Vance, the (literal) Populist!
Trump's VP pick said childless adults "don't have as much of an investment in the future of this country," and that those with children should have more say, including an extra vote for each child.
According to Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance, if you don’t have children, you don’t count—at least not as much.
Back in 2021, JD Vance, then a candidate for US Senate in Ohio, gave an interview on FOX News with Tucker Carlson that’s just now drawing attention. Vance was complaining about Democrats and said that the US is being run by a bunch of “childless cat ladies.”
“We’re effectively run in this country—via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,” Vance told Carlson, “by 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.” During the interview, Vance cited Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (not a lady by the way), and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as examples of “people without children” in the Democratic Party.
Mocking someone for not having children is a cruel low blow, even in today’s hostile political environment where almost nothing is out of bounds—and should have been beneath someone who was running for US Senate. On top of it—it wasn’t true. Harris has two stepchildren, and Buttigieg and his partner are the parents of two adopted children. Whether it’s by choice or not—it’s none of Vance’s business whether someone has, or doesn’t have, children or why—or to punish them for what may not even be a choice. And, do only someone’s biological children count?
It’s ironic that one of the leaders of a party that preaches getting the government out of the lives of its citizens and criticizes the “nanny” state would instead be preaching the “baby” state.
Since the “cat lady” remarks became widely public, Vance has tried—in his own, and as it turns out superficial and combative way—to backtrack, a bit. “I know the media wants to attack me and wants me to back down on this,” he said on the “Megyn Kelly Show” this past Friday, “but the simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way.”
If only that were the “simple” point he was making. Perhaps he thinks we are the simple ones? No JD—the not so subtle point you were making is that parents—especially parents of biological children—have a greater stake in the future of our nation, and therefore should have more of a say in how our country is run. Might parents (all parents) have a different perspective that having children gives them—OK I can go with that as far as that goes. But Vance goes farther—much farther.
How do I know? Because Vance gave another interview in 2021 that is even more disturbing than the FOX News interview. In a speech to a conservative policy group, Vance said that each American’s political power should be proportional to the number of children they have. The more children you have, the more your vote should count.
“Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children,” Vance told the Intercollegiate Studies Institute back in 2021. “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power—you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic—than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.” Sorry, but that doesn’t sound very democratic to me.
Vance, 39, is the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a memoir turned movie about Vance overcoming a dysfunctional, chaotic, hardscrabble childhood to attend Yale Law School—with a stop as a US Marine serving in Iraq in between. In many ways Vance’s life is the cliche rags-to-riches American Dream story—but his politics can be a nightmare, even for Republicans.
“Hillbilly Elegy” catapulted Vance to national attention—which he leveraged into a successful race for US Senate in 2022—and now possibly to being the Vice President of the United States. Once a “Never-Trumper,” who called Trump '“toxic,” an “idiot,” and “reprehensible,” Vance’s evolution into the MAGA movement, some might say “devolution,” has an air of malleable ambition about it.
“There is, of course, nothing inherently pathological about changing one’s political views,” Michelle Goldberg writes in the New York Times. "Vance, however, swapped out not just his beliefs but his entire public persona in just a few short years. ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ contains an indictment of ‘conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics’ who spread lies about Barack Obama’s religion and birthplace. And it laments the corrosive cynicism that led many in his white working-class community to embrace these falsehoods.”
So, walking back comments or repudiating prior beliefs is nothing new for Vance, but during his appearance on the “Megyn Kelly Show,” he had an opportunity to “clarify” his comments about disenfranchising the childless—he instead doubled-down. While calling his “cat-lady” comments harmless sarcasm—he avoided discussing his controversial voting scheme altogether.
We should be rightfully suspicious of someone who changes worldviews when it becomes convenient—or when a prior worldview becomes temporarily inconvenient. Abraham Lincoln once replied to a US Senator who criticized him for changing his mind, “I don’t think much of a man who is isn’t smarter today than he was yesterday.” But JD Vance is no Abraham Lincoln, and change has been a big part of Vance’s persona. In 2019, for example, Vance converted to Catholicism and was baptized.
