Even those of us who were not fans of J.D. Vance before he was selected to run as Donald Trump’s pick for Vice President did not expect the trainwreck that has ensued. He has always been an opportunistic charlatan, an overrated suck-up, and an intellectual void in search of power and validation. But even though he is a bit more of all of those things than almost anyone else, he is not categorically unique in elite political and financial circles in the U.S. and elsewhere. Being a straight white male, he was almost certainly going to be elevated to a level that was beyond his capacity, but again, there has always been a lot of that in Washington, on Wall Street, and in Silicon Valley.
In any case, Vance has been an utter disaster as a national political candidate, and uniquely so. One of his speeches (during which he weirdly said that Democrats would call him racist for drinking Diet Mountain Dew) has already been mocked and parodied by dozens of comedians, political analysts, and media strategists. When a candidate’s performance is being compared unfavorably to Jeb Bush’s “Please clap” moment from 2016, things are not going well. Given Trump’s infamously transactional modus operandi, people are now wondering whether he might even try to replace Vance with someone who delivers actual political value rather than dragging down an already weak ticket.
Even worse for Vance (and thus better for those of us who care about the future of the United States and the world), much of what is making news is not even new, with politically toxic comments bubbling up from the last several years. He was, to say the least, poorly vetted by the Trump team. Vance is now left to claim that he is being mischaracterized, but even when he tries the Trumpian move of saying that he was obviously being sarcastic, he reiterates that he actually believes “the substance” of his earlier comments.
And what is that substance: “I’m sorry, it’s true. It’s true that we’ve become anti-family. It is true that the left has become anti-child.” I am not at all sorry to say that that is false. It is false in the most politically stupid sense that Vance meant it, and it also highlights the profoundly ignorant way in which he views human society. He is not merely a blustering jerk. He is a proudly antisocial blustering jerk.
About All of Those “Childless” People
Vance’s “cat ladies” comment has already brought forth a tidal wave of analysis and response, making it relatively easy here to shorthand some of those responses while emphasizing the points that I think have not been articulated strongly and loudly enough. And like any decent human being who hears a blowhard insulting other people’s life situations and choices (and often outcomes that were not choices at all), I am incensed.
I begin with my own views about what it means to “have children.” To have children means to be a parent. That might seem like an obvious statement, but in fact it hides the very notion of what a parent/child relationship is behind the words “have” and “be.” Is parenting merely biology? Is a man who accidentally gets a woman pregnant and never has anything to do with that child a “father” —especially in a state where the government forces women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term by force of law, as Vance has advocated across the U.S. (once calling pregnancies resulting from rape and incest merely “inconvenient”)? Is a woman who does not nurture and raise a child its “mother”? Obviously, the answer to both questions is yes in a biological sense, but society is about how people treat each other. In turn, families are about how family members treat each other.
There was a very short-lived TV sitcom that ran in 1988 called “Eisenhower & Lutz.” In it, the main character is a thirty-ish lawyer who spends time with his quirky dad in a loving father-son relationship. In one episode, it is revealed that the father might not be his “real father.” That is, the audience learns that the sperm that fertilized the egg that then led to the birth of the protagonist might have come from a different man. After receiving an envelope containing the results of a DNA test, the son throws it away and says, “You’re my dad, Pop. You always have been.” I am well aware that such a scenario has been depicted many times in far higher forms of art and literature, but for some reason, that 23-minute episode of otherwise forgettable television has always stuck with me. Parenting is as parenting does, and a person who does nothing for a child is not a parent.
Are you a parent? Again, the answer depends not on what you are (genetically linked to a child) but what you do (actually be a loving parent to that child). When two of my closest friends adopted a child, it never occurred to me that they were not the little girl’s “real” parents, and it broke my heart when other people tossed off casually cruel comments suggesting that their parent-child bond was somehow lesser. When I married into having two stepchildren, I never for a moment thought, “Well, I’m not their real dad.” What kind of a monster would think that?
Well, we know the answer to that. But what is especially infuriating about Vance’s thoughtless hate is that it does not even add up on its own terms. He and his supporters have sneeringly dismissed the idea, for example, that Vice President Kamala Harris is a real mother, because her children’s biological mother is still a part of that blended family. If Harris’s husband had been a widower, would that make Harris a “real” mother, or would her children have to be told that “you have no mother”—that that woman who has loved you and cared for you is not a real parent? Before answering, consider that Vance has said that people who have children should get a tax break, which begs the question of what would count as a parent for that purpose. (As many people have pointed out, of course, the Internal Revenue Code already offers financial assistance to parents, but those benefits are tied to actual parenting, and for very good reason.)
Is a “fake parent” suddenly a “real parent” if the right person dies? Is parenthood suddenly a sick parody of “Game of Thrones”? Beyond that sad way of understanding Vance’s worldview, however, it should be noted that his entire goal here is to present himself as “pro-family” or maybe “pro-child.” That means that his real complaint—recall his false claim that the “the left has become anti-child”—is that people are not having enough children and need to be financially induced to do so. But the decline in birth rates is much more pronounced in many other countries, the most extreme cases being South Korea and Japan. Are those two countries (and many others with birth rates below replacement level) dominated by child-hating leftists? Apparently not, because both countries have been trying for years to get their young people to increase their family sizes, offering financial rewards that would make a Republican blush for their cost to the nations’ treasuries. Even at those levels of support, birth rates have not gone back up.
Again, much of the ground here has been covered well by others, including noting the hypocrisy of an anti-IVF (in vitro fertilization) Senator blaming people for not having children. Vance claims that his recent vote did not mean that he is against IVF, but that is spin at its worst.
