who knows nothing other than the flesh and the dirt which reared him into a living being, one among a lengthy chain of many others who had nothing but such a conception to pass down to their descendants. The American is as native to this country as its green ash and red wolves, both now forced to deal with its own invasive foes bringing new ideas for the land. Perhaps it is no coincidence that for Aristotle the “intellect” or “spirit” was something that invaded the body and soul from the outside, νοῦς θύραθεν, nous thurathen.

In a previous article, I have given my own alternative proposal for what an American is, and it is one that emphasizes the land and the body in its proper roles in generating the American people. Consider the following story from America’s incubation as the article describes:

There is an analogous story in American folklore pertaining to a Penelope Stout and her husband Richard, two children of England sailing for New Amsterdam on a Dutch ship. Set off course by foul wind, the vessel ran aground several miles south on what is now Sandy Hook, New Jersey. The Dutch, keenly aware of the savagery that lurked in the landward woods, immediately abandoned the vessel and fled to the Hudson on foot. But the Stouts were left behind, as Richard was immobilized by fever and his wife could not bring herself to leave him. That night, a party of Lenape boarded the ship, butchering and scalping the defenseless Richard, “as a boy would kill a little harmless snake, for no reason whatever, except that he was able to do it”, as one account puts it. Penelope narrowly escaped, maimed and grieving, hiding in a tree trunk until her eventual capture by the Lenape. Some time later, the Dutch learned of a White woman held captive among the natives, and ransomed her back to safety. Upon her arrival to a familiar people, Penelope learned that she was the sole survivor of the voyage. The Dutch that fled on foot never made it.

Our generation thinks little of the Indian Wars, more concerned with new foes from Afghanistan to Mexico and everywhere in between. But we forget that these brutal wars lasted some three centuries, from the first sorties outside of Jamestown in 1609 to the last and final Apache raid against Americans in 1924. Every American generation had personal experience with this conflict until it was finally won, and the continent was made silent. We ascended up the slopes of Appalachia as colonists, but upon the peaks we saw the frontier, and upon our descent we were transformed into Americans.

An American Terroir

Gildhelm

·

August 26, 2025

“It has often given my pleasure to observe, that independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected fertile, wide-spreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams…

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One cannot begin to describe the American without first describing the frontier. This was the official story of America taught widely in schoolrooms across the country, the Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner. As Europeans came to this continent, they were met with a less-than-figurative wall at the edge of wilderness. One can imagine himself atop the piked bulwark of Jamestown, frozen musket in hand, with one world behind him and another in front of him, somewhere in the dark rustling limbs echoing whoops and hollers at him. This frontier was gradually conquered, but it was never wholly defeated until the 20th Century. Appalachia became the Ohio Valley, then the Mississippi, the vast Great Plains of the West, and finally the gates of the Pacific. It was the frontier, the essential lawlessness and demand for competent self-sufficiency that exuded from its virgin soil, that shaped the European into the American. It is precisely this ethnogenesis where Vivek’s gaseous “ideas” come from. They were demanded of us in exchange for such a bountiful land, lest we perish on it. Many did.

That is the character—that is, the embodied soul—of the American. It has nothing to do with the Constitution, colorblindness, or free expression. These were values the American created for himself, and does nothing to explain anything about who the American is. This is the essential failure of Vivek’s thesis: out of a fear of “blood and soil” rhetoric born of his own identity and upbringing, he conjures up a specter of “the American idea”, which entirely neglects the physical American himself. He is thus left with nothing but a ghost, perhaps at best a golem, which bears only but the faintest resemblance to what came before. We could abandon these ideas in a second and still possess the same land and the same body. Only through Vivek’s appallingly self-serving conception can one see the plausibility of deporting a descendant of Jamestown for his lack of patriotism in favor of an African who merely believes in the idea of America.

It is this time of year which heralds in Americans to be reminded of his family and of his heritage, the gripping of the land’s changing image known as season, and the profound communion between land and people. Even as his Vinland continues to deteriorate and his neighborhood “progresses” towards the finality of a Brazilian slum, around this well-lit hearth he is given the comforts of his belonging. Vivek’s own tradition of calling this into question, year after year, only serves to further emphasize the shocking contrast of sturm und drang the contemporary American finds himself in. We thank him for the invitation for reflection, but respectfully turn our attention to the people in our homes, and not to an “idea” somewhere in the sky.