My dad came here for a reason, and it wasn’t the dirt of a graveyard.
On November 10, 1948, Vladimir Gavora jumped into the frigid waters of the Danube River. That year, a pro-Soviet government had seized power in his native Czechoslovakia. Vladimir was 17 years old, and had been caught tearing down the new government’s propaganda posters. With the secret police on his tail, he decided to escape by swimming to Austria. He finished high school in a refugee camp in West Germany, won a scholarship to come to America, studied at the University of Chicago, and made his way to the then-territory of Alaska. There, he built a successful business and raised a family of nine children—one of them, me. When he died in 2018, he was hailed as the man who did more than any other to shape the development and growth of his corner of the Last Frontier.
I thought of Dad last week, when the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, said something that profoundly misjudged and disrespected his memory.
“America is not just an idea,” Vance said in his introductory speech to the American people at the Republican National Convention. Americans won’t fight and sacrifice for “abstractions.” Shared history, he assured us, is what we care about. And shared dirt. He used the morbid image of a cemetery plot in Kentucky coal country, where generations of his family have been laid to rest. He expressed his desire for his children to one day bury him there and—carrying his morbidity to the extreme—for them to eventually follow him.
The notion that America is an idea has always lifted up our country, and for good reason. The fact that America was founded on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the governing limits of the Constitution makes us unique among nations. Most countries trace their origins to tribal identity. But America has its origins in the revolutionary idea that the government cannot deny men and women an equal opportunity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Both our friends and foes have recognized this difference. No less than Joseph Stalin railed against American “exceptionalism” when our workers refused to join in solidarity with his murderous revolution of the proletariat.
Vance went out of his way to trash this exceptionalism, to say that America is not distinguished by its creed, no matter what Stalin thought. In the same speech, he acknowledged the contribution of immigrants like his wife’s parents, who came here from India. But in repudiating the American ideal, he insulted the reason immigrants come to America in the first place.
Did Dad have the preamble to the Declaration of Independence in mind as he swam across the Danube to freedom? Probably not. Was it the abstraction that “all men are created equal” that kept him company as he huddled in the trunk of a car through the Soviet zone of Austria? Dad never talked with me about what exactly was in his head during that fateful crossing. But I assume it wasn’t the ringing words of Thomas Jefferson. So, okay, Dad may not have been driven by the idea of America. But he was driven by what that idea—the American creed of equal opportunity— created in the American nation. He was driven to find a place where he knew he could control his destiny.
Some, generally on the left, have accused Vance of advocating Christian nationalism or white supremacy by denigrating America’s founding ideals. In fact, he is doing something even more damaging to the American experiment. The words all men are created equal have always served as (at least) a moral voice and (at most) a legal bulwark for poor, powerless Americans. The words have not always been honored, and we have taken far too long to fulfill their true meaning. But they have been there, through slavery, through Jim Crow, through anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic bigotry. They have changed this country for the better.
What these words confer to all Americans is agency. This is one of the most underrated words in American politics. Better even than freedom, agency captures both the opportunity and the responsibility that is promised by the American idea. Our founding documents are a guarantee not of success, but of the opportunity for success.
Vance used to understand this. His masterful autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, electrified a nation on the verge of electing Donald Trump precisely because it acknowledged the agency of the people in the poor, drug-addicted community and family into which he’d been born. Vance took a hard look at where he came from and saw a self-destructive culture that had turned its back on its agency. He understood that economic forces were working against his community, but he bravely took that community to task for its self-imposed victimhood. Vance described how, one after another, his relatives, friends, co-workers, and neighbors refused to take responsibility for their situation. Young men walked away from good jobs. Single mothers used their food stamps to buy soda that they sold for cash. Everyone’s lives were tough, but it was always somebody else’s fault.
That bracing message took a 180-degree turn last week. And it’s no coincidence that Vance used the same speech in which he denigrated the idea of America to deny the agency he once subscribed to his fellow hillbillies. Suddenly, he was describing people who work with their hands in midwestern swing states as helpless victims with no responsibility for their plight. “America’s ruling class wrote the checks,” he said. “Communities like mine paid the price.”
Does Vance really believe what he is saying? It’s hard to reconcile these words with the courage of the young author. But he wouldn’t be the only one to have given up on the American ideal. What my father saw in America is something that too many Americans no longer see for themselves. We do not teach our children the gifts and responsibilities of their birthright. Our elite universities see the founding ideals of America as either racist lies or plain old lies. One result is that too many young Americans feel entitled to be saved by the government, rather than working to save themselves.
[Read: I hope Trump kept the receipt]
In Czechoslovakia, the government confiscated our family’s liquor business and sent my grandmother to a work camp for burying her share of the inventory in her backyard. That is the lack of agency my father escaped. He came to Alaska with a degree in economics from Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago. When the job he was promised at the University of Alaska fell through for lack of funding, he didn’t sue the university for breach of contract. He took the first job he found in the want ads: delivering milk. He was the most overqualified milkman in Alaska, if not America. He ended up owning all of the stores he once delivered milk to.
Dad was born and grew up in a small town in Czechoslovakia. Like Vance, he lived near a cemetery. It is full of Gavoras going back generations. But Dad is buried 4,700 miles away on a hillside overlooking Fairbanks, Alaska. He had no past there. No native culture. No native language. But he left his homeland behind for a successful, chosen life—a life made possible by the idea that is America.
