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The current vice president of the United States doesn’t have much of an official portfolio, but he does appear to have at least one significant passion project: demanding that other people make elaborate displays of gratitude toward the United States. For JD Vance, the expressions “have you ever said thank you” and “show a little gratitude” sit somewhere between a rhetorical tic and a catchphrase. So when he visited Michigan last week to stump for Senate candidate Mike Rogers, it was doubtless only a matter of time before he tried out his favorite move on Rogers’s opponent, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.
If anyone from Vance’s fan base of 22-year-old groyper boys was watching his remarks in real time, they must have been breathless with anticipation as they waited for the moment. And Vance did not disappoint. “I don't understand how [El-Sayed] could have so much hatred in his heart for the people and the places that gave him so much opportunity,” Vance said. “I don't know why he resents the things that he does. Perhaps it's because he sees them as too white or too proud or too American. But what I do know is this. That Michigan deserves better. You deserve better than a little weasel who should shut his mouth and show a little gratitude to the country that gave him everything.”
By my count, El-Sayed is the fifth prominent individual to receive public rebuke from the nation’s chief gratitude-demander. Vance has deployed variations on this tactic against Kamala Harris during the 2024 election and then, once in office, against Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Zohran Mamdani, Joy Reid, and, now, El-Sayed. (He has also complained about the lack of gratitude from Democratic officials as a group.)
Notice a pattern? Zelenskyy is the only white man on the list, and he is the Jewish head of a foreign country. Reid is Black, Kamala Harris is of Afro-Jamaican and South Asian descent, Mamdani is a Muslim of South Asian descent, and El-Sayed is an Egyptian-American Muslim. If you’re a white American, you are apparently safe from Vance’s scrutiny.
Vance rarely specifies what his targets should be showing gratitude for, but the above pattern allows us to make some inferences, especially in light of some of his other public remarks about the nature of citizenship and American-ness. In the same 2025 Claremont Institute speech where he asked whether Mamdani has ever “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,” Vance suggested that “heritage” and line of descent counted toward someone’s American-ness at least as much as their allegiance to the country’s founding principles. If adherence to the creed inscribed in the Declaration were what made someone an American, then the nation’s polity “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreigners,” he said. “Must we admit them tomorrow? But, at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people the ADL would label domestic extremists, even though their own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War.”
And later: “The Founders understood that our shared qualities—our heritage, our values, our manners and customs—confer a special and indispensable advantage.”
The people who share that “heritage”—whose “own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War”—don’t need to make any special displays of gratitude because this country is their birthright. Non-“heritage Americans,” to use a pungent euphemism from Vance’s friends on the far right, have no such privilege. The not-so-subtle implication behind Vance’s persistent demands for their gratitude is that they only belong in this country insofar as their social betters condescend to keep them around.
This kind of thinking has an unsavory heritage all its own. In 1806, Virginia’s Assembly passed a law that allowed for the re-enslavement of any freedpeople who resided in the state for more than a year. Ten years later, the state modified the law so that free Black residents (some of whom may have had ancestors who arrived in Virginia as far back as 1619) could petition the courts for the right to stick around. They just had to prove that they had been legally emancipated and, typically, find some white supporters who would testify to their good character. Residence for Black Virginians was not a legal right but a gift that whites could bestow or withhold as they saw fit.
Following the German theorist Rainer Forst, we might call this permission-based citizenship. In his book Toleration in Conflict, Forst distinguishes between four different kinds of toleration: the permission conception, the coexistence conception, the respect conception, and the esteem conception. Under the respect conception, “the tolerating parties respect one another as autonomous persons or as equally entitled members of a political community constituted under the rule of law.” This is what equal citizenship means in a robust democratic sense. In contrast, permission-based toleration “means that the authority (or majority) grants the minority the permission to live in accordance with its convictions so long as it—and this is the crucial condition—does not question the predominance of the authority (or majority).”
What Vance is really asserting with his demands for gratitude is the right to deference and a certain degree of submission from nonwhite Americans, and in particular nonwhite immigrants. He is, in other words, asserting that their citizenship is permission-based rather than respect-based. I suspect this concept of permission-based citizenship is how you might resolve the apparent conflict between Vance’s barely concealed white nationalism and the reality of his interracial marriage and mixed-race children: JD serves as Usha’s character witness.
Permission-based citizenship is citizenship without political rights. As such, it is no citizenship at all. The essence of citizenship in a republic is the ability to look any of your fellow citizens directly in the eye; to assert that you deserve their recognition as an equal in the political arena and society as a whole. The problem with El-Sayed is not that he lacks gratitude—he has, in fact, spoken movingly about his love for this country—but that he has the temerity to call himself an American, with all the rights and duties the word implies. Kamala Harris, Zohran Mamdani, and Abdul El-Sayed treat their right to participate in politics at the highest level as a given—and, worst of all, they participate while disobeying JD Vance.
It would be one thing if only the vice president were espousing these views. But tiered, permission-based citizenship is central to the entire MAGA project. You can see its influence in the calls from Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Munich) and others to strip Mamdani of his U.S. citizenship. It’s there in the Trump Administration’s campaign to denaturalize Rep. Ilhan Omar; according to President Trump, she deserves to lose her citizenship because all she does is “complain, complain, complain.” And you can see it in the right’s freakout over the presence of a bunch of desi students at a UT Austin football game.
On a podcast about said freakout with Manhattan Institute senior fellow in race science Christopher Rufo, right-wing book publisher Jonathan Keeperman said that the problem with those students was that they were “not an assimilated group.” But the real problem is that these students were too assimilated. Here were people of South Asian descent, some of whom might have been immigrants and many of whom were likely native-born citizens, daring to act like Texans. Keeperman didn’t give them permission to do that, so who did?
The same applies to Mamdani and Omar. It is hard to imagine a more profound act of assimilation to the American way of life than running for high office, winning, and using the levers of democratic politics without bowing and scraping before the party that currently occupies the White House. JD Vance and his ilk would have you believe that Mamdani, Omar, El-Sayed, Kamala Harris, and UT Austin’s nonwhite students all fail to understand the meaning of American citizenship. It’s not in their blood, after all. But blood isn’t what matters here. And Vance is the one who has no grasp on what it means to be a citizen in a free republic.