Caught off guard by the Democrats’ late-start presidential campaign, conservatives are panicking, with many blaming J.D. Vance for the GOP’s recent slide in the polls. Vance’s success dealing with adversarial interviewers this past Sunday, however, reveals him as an excellent pick—a natural communicator with the potential to bring the country back to its historic roots, the once cherished idea of liberty.

At the Republican National Convention, Vance had his “pit bull with lipstick” moment when he ruminated about the cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky where his ancestors are resting and where he, too, hopes to be buried one day:

Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principle. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

It was an evocative passage, so naturally, the pundits whose hearts didn’t grow an inch after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump jumped in to assert that Vance’s speech was an example of both white supremacy and toxic masculinity. The argument that America is more than an idea proved to be predictably dangerous to the people who’d have you believe that white Americans are mere colonizers. That the generations of Vances weren’t rejected by the land puts the woke ideology to lie.

Vance was not the only convention speaker that night to talk about America as a home worth fighting for.

Ninety-eight-year-old Sergeant William Pekrul stood in stark contrast to our waning president, Joe Biden. In 1944, Perkul stormed the beaches of Normandy. At the RNC, he appeared proud and clear-minded. He, too, said that America is much more than an idea—it’s our home. In effect, the pundits attacking Vance’s alleged white supremacy are implying that it was white supremacy that defeated Nazism.

What makes America a home? What I find striking about Vance and his wife Usha is not some Scotch-Irish exoticism. As a resident of the San Francisco Bay area, he presents less hillbilly and more elegy. Of course, the Vances are from here, too—Usha was born in California, and J.D. worked as a venture capitalist in San Francisco.

A history of military service is pretty unusual around here. On the other hand, the vice-presidential nominee was a philosophy major in college and is a real author—unlike Barack Obama he didn’t use ghost writers. There isn’t a trace of Southern drawl in his speech, and he cooks authentic Indian food. Vance says that his mother-in-law approves of his cooking as she does, I’m sure, of his Yale law degree. The progressive Daily Dot observed that Vance has “the music sensibilities of an urban hipster millennial.” His wife is accomplished, and his kids are adorable, albeit the Vances have the extra third child—some people get carried away, what of it? They could be my middle-class neighbors.

This is in contrast to the recent Kamala rallies, where her vice presidential pick Tim Walz and husband Doug Emhoff both looked jittery. Their gestures were unconventional—instead of kissing his wife, for instance, Walz shook her hand. Considering that the country is in the midst of a substance abuse crisis, footage from the Democratic campaign makes me want to introduce random drug tests for elected officials.

Vance, on the other hand, handled hostile questions from CNN’s Dana Bash with grace. He’s delivering campaign messages, looking neighborly and natural. He’s demonstrating knowledge of the subject matter—and in long compound sentences, no less. It’s a rare treat at a time when the sitting vice president talks about Russia as the big country next to a smaller country, Ukraine. Believe it or not, some U.S. voters still want to see substance.

Of course, Trump needs all the turnout he can get. But where he can really use some help is in the suburbs and urban areas, especially with female voters. The 45th president might be a native New Yorker, but most urbanites find him a bit weird. Why, for instance, did he kiss the uniform of Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who gave his life shielding his wife and daughter during the Trump assassination attempt? The Vances, on the other hand, come across as the people with whom American professionals would like to grab a beer. This affinity is not superficial.

Everyone in the suburbs is from somewhere, and Vance’s ancestors came out of the Scotch-Irish heartland of Appalachia. The Scotch-Irish spread westward, populating the country and assimilating newcomers. A key ethnic group that formed the backbone of our nation, they had both a libertarian spirit and a populist disposition. They’ve shaped our artistic sensibility too—that Williamsburg 2012 playlist populated by anti-Trump artists that the Daily Dot found so scandalous owes its existence to hillbilly musical traditions.

What Vance did at the RNC is bring the reality of rootedness back into the United States mainstream. Our DNA obsession aside, the American way of life is distinct even in the West, and it didn’t happen accidentally nor is it purely a New World phenomenon. While many like me had the good fortune to adopt it for ourselves, it’s a product of a mentality of a particular people.

As David Hackett Fischer noted in Albion’s Seed, the folkloric idea of natural freedom that came from the Scotch-Irish “was created by a complex interaction between the American environment and a European folk culture. It derived in large part from the British border country, where anarchic violence had long been a condition of life.” Fischer then explained that the popular idea was not imparted through book-learning but was instead a mental outlook, absorbed through their mother’s milk: “[Moving out West] they were repeating the thoughts of George Harrison, a North Briton who declared the borderlands during the seventeenth century that ‘every man at nature’s table has a right to elbow room.’”

This kind of history used to be foundational to understanding the American idea. Unfortunately, young people today are growing up alienated from it. Instead, they learn the tenets of DEI and end up confused about themselves and their environment.

For generations, Americans have been settling in suburban stand-alone houses in search of the elbow room that had been central to the American way of life. Admirably, Vance himself managed to find it despite immense odds. But there is no denial that today Millennials like him are at a disadvantage. Between college debt, skyrocketing housing prices, and growing confusion about history and identity, the dream of home and family is being put on hold, sometimes indefinitely.

J.D. Vance has the potential to unify our disjointed nation, because he can remind America of its roots. Of course, people fight for abstractions like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But these abstractions don’t spontaneously materialize out of thin air. They have their own ethnography and are grounded in something concrete—homes, ancestral burying plots, and fruited plains under the spacious sky.