Other commentators have noted that young people in the U.S. are not having children for a number of reasons, many if not most of them financial. Yet Vance and his Republican colleagues have absolutely gone ballistic about the Biden administration’s efforts to reduce student loan debt, which is the biggest financial barrier stopping young people from getting on with their adult lives.
For those people who could imagine becoming parents, there are many other reasons that they might choose not to do so. Notably, during the 1930s and through World War II, birth rates dropped to very low levels in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Both dictatorships tried to use all kinds of inducements to increase births (of only the favored race, of course), and both continued to fail. Why? The answer is not difficult to understand. Even for citizens of those countries who were outwardly in favor of their governments’ murderous policies, the fact is that they would be bringing children into an ugly, dangerous world. Many of them decided not to do that, even with a brutal regime pushing hard to create a master race.
The desire to become a parent (through whatever means) is very much a statement of optimism. Vance wants to blame “the left,” but young people are looking at the world that the Republicans might create—a world of worsening climate disasters, chronic inequality, and vanishing government support for families—and feeling nothing but pessimism. Deciding not to be a parent might well feel like a compassionate choice.
We All Have a Stake in What Happens in Society, Beyond “Our” Families
Vance’s eugenicist motivations are certainly horrifying, but his larger worldview is simply confused. His 2021 comments attacking people without biological children, for example, included this question (which he apparently thought was rhetorical): “[H]ow does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Similarly, he argued that same year that parents (but only biological parents?) should have the ability to cast multiple votes, for themselves and for their children. This raises some immediate questions, such as whether it is only the father who gets to cast his children’s votes, whether people should be able to vote based on how many children they plan to have (because it is all about the future, right?), and other problems with this inane idea. Getting into those ultimately pointless particulars, however, is beside the point.
Vance has since responded with snark to such criticism, saying that obviously he was just engaged in “thought experiments” and that he was not being serious when trotting out his inconveniently unpopular, bonkers ideas. But that explanation actually makes matters worse rather than better for Vance. He justified his parents-voting-for-kids hypothetical by adding this:
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.
So, according to Donald Trump’s choice to be the proverbial “heartbeat away from the presidency,” people who are not biological parents “don’t really have a stake in” the country, because such defective people “don’t have as much of an investment in the future.” Got it. But what are the “consequences and reality” of not being a parent? Vance has no idea.
Because one of my primary areas of scholarship deals with retirement finance, I have long been fascinated by how nonsensical it is to think that people without children have no stake in the future or the well-being of the country’s children. Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s, some people were arguing under a “singles’ rights” banner that the government should stop using childless people’s taxes to subsidize other people’s “self-indulgent” decisions to have children. If someone wants to raise rugrats, the nasty argument went, the rest of us should not be forced to pay for their egotistical choices.
That was as wrong as Vance’s rightwing version of the argument that non-parents have no stake in helping the next generation thrive. Society is not a bunch of atomistic individuals. Even the most conservative version of Economics 101 says that people need other people to produce and buy each other’s goods and services. And when it comes to retirement, the connection is even more obvious, because even a fabulously wealthy person who is not a parent is going to be rather disappointed if he retires into a world in which there are not enough young, healthy, productive people to create the goods and services that the retiree wants to buy. Heart medications, winery tours, and Depends adult diapers do not produce themselves.
Note that this is true no matter how a country’s retirement system is financed. Social Security and other highly successful and popular forms of social insurance require younger workers to support retirees, but so does every other form of retirement system—even one in which retirees rely only on what they have managed to accumulate in savings accounts.
One of my students told me once that her father had a line that he liked to repeat to her and her sister: “You’re my retirement plan.” For much of human history, the lack of social coordination made that statement literally true: people who could say to “their” children that there was an obligation to provide support to one’s elders had to trust that the kids would come through when it mattered (and many did not, by the way). Meanwhile, those older people who could not tap into a familial network had no choice but to work until they died.
But again, even in situations in which adult children do support their aged parents, the now-grown workers are not producing all of their own goods and services. They were (and are) working in economies in which people interact to increase the size of the economic pie through specialization and the division of labor. Even though the parents might think that their own children are exclusively supporting them in retirement, it is in fact every younger worker in our market economy who is making it possible for older people not to have to work.
All of this means that people without children have at least “as much of an investment in the future,” in Vance’s words, as anyone else. Possibly, they would feel even more of a stake in investing in young people’s future productivity (which means investing in the health of all citizens and their environment), because they could not fall back on the lazy thought that only one’s own children are their ultimate source of support.
People who have no children on whom they can rely for support in retirement have every reason to pay attention to how we as a nation invest in our future. They have a very direct stake in the future, and they have intensely personal reasons to see the reality much more clearly than others, which is that everyone loses when we live in a society in which there are not enough children with sufficient education, skills, technology, and robust health to support people in dignified retirements.
A 30-year-old who says, “I’m going to have four kids, and they’ll take care of me when I’m old,” is superficially correct but deeply wrong. A 30-year-old who says, “I’m never going to be a parent, but I do plan to retire,” might think that their retirement savings will support them when the time comes, but that would also be superficially correct and deeply wrong. This is a society. This is a modern economy. No matter one’s parental status, the welfare of all children very much determines everyone’s futures.
Again, Vance’s denigration of the supposedly anti-child left is grotesquely dehumanizing and simply wrong, on the most personal level. Such ideas can only come from a man who does not understand what human interdependence means. Even selfish and narrow-minded people like J.D. Vance need other people. That he does not understand that tells us that he is unqualified to lead.
