Vance likewise adheres to the "heritage not values" definition of an American because it serves his racist and white nationalist ideology. After all, people from foreign countries could agree with American values, and then people like Vance might be forced to accept them. Vance further argued " like, he explicitly argued " that, under a values-based system Confederates in the Civil War and modern American-based hate groups might not be considered real Americans because they actively opposed and oppose concepts central to the Declaration of Independence such as all people being created equal. To be 100% clear here: Vance thinks that marginalizing Confederates and modern hate groups is a bad thing, because those people can trace their ancestry back here a long time and isn't that more important?

What Vance espoused during that speech was the textbook definition of "blood and soil nationalism." The notion that the arbiter of true citizenship should not be whatever legal regime happens to exist at the moment or a function of one's adherence to values and norms which demonstrate that a person is a member of a given society. Rather, it's all about who you are genetically speaking, where you live, and how long you have lived there. It's an ideology that was first called Blut und Boden, in the original German, under the Nazi belief that a racially defined national body " the blood of certain types of people " and the soil on which they live is what truly matters. This sort of distinction was, of course, a necessary precursor to the creation of a state which decided whose blood was pure enough to truly be German and which sorts of people could be said to be properly of the land. And we know what happened once they began making such distinctions.

"Blood and soil" was a key component of Nazi ideology. It is also a key component of J.D. Vance's ideology. This is no coincidence.