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In the weeks since his selection as Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance’s political vision has come to be defined by a single, compact denigration of Democrats: “childless cat ladies.”
Journalists unearthed scores of clips of Vance ridiculing the left as lost souls—non-parents adrift and building a ruinous culture. The family had been abandoned, Vance fretted in 2021, by Democrats who were not real Americans but “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Many iterations of this insult exist. Over the years, Vance has critiqued Vice President Kamala Harris’ lack of children; he’s gone after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for not having offspring. He has suggested adults with children should get extra votes.
There is a way of thinking of Vance’s mantra as strange. But, is it? Vance has uttered these “childless” epithets so much because the idea that kids are paramount—central and necessary for true citizenship in America—is not that abnormal. For years, economic policies have been, on both sides of the aisle, about helping families.
Parenthood has an exalted place in our society. People often trade away their values for the supposed necessity of protecting children (whether that leads to QAnon madness or the liberal extolling of public education right up until choosing a school for your son). Vance’s “childless” comments are simply a cruder, meaner version of what often is presented as “family values” in the United States.
As Dr. Melinda Cooper wrote in her pathbreaking work Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, many would like to cleave the idea of policy away from “the family”—but our economic order is bound up with how we conceive of the home.
A few years ago, I read Cooper’s book and it completely upended my understanding of “cultural politics“—and I am still sifting through how it rearranged my thinking. How do the economic structures of our world create systems we call natural? And what does it mean that we appeal to these myths in our politics? Her new work, Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance, tackles similar ideas and applies them to how the agenda of austerity developed since the 1970s. (It’s also causing me again to rethink…well, most things.)
I thought immediately of Cooper when I heard Vance’s comments. Pondering Vance and my frustrations about how we talk about his social conservatism, I reached out to her. She answered a few of the thorny concerns I had over email. Take a read of the lightly edited answers below:
Over the last week or so, journalists have resurfaced a series of clips from Vance—and other Republicans—bemoaning “childless” people. It seems like many were surprised to hear his arguments. Were you?
No. I think the wider social acceptance of homosexuality, brought about by the legalization of same-sex marriage, has shifted the line of deviance from sexuality (hetero versus homo) to reproductivity. Hetero versus homo has been replaced by the reproductive versus the sterile. Judgements around childlessness were always there. But it has become the focal point. The stigmatization is sex-asymmetric—it weighs on women in a way it doesn’t on men because of our asymmetric understanding of female bodies as bearers of family lineage. There’s a reason why there is no male equivalent to the cat lady.
It’s interesting to see that the stigmatization of trans people now often turns around issues of sterility. I would say that a few decades ago transphobia overlapped with homophobia to a much greater degree; that is, transpeople were tainted with the brush of deviant (homo) sexuality. Now the defining issue is the threat to reproduction, either through the sterilization of children or imagined pedophilia by trans adults.
A lot of your work concerns the political economy of cultural arguments like Vance’s. What do you think are some of the key things that have happened since the 1970s in our economic structure that help us understand why someone like Vance would say this?
Demographic common sense has shifted since the 1970s.
Anti-natalist arguments were dominant in the 1970s. In the Anglo-American west, there was widespread fear that the Keynesian welfare state had been too successful—that it had literally subsidized the birth of a whole generation of student radicals (the baby boomers) and empowered parts of the American population who were supposed to remain in the margins. These fears were projected onto the anti-colonial “Third World” and translated into fears of overpopulation from the global south.
For a long time now, the pendulum has shifted back in the other direction and the overriding danger is understood to be declining birth rates. This is as true of countries in the global South as it is in the global North.
Demographic fears around declining birth rates often rest on the idea that they are a key factor in economic growth. The term “secular stagnation” was coined by the American Keynesian Alvin Hansen in the late 1930s: he proposed the term as a way of describing the long-term decline in growth rates, a decline which he attributed above all to falling birth rates. The concept of secular stagnation posits a crude one-to-one relationship between women’s per capita fertility, the size of the national population and GDP growth. This leads to the idea that the primary reason for lackluster growth rates and national economic decline is women’s refusal to have enough children. You could describe this as a bastardized Keynesianism. But in that case Keynes was also a bastard Keynesian, because he was not above attributing underconsumption crises to underpopulation. (I explored this in a paper.)
