It’s the dead of midwinter and that means that I’m spending my days watching curling and moguls and luge and foreign policy speeches at the Munich Security Conference.

Like pretty much the entire American right, I mostly liked Marco Rubio’s speech there, certainly better than the last guy’s. But I took note of one perhaps tellingly awkward construction, the one the State Department chose to blast out on social media as the money quote: “Armies do not fight for abstractions. They fight for a people, a nation, and a way of life. That is what we are defending.”

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I caught hell on X/Twitter from other fans of the speech, for pointing out that a people, a nation, and a way of life are, in fact, abstractions — paradigmatic ones, even. For this I was called a pedant, a stupid leftist, and sundry slurs about my masculinity. But I’m obviously right. And not just for semantic reasons, but for substantive ones. Let me explain.

First, the easy part. A “people” is not a concrete object. You can’t trip over it. It has no home address. A “nation” is a community of shared sentiment and mutual obligation that, critically, need not constitute a state or any other geographically contiguous area. It’s an “imagined community,” and all........

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