JD Vance's Trail of Tears

Vance's historical ignorance about crimes against Native America provide yet another example of his agenda's cruelty.

A recent NYT article referenced a statement JD Vance made in 2021 about the lengths to which Trump should go, if he’s able to retake the presidency, to dismantle the administrative state. Nothing terribly new here, as anyone who’s been paying attention knows that Vance is fully aligned with The Heritage Foundation’s goal to break the regulatory spine of the American government with a raft of arch-conservative policy proposals called Project 2025.  But the particular bit of American history that Vance chose to drive his argument home is worth at least a moment’s pause. After advising that a second Trump administration should replace every “bureaucratic and mid-level civil servant” with Trump loyalists, effectively MAGAfying the governing capacity of the United States out of existence, Vance conceded that such a liquidation would surely meet some resistance in the courts. But no matter. If the Supreme Court were to question an American “Night of the Long Knives” (which, in 2024, seems like wishful thinking) Trump could just crib from the most romantic hero of MAGA nostalgia, Andrew Jackson, and say: “the Chief Justice has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.”

Leaving aside the posturing tough-guy bullshit (not to mention the glib dismissal of absolute constitutional pillars like the separation of powers) I have to wonder if Vance knows, or cares, about the context in which Jackson supposedly made the statement. It was in fact at a moment of real turbulence for a still relatively young United States. South Carolina was threatening to take up arms against the federal government over a tariff that disadvantaged  southern slave states to the benefit of northern industrial interests; and the Supreme Court was adjudicating the state of Georgia’s right to violate the treaty-guaranteed jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation. In both cases, the stability of the union was genuinely in question. A supporter of both states rights and expansive executive authority (sound familiar?) Jackson simultaneously refused to countenance South Carolina’s belligerence and endorsed Georgia’s violation of Cherokee sovereignty in the face of a Supreme Court decision, Worcester v Georgia, that ruled in favor of the Native American nation. It was Jackson’s rejoinder to this ruling, and in particular, to avowedly federalist Chief Justice John Marshall, who authored the majority opinion in Worcester, that Vance referenced to polish his MAGA bona fides in his 2021 interview. 

Worcester should have been the Cherokee Nation’s last line of defense against the misery the U.S. government ultimately visited upon them, namely, the ethnic cleansing most of us know as The Trail of Tears. According to the Supreme Court’s 1832 decision, treaties signed with the United States prohibited Georgia settlers from trespassing inside Cherokee national borders. Georgia refused to abide by this decision because gold had been discovered on Cherokee land,  and the territory was also ripe for the state’s expanding plantation economy (of course this meant an expansion of the institution of slavery as well). The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause expressly prohibits US states from violating treaty commitments made by the federal government; and, in theory, it is the job of the executive to enforce obedience to the Constitution among the states, even if it requires military intervention. Jackson refused to do this, and the Cherokee were coerced into signing a new treaty, one that set the stage for their forced “relocation” to the trans-Mississippi West, a journey on which some six thousand men, women, and children died. Jackson’s refusal wasn’t predicated on an abstract commitment to states’ rights: Jackson believed that white Georgia settlers were entitled the Cherokee land because Native Americans were an inferior race (incidentally, he also had financial interest in the land from which the Cherokee were expelled, precursor to another president who would trash the emoluments clause). 

The fact that Vance would hearken back to this shameful episode in American history, one that showcases the cruelty, violence, greed, and utter inhumanity that can swarm us when power exceeds its bounds and blots out the rule of law, should be enough evidence for any reasonable American to dismiss the current Republican ticket out of hand. It’s like upholding the valor of those Companies that perpetrated the Mai Lai massacre, or praising the soldier that manned the Hotchkiss gun at Wounded Knee. It should be a self-executing disqualification from public office because it crystalizes the autocratic white nationalism coyly disguised in today’s Republican agenda. It’s also indicative of the fatuous, sophomoric “cult of virility”–which is really just a brand of sadism appealing to weak and inadequate men–that thrills the likes of Vance, and Hawley, and Cruz, and Miller, etc. But more than that, and the reason that I’m writing this, comments like Vance’s are an insidious method that the New “MAGA” Right employs to control a historical narrative in service of vicious and illegitimate ends. 

What Vance and his little boys club would have us believe is that American history is a straightforward story of honorable white men behaving nobly (with a few unfortunate but ultimately excusable deviations) in a selfless effort to forge a nation before which everyone should uncritically genuflect. Vance insists that anyone who would take issue with this version of America, who’d be impudent enough to submit that along with the good came an equal portion of bad, is simply not grateful for all that their great white founding fathers set into motion for them. Of course this is nonsense, and Vance himself probably knows that. He’s an unabashed charlatan, and on one level deserves to simply be ignored. But at the moment, that’s not possible. His “contributions” to public discourse about the state of contemporary America rely on dishonest, perilous distortions of our past, and if these lies take firmer root, they portend moral hazard for our future. 

Specifically as it concerns the United States’ treatment of Native American peoples, there is a hard fact with which we must ultimately contend: we took from them that which was undeniably there’s. We dispossessed them with violence, with deceit, justified it with philosophical, theological, and jurisprudential sophistry, and, on occasions like the one apparently held in such high esteem by vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, we did this in violation of our own laws. The least we can do is honestly acknowledge that fact, with the requisite humility and contrition. And the least we should expect from our public servants is that they not brandish artifacts of that disrepute in cheap displays of political machismo.