In recent years, this has become an increasingly popular explanation for faltering growth rates in Western Europe, North America, and Japan. At the turn of the century, the renowned development economist Walt Whitman Rostow published a book about the worldwide dangers of underpopulation in the 21st century. After the global financial crisis of 2008, some very mainstream economists resurrected the idea of “secular stagnation” and sometimes suggested a link between falling birth rates and declining growth rates. Every few years, the Financial Times runs a feature on the economic dangers of the “baby bust.” See this for a recent example. Matthew Yglesias’s recently reissued One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger is a clear example of the genre. The argument is that America is in economic and military decline—the root cause of which is demographic decline (with a nod to Alvin Hansen’s secular stagnation). Note that much of this kind of thinking has a Keynesian lineage and is coming from the centre or liberal left.
This leads to the idea that the primary reason for lackluster growth rates and national economic decline is women’s refusal to have enough children. You could describe this as a bastardized Keynesianism.
So in some ways the most surprising thing about the new “pro-growth” pronatalism is the fact that its coming from within the Republican Party. This is driven by a resurgent right-wing economic nationalism that is protectionist and mercantilist rather than Keynesian. The anti-free trade, protectionist wing of the Republican Party was once represented by someone like Pat Buchanan, who can also be described as a far-right paleoconservative. This tradition was always very pro-natalist. In his 2001 Death of the West, Buchanan wrote that the Western world was committing “autogenocide” thanks to the refusal of overeducated, working women to have children and the “Reconquista” of their lands by non-white migrants.
I would see JD Vance as a paleoconservative economic nationalist like Pat Buchanan, so his pronatalism is hardly surprising. You have a new breed of Republicans associated with American Compass and American Affairs who make devastating critiques of the free-trade neoliberal consensus in the name of a renewed economic nationalism. Their welfarism represents a genuine break from neoliberal orthodoxy but it is also very limited and conditional. It’s a species of welfarism that supports paid parental leave or child benefits on pro-natalist rather than gender-egalitarian grounds. Similarly, their pro-labor politics doesn’t go much further than protectionism and mercantilism—tariffs and migration crackdowns.
The nativist inflections of this kind of thinking can vary in intensity. On the one hand, you have great replacement theory and fears of white extinction at the hands of migrants. On the other hand, you have someone like JD Vance who would say, I want women to have lots of children but immigration can never be a solution to declining birth rates because it says something about our moral weakness as whites if we accept this. (See this clip.) Instead of externally directed racism the accusation is turned inwards and whites are held responsible for their own extinction.
It seems to me liberals really struggle to understand the argument here from Vance, and why he would say these things. What do you think the typical Democrat misses about what he’s saying—and why it’s dangerous? There is a discomfort, it seems to me, with discussing their own understandings of family structures under capitalism.
I think the discomfort comes from the fact that some of Vance’s core assumptions are shared by liberals. Every few years liberals start beating themselves up for having abandoned the issue of family values to the right. It is happening again in the context of wider fears around declining birth rates. See this recent feature article in the New Yorker which talks about the forthcoming book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, What Are Children For?. In an extract from the book, Berg and Wiseman begin by lamenting the self-obsession of young “people” who “spend their twenties on journeys of personal and professional self-discovery and self-fulfillment.” But the complaint very quickly narrows in onto the problem of “female empowerment” and “female autonomy.”
These narratives translate very quickly into a conservative “anticapitalism” (really an anti-neoliberalism as in economic liberalism). Typically working women, particularly working women in positions of relative power, become the symptoms of market excess in a way that working men never do. So you slide very quickly from a critique of lean-in neoliberal feminism to the idea that neoliberalism is somehow inherently feminist.
Vance is much crueler and authoritarian in his views. But the basic assumptions are shared. Vance talks about the childless left. Berg and Wiseman talk about “the left’s wariness of children.” Vance talks about people who “don’t have a stake in the future of the country.” They imagine children in exactly the same terms, as a form of secular transcendence and commitment to the future of the nation.
In the foreword to Kevin Robert’s new book, Vance writes: “Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family. In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids.” What rift between new and old right do you think he is addressing here?
He is referring to the shift away from neoliberal economics toward economic nationalism among Republicans associated with American Compass, American Affairs, and, most recently, the Heritage Foundation (led by Kevin Roberts since 2021). He is suggesting that this move will make the Republicans more focused on “family values.” But the Republicans’ neoliberalism was always aligned with neoconservatism (the dominant current in social conservatism up until George W. Bush) as well as various religious conservatisms. So the attachment to family values is far from new. However, JD Vance and Kevin Roberts represent a shift from neoconservatism to paleoconservatism, which is much more closely aligned with the racist far right (see my “The Alt-Right: Neoliberalism, Libertarianism and the Fascist Temptation”) and the theocratic far right (I discuss this in Counterrevolution). This articulation of paleoconservative and economic nationalist positions was represented for a long time by Pat Buchanan.
