There's a clip from Ohio Senator JD Vance's old Senate
campaign going around.
Have you seen this yet?
We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats,
via 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.
You look at Kamala Harris,
Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is
controlled by people without children.
They've played their entire lives
to win a status game,
they're obsessed with their jobs,
and they hate normal Americans for choosing family over these
ridiculous DC and New York status games.
Women taking care of cats instead of kids is apparently
everything that is wrong with America,
and something that exists entirely because of Democrats.
Now, beyond being a really weird belief,
Vance's view here has a distinctly authoritarian bent.
Vance has openly praised this policy from Hungary's authoritarian dictator
Viktor Orban,
one that encourages native Hungarian mothers,
native ones, to have four or more children.
The idea there is to repopulate the country with white
Christians instead of Muslim immigrants.
Hmm
JD Vance also thinks that if you don't have children,
your vote shouldn't count as much as those who do,
which is sort of a self fulfilling prophecy of conservative
domination.
Assuming all childless cat ladies are Democrats.
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.
Vance has also advocated for creating an economic system that
reinvigorates jobs specifically for American men.
Because according to JD Vance,
families suffer more when men are employed than they do
when women are.
The decline of manufacturing hit male employment much harder than
hit female employment.
And one of the things we see consistently is that
when men are unemployed,
it's very hard for them to maintain,
to build families themselves. And so I,
I do think that we're,
well, this makes maybe some people uncomfortable in the audience.
The fact that we lost a lot of stable male
employment was a catastrophe for the American family.
Throughout his political career, JD Vance has pushed for an
economic populism premised on men working and women being married
and staying married and having children whether they want to
or not.
Question really to me is about the baby.
We want women to have opportunities.
We want women to have choices,
but above all, we want women and young boys in
the womb to have the right to life.
This is one of the great tricks that I think
the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace,
which is this idea that like,
well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally,
you know, they were, they were maybe even violent,
but certainly they were unhappy.
And so getting rid of them and making it easier
for people to shift spouses,
like they change their underwear,
that's going to make people happier in the long term.
And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads,
so I'm skeptical, but it really didn't work out for
the kids of those marriages.
In a new piece titled JD Vance's Sad,
Strange Politics of Family, New Yorker contributing editor Jessica Winter
unpacks Vance's newly resurfaced concerns about childless cat ladies by
taking a look at Vance's own family.
Winter writes. A close read of
Vance's grandmother's plight reveals striking similarities between Vance's guardian Angel
and the ideal matriarch who emerges from Vance's political platform.
Their place is at home.
Their job, which they have no choice whether to quit,
is to have babies. What results is a blinkered,
grotesquely narcissistic vision of the social contract and identity politics
of one grown child.
Joining me now are Jessica Winter,
contributing editor at The New Yorker,
and Sam Stein, managing editor of The Bulwark.
Thank you guys, both for being here.
And Jessica, First, let me tell you,
I very much enjoyed this read.
And I wonder if you could explain the way in
which
JD Vance's grandmother's story is,
in a way, the the Rosetta Stone for his political
agenda and cultural outlook.
Absolutely. And thanks for having me on the program,
Alex. So yeah, JD Vance talks about his grandparents as
the best things that ever happened to him and
that they rescued him from being a statistic.
You know, JD Vance's mom struggled
with drug abuse. The household that he was raised in
was often unstable.
She cycled through a lot of boyfriends and husbands,
and she was at times neglectful or even abusive.
And his grandparents, his grandmother in particular,
provided him with a refuge from that chaos and that
instability.
And what's funny about that is that his grandparents had
also created a very volatile,
sometimes violent, very unstable household for
his own mother. And so there's kind of a generational
trauma that's being handed down.
But I think what's really interesting and what comes into
sharp relief in in one of the clips that you
played before the break
is that there's a really essential difference that he sees
between his grandparents and his mother,
which is that his grandparents stayed married.
And I think that because his grandparents were so important
to him,
because they saved him from being a statistic,
as he has put it.
I think he's inscribed a lot of importance in their
marriage and how they stuck it out through thick and
thin.
And I think that's gone a great deal towards shaping
his his ideology, his politics and even some of his
policy preferences.
Yeah. His idea that people should stay married no matter
whether they're in violent relationships or not.
I do want to ask,
though, Jessica, you know, in terms of the way he
thinks of marriage and,
and, you know, child bearing,
he thinks of the family as kind of a uniquely
conservative phenomenon.