It’s fair-game to challenge a politician for “flip-flopping,” though we should respect those, like Lincoln, willing to abandon or modify their thinking when it doesn’t work or they’ve come to see it as flawed—economic and foreign policy come immediately to mind. Vance has argued, for example, that his change-of-heart regarding Trump is a product of being shown he was wrong—or perhaps it was just wrong for Vance politically if he hoped to climb Trump’s Republican ladder.
I’m not surprised that Vance’s “cat-lady” comments have garnered so much media attention, but I am surprised that his childless “don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country” comment has received so little. Many in the media have focused on the “cat-lady” comment and tried to twist it into misogyny—I don’t see it as misogyny so much as stupidity.
The New York Times Maureen Dowd, for example, has argued that Vance believes in disempowering women and turning them into to nothing more than baby machines. “[O]n the campaign trail,” Dowd wrote of Vance, “he projects an archaic image nurtured by Heritage Foundation-Project 2025 fanatics and Vance’s fellow superconservative Catholics. You get the impression that they would love nothing more than to dispatch women back to the kitchen and bedroom, turning them into what Hilary Mantel called ‘breeding stock, collections of organs.’”
I’ve grown weary of the “Handmaid’s Tale” allusions, and I don’t think they fit here. Vance is no Harrison Butker—the Kansas City Chiefs kicker who believes that a woman’s highest calling is as a mother and wife, and whose focus should be inside, not outside, the home. Like Vance, his wife Usha is also a Yale Law graduate—they met in law school—and she has clerked for two current Supreme Court Justices, including Chief Justice Roberts. Up until Vance’s nomination as Vice-President she was a civil litigator for a large law firm. She’s no doting, submissive, housewife.
And it’s not just political power Vance wants to take away from the “childless.” He wants to take away their money too. According to Forbes during a podcast in 2021 he advocated a higher tax rate for childless adults and has supported giving federal loans to marrying couples that would be forgiven if the couple has children.
Vance, the Populist!
Does anyone other than me see a theme here? Vance is obsessed with Americans having more children—he’s a literal populist. It’s true that the American birthrate is at an historic low—as the younger generations have fewer children, and later—or not at all. And the marriage rate is also declining—and unmarried women are less likely to have children. Let’s put aside the obvious constitutional questions for now—and the violation of “one man, one vote.” Are Americans really going to have more children, or get married, to get more political power? Will the new come-on line become—”hey baby, let’s go upstairs…and make a new vote?”
There’s a scene in the movie Braveheart where Longshanks, the King of England, is plotting his conquest of Scotland and after several failed attempts he’s decided to give his lords free “reign” over newly married women so that the children born will have English blood. “If we can't drive them out,” quips Longshanks, “we will breed them out.” I’m not sure to what end Vance’s literal populism is aimed, but I am sure I don’t want to know. Does he think that we can **** ourselves out of our country’s problems?
Vance also has other unconventional ideas—at least for someone who styles themselves as a conservative Republican. “He is not someone who just parrots his party’s talking points,” writes Oliver Wiseman in The Free Press, “In the Senate, he hasn’t just voted with the GOP herd but teamed up with Democrats on a range of bills that stake out new ideological territory for Republicans. He makes some of Trump’s donors uncomfortable.”
He’s making me uncomfortable too.
Of all the incredible positive things that this man has done for this country already, and all of the positive things that he has said to date, I just can't believe you are focusing on one comment, taken out of context, and from over four years ago. With all of the very real and despicable things that communist installed Kamala Harris and Pete scumbag have said and done to DESTROY this country,and you focus on one comment that Vance may have said... YEARS AGO! UNREAL
There is no middle of the road between communism and a Constitutional Republic, and if we do not elect VP Vance and President Trump in the next election, we will be in as deplorable a condition as Venezuela is right now!
ChewonthisAmerica!