Patriarchy, plutocracy, and ethnonationalism fuel the vice-presidential candidate’s bizarre slur.
Who let the cats out? Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance.(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
Donald Trump hates dogs and J.D. Vance hates cats, so it is hardly surprising that the two men have teamed up for a perfectly balanced presidential ticket. The president habitually and bizarrely uses the word “dog” as a slur while his recently selected running mate seems to regard feline fanciers as the root of all social evil.
Vance followers have long been aware that he often uses “cat lady” as an all-purpose putdown. I wrote about Vance’s peculiar tick in a Substack post in 2021 where I flagged Vance’s claim that “Paul Krugman is one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country.” Paying attention to such mind-numbingly stupid comments used to be the lonely work of the few journalists who specialize in monitoring the far right. But Vance’s utterings have gained new prominence, since there is real chance he could soon be vice president (or even, given Trump’s age and decrepitude, soon be president).
In a recently resurfaced video of a 2021 appearance on Tucker Carlson’s program, Vance spells out what he means by “cat lady”:
We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, 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. And it’s just a basic fact if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And 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…. If we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more, we should vote more, we should support more people who actually have kids. Because those are the people who ultimately have a more direct stake in the future of this country.
In a follow-up comment, Vance claimed that the childless left “hate normal Americans for choosing family.” Vance also used the “cat lady” jibe many other times, notably against young people worried about climate change, journalist Victoria Brownworth, and former Planned Parenthood head Leana Wen.
There are many possible responses to Vance’s comments. One would be a simple fact-check. Kamala Harris is not childless. With her marriage to Doug Emhoff in 2014, she became stepmother to his two children, Ella and Cole, who call her “Mamala.” Indeed, Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife, Kerstin Emhoff, recently said, “These are baseless attacks. For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a coparent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” At the time Vance made his remarks, Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, were in the midst of trying to adopt children, which they succeeded in doing a month after Vance’s appearance Carlson’s show.
Speaking on CNN, Buttigieg poignantly noted, “The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey. He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children, and it’s not about his kids or my kids or the vice president’s family. It’s about your family, people’s families whose well-being will depend on whether we go into a future led by somebody like Kamala Harris, who is focused on expanding the prosperity, the freedom, the well-being of our families.” This reasonable response boils down to “mind your own business.”
Many others were personally offended by Vance’s comments, notably the actress Jennifer Aniston, who wrote on Instagram:
Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.
Of course, these responses from personal experience don’t address Vance’s philosophical claim, which is that only biological children give someone a “direct stake” in society. Vance is so committed to the view that the fertile are superior to the childless that he wants to change the political system to increase the political power of parents. In a 2021 speech, Vance argued:
Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. 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.
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Unfortunately for Vance, all of human history makes the point that the childless are no less committed to social life than the fertile. As a Catholic convert, does Vance really believe that priests and nuns are more antisocial than those who have children? Does he think that childless founding fathers such as George Washington and James Madison should be seen as inferior to the traitor Benedict Arnold (robust patriarch with a clan of four sons and one daughter).
Does he believe that Jesus (no children) is of lesser value the the prophet Mohammed (who by tradition had seven children)? This is not to speak of the contributions to human civilization of Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Plato, Joan of Arc, Isaac Newton, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Flannery O’Connor (to give only a small sampling of notable non-breeders). None of these illustrious figures could match Senator Vance’s success in thrice impregnating his wife, but their lives surely had some value. Do their voices deserve to be less audible than those whose main achievement is procreation?
But beyond the personal objections based on the cruelty of Vance’s comments and the philosophical objection based on their manifest lack of logic, the political dimensions of his thinking deserve to be challenged.
Vance’s pro-natalist politics are rooted in patriarchy and plutocracy. The slur of “cat lady” has been used against childless women for ages (as seen in cartoons from the 18th century). But the recent upswing in usage, along with the political slant given to the term, came in the last decade from incel culture. Young men who blamed their personal inability to gain romantic partners on feminism started using “cat lady” to deride modern single women. This bitter usage was then popularized by right-wing intellectuals such as Rod Dreher (a friend of J.D. Vance) in publications such as The American Conservative.
“Cat lady” served Vance’s purpose because it gave a rational and relatable veneer to his brand of pro-natalist politics, which emerged out of the demographic anxieties of Silicon Valley. Vance has been for many years a financial and political minion of tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Along with figures such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Thiel has helped promote an upsurge of pro-natalist activism in Silicon Valley, rooted partly in eugenics.
Thiel himself might have an additional motive: He has long been interested in experimental medicine to rejuvenate the old and extend life, including receiving blood transfusions from young people. Explaining his politics in 2009, Thiel wrote, “I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.” If Thiel is to win his war against death, he’ll need an endless supply of young people to provide blood transfusions (assuming that his preferred theory of rejuvenation works).
Seen in this light, Thiel is an aspiring vampire, making Vance his willing henchman—akin to the insect-eating wretch Renfield in the Bram Stoker novel Dracula (1897).
Another Renfield is failed Senate candidate Blake Masters, also a heavy recipient of Thiel funding. Defending Vance, Masters wrote,
Political leaders should have children. Certainly they should at least be married. If you aren’t running or can’t run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families, or govern wisely with respect to future generations? Skin in the game matters[.]
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The phrase “skin in the game” perhaps refers to all the young flesh that Thiel will bleed in his quest to never die.
But, of course, Thiel’s brand of techno-vampirism is only part of the story. The larger force at work is plain old fashion blood-and-soil nationalism. The national conservative moment that Vance belongs to rejects the belief that the United States is a nation built on fealty to a set of ideas (a liberal notion articulated by Joe Biden in his speech on Wednesday announcing he won’t run for reelection).
Blood-and-soil nationalism sees American identity as a matter of inheritance from the core demographic group that allegedly built the country (white people). In this view of history, these are the people who are real Americans, who hold the country together. Others, whether they be Black Americans or immigrants, are more provisionally American, allowed citizenship conditioned on good behavior. By this logic, Vance’s wife (the child of South Asian immigrants) and his own children (biracial by American racial taxonomy) can be folded into the protection of white identity thanks to Vance’s own vaunted hillbilly roots and status as patriarch. This explains why Vance’s pro-natalism plays hand in hand with his anti-immigrant politics.
As Melissa Gira Grant noted in The New Republic, “For J.D. Vance, real Americans procreate, and only ‘real’ Americans ought to procreate. This pro-natalist, nationalist belief has long been out in the open, part of Vance’s political grievances and his persona.”
For Vance, then, pro-natalism serves as a useful political rope that allows him to tie together disparate political projects: the religious right’s desire for a renewed patriarchy, Silicon Valley’s quest for a younger work force (and in the case of Peter Thiel, fresh blood), and the ethnonationalist’s quest for an assertion of a white American Volk identity. Vance’s variety of ethnonationalism will sound strange to many ears, since it comes from the wilder precincts of the far right. Talk of “cat ladies” ruling America seems absurd. But the really terrifying fact about Vance is that he is deadly serious.
Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.