Republican vice-presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance thought it was decent and conservative to launch withering attacks on leaders in public life who’ve had no children.
In July 2021, before he held office, he told Tucker Carlson, “We are effectively run in this country…by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too. It’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.” He asked: “How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Where to begin? We can quickly get past the fact that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and his husband in August 2021 adopted twin babies. And the fact that Harris has two stepchildren with Doug Emhoff. And the fact that AOC is just 34 years old and has plenty of time to become a mom if she wishes to.
And the fact that the vast majority of Democratic leaders past and present are fathers and mothers: Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Bill and Hillary Clinton and governors from Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan to Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania to Wes Moore of Maryland to Gavin Newsom of California. Anyone who asserts with a straight face that “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children” has an abusive relationship with the truth.
But stop and dissect the nasty insult that someone without children lacks a stake in the future of the country.
George Washington had no children. Did the literal father of the United States lack a stake in America’s future? Stop laughing.
Ed Koch had no children. Did one of New York City’s most consequential modern mayors lack a stake in the future of New York City? The notion is patently ridiculous.
Angela Merkel has no children. Did Germany’s most consequential modern leader have a miserable life and therefore set about to make the rest of her nation miserable?
Nor does having offspring correlate in any way, shape or form to the quality of a person’s character or leadership. Donald Trump has five children from three separate marriages. He’s been held civilly liable for sexual abuse. He added more to the national debt than any president in U.S. history, a clear sign of disrespect for future generations.
Vance, like Trump, is so desperate to ignite new culture wars that set Americans against Americans that he looks for any potential rift to explain why “they” are alien to “us,” and why “they” are to blame for all “our” problems. It’s ironic because a big message of his bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy” is that facile political blame games are facile and self-destructive.
In the book, Vance is honest about the fact that the family he grew up in, mired in poverty and beset by drug addiction and alcohol abuse and chronic irresponsibility, made its own bad choices.
The introspective, relatively honest man who wrote that 2016 memoir has vanished. So who is the man running alongside Donald Trump?