I mean, his wife worked for a San Francisco law
firm until like,
2 minutes ago. Does he not understand that Democrats have
children and families,
too? It seems very asymmetrical to be euphemistic about it.
Yeah, absolutely. He absolutely sees
the traditional nuclear family of,
you know, the mid 20th century where dad goes to
work and mom stays home with the kids and everyone's
getting by on a single income.
That is the ideal that he wants to strive for.
And the notion that, you know,
a mother, a woman would want to work,
would need to work out of economic necessity or perhaps
would just want to work
for her own, you know,
personal fulfillment at a white shoe law firm,
perhaps that doesn't really enter the position when it comes
to his political views and his economic outlook.
Sam, I am struck by how
far outside the mainstream JD.
We we, I think people have paid some attention to
JD fans or people interested in Senate politics have.
But the more you hear from this individual,
the more weird is the word being used to describe
his views.
But you know, he's someone who said universal daycare.
This is right before he announced the Senate run.
Universal daycare is class war against normal people.
I just want to make the point that his wife
and he have three children
and at her law firm they offer 12 hour on
site daycare.
The like disconnect. Do you,
I mean, do you have a thought about this?
I have multiple thoughts about it.
I would say a couple things.
One is it wasn't always this way.
If you look at his biography
when he was a law student at Yale,
for instance, and he was writing on his
little blog. He had a personal blog back then,
but he was also writing for conservative sites.
The glimpse that you get of
JD Vance's is a different person.
It's someone who's more social liberal,
more Republican, moderate and Republican,
and it's Republicanism.
It's not that he's cosmopolitan or anything.
I mean, he obviously had written his memoirs,
about to write his memoir,
and that was sort of the root of his political
beliefs.
But he certainly wasn't projecting this type of
a persona. I think what happened was,
if I had to guess,
that he began to get more involved in national public
politics and he saw the way that the wind was
blowing.
He recognized that the sort of
part of the party was
with this ideology. And that's been sort of personified
not just in his politics,
but what you see. And for instance,
Tucker Carlson show for a while it did the nuclear
family central to America and was being sort of rapidly
deteriorated by Democrats.
And so that's where he's coming from.
It's part political ambition. I don't think it's all political
ambition.
I think he's somewhat, he probably does believe some of
these things genuinely.
But now that it's being thrust into a national or
in front of a national audience,
it just lands differently, right?
This is not Ohio. This is not rural Ohio.
This is not Fox News or Tucker Carlson.
This is a national audience.
And I think a vast majority,
not just women, but men,
sort of recoiled the idea that,
you know, if you're childless,
somehow you're lesser.
Well, yeah, it's not only if you're childless that you're
lesser or stepmoms aren't really moms.
Women should be staying in marriages,
even if they're violent marriages.
And universal daycare is for people who are not,
not, not normal. I mean,
I I just think, you know,
Jessica, when when we talk about how he came to
these views,
you go back to Hillbilly Elegy.
As Sam says, there seems to be an interregnum period
where he's somewhat tethered to the reality that most of
the country lives in,
which is that people need daycare.
But it almost seems like he sort of self radicalizes
with, you know, go harkening back to his roots.
And then with the added,
you know, incentive of being on Fox News with Tucker
Carlson.
Do you have a sense of like
how deeply felt these ideals are?
You know, just to add on to what Sam was
saying,
if you go back to around the time that Hillbilly
Elegy came out,
a really interesting artifact from that general period is a
Ted talk that he gave.
And in that Ted talk,
he he talks about how he got out of the
terrible situation that he was in
and that we should be affording more chances to more
kids like young JD Vance to get a great education,
you know, get reach the the heights,
aspire to the heights that he had attained even at
that point in his career.
And he's pretty explicit about the fact that he doesn't
have policy solutions,
that he's posing questions and starting and trying to start
a conversation,
but he doesn't have the answers.
And I think by the time he reached his Senate
campaign,
he'd found some answers, whether or not they were
earnestly held all that time,
whether or not they sort of
were exaggerated outgrowths of, of feelings or instincts that he
already had.
I can't really speak to that.
But there was definitely a period where he was kind
of searching where
for where he wanted to land on these issues.
Well, he's he's landed in a very interesting place.
Jessica went,
Sam, Sam Stein, you stick around.
I have many more questions for you.
Jessica Winter, thank you for the great reporting.
It is a really great read in this week's New
Yorker.