​Not long ago, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy posted a video of himself saying that “America is an idea.” That is a fatuous statement because America is, in fact, a country, not an idea. However, McCarthy was edging close to something important, which is that America, unlike all other countries, is built primarily around an idea or, actually, a collection of ideas. It’s those ideas that Marxists have been attacking with stellar success, and it’s why we are more wobbly even than other countries when pushing back.

My point has its genesis in Max I. Dimont’s marvelous and very readable Jews, God, and History. He argues that Jews have defied history by being the oldest continuously surviving coherent people in the world, who still hew to an identity and a belief system stretching back to the Bronze Age. No other people can make that claim. This isn’t how it’s supposed to work.

Dimont explains that Oswald Spengler, one of the great early 20th-century historians, argued that nations have a lifespan, just as people do:

In Spengler’s view, civilizations are foredoomed to death. Civilizations go through the spring of early origins, mature into the summer of their greatest physical achievement, grow into the autumn of great intellectual heights, decline into the winter of their civilization, and finally die.

The problem for Spengler was that the Jews refused to fit into his thesis. He responded by ignoring them.

Image: The tragedy of the Jews in exile (in Babylon) by Eduard Bendemann, 1832. Public domain.

What Spenglerites don’t understand is that Jewish nationhood revolved around ideas rather than geography or genetics. In the ancient animist world, when gods were tied to locations or objects, the Jews had an abstract, omnipresent God. That’s why, during the Babylonian captivity, they maintained their beliefs and the memory of an affiliated geographic location (“If I forget you, O Jerusalem…”) without the Temple itself.

The Jews eventually returned to Jerusalem, only to be ousted 500 years later with the Roman conquest. But again, they were held together by the Torah…an idea about God, morality, rules of conduct, and their portable identity as a distinct people. Not only were they Jews wherever they went, but they were also able to welcome into this portable nation any other people who chose to embrace the same ideas.

No other country on earth was like that. Either the people vanished from the land, or conquerers vanquished their unique identity. If they relocated to other lands, voluntarily or not, they lost their national identities.

One of the deep insecurities that plagues those Africans whose genetic brothers sold them to be dispersed throughout the world is that they have no sense of their national identity. They could bring some of their culture with them but, because they were non-literate, from many tribes, and lacked a binding identity, they invariably became an amorphous group of dark-skinned people on foreign soil. Here in America, the descendants of those blacks celebrate Kwanza, a Marxist holiday with no African connection, and wear kente clothes, which are uniquely Ghanaian, but it’s a poor simulacrum of a true historic identity.

And then there’s America: We do not have a shared genetic lineage, for our people come from all five continents. For the same reason, we don’t have much of a shared cultural lineage. Geographically, we’re a peripatetic people with limited ties to any specific location in America. What binds America isn’t the “idea of America” but the “ideas of America.”

These ideas can be traced to three distinct documents: The Judeo-Christian Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. The principles in these documents are what bind our nation together. Everything else is window-dressing.

It’s these ideas that leftists have so assiduously attacked. They denigrate each document as a pathetic remnant of a white supremacist, slave-based, sexist, homophobic worldview. Yet it is these documents that define America as a country and a people. These definitional concepts are

• That people are subordinate to the Creator;

• That He created man and woman—and only man and woman—in his image, meaning that we share inherent rights that the state cannot take away, with these rights limned in the Bill of Rights

• That the government is the People’s servant, not its master;

• That the moral laws that God gave Noah and Moses are not only divinely mandated but that they create the optimal society in which all people can prosper; and

• That the tie that binds us together is our willingness to accept that these ideas create the American nation and the American people.

If Marxists can destroy these ideas, there is nothing left. Moreover, Americans are without the binding notions of being genetically Irish, French, Italian, or Dutch, with millennia-long ties to the land. This means that when we’re under attack from within, without binding ideas we don’t have an alternative platform from which to fight back.

However, and here’s the kicker, if we fight to reaffirm our ideas, we don’t need to point to genetic similarities or a 2,000-year history on the land. Instead, America, like the Jewish people, can and will defy Spengler’s historical determinism. Keep the ideas alive, and you reaffirm our nation.