J.D. Vance: A Childless Cat Lady Responds
August 2, 2024
Image by Jessica Ramer.
People who know J.D. Vance describe him as a true intellectual and an all-around good guy. Overcoming a troubled childhood marked by parental substance abuse and domestic violence, he served in the Marine Corps, graduated summa cum laude from college, and attended Yale Law School. While still in law school, he began work on Hillbilly Elegy, a book that has garnered favorable reviews from people on both sides of the political divide.
Unfortunately, his intellectual acumen fails him when he writes about childless women. While some news reports have implied that these comments were a one-time, impromptu gaffe during an interview with Tucker Carlson, in fact, Vance sent out at least six emails about childless people that bordered on demagoguery.
The subject headings—the capitalization is his— for these six emails are:
August 3 ICYMI: Why are we listening to childless cat ladies?
August 4: No more CAT LADIES:
August 9: JD Vance: The Childless Left is Ruining America
August 17: Childless People Don’t Have a Stake here
August 18:(Again) The Childless Left is Ruining America
In choosing these headlines, Vance displayed both thoughtlessness and viciousness.
First, they assume that the only way to have a stake in America is to reproduce. Thus, childless educators, medical professionals, and first responders who work to teach, heal, and protect other people’s children have less of a stake than parents, even neglectful ones. Childless adults whose taxes subsidize schools that they do not benefit from should have no say in determining this country’s future, according to Vance. Since scientists working to combat diseases common to children often receive federal grants funded in part by taxes paid by all those cat ladies, maybe, just maybe, this help for other children should give them a voice in our government.
Childless cat ladies who assist relatives in caring for their children don’t contribute enough to have a stake in our country, even though in some cases they are picking up the slack for parents who have fallen down on the job because of drug addiction or disinterest in their offspring. Caring for what biologists would call collateral kin counts for nothing in Vance World.
As a military veteran, Vance should know that up to 1300 American men sustained genital injuries in the Iraq War. Many of them will be unable to reproduce. Vance, however, served as a press liaison—a relatively safe position although one not devoid of real danger. He was lucky. Almost 1300 men were not. Sometimes, women lose their only child in war and thus become childless. How is it possible that an educated military veteran can make such sweeping generalizations without considering these cases and the pain that his comments might cause to people in this situation?
As a convert to Catholicism, Vance knows that countless priests and nuns have opted not to reproduce. Many have toiled to feed and educate other people’s children. Generations of Catholic students have benefited from the high-quality education and orderly environment that these schools provided. Poor families often receive help with food, clothing, and utility bills through Catholic charities founded by the childless priests and religious. I guess their contributions mean squat, too.
Since Vance seeks a political career, he might reflect on the fact that neither George Washington nor James Madison, who is largely responsible for the US constitution, had biological children. Our tenth president, John Tyler, had fifteen. It is safe to say that Washington and Madison contributed more to our country than Tyler, a wildly unpopular president.
Vance descends to new levels of crassness when he links childlessness to sociopathy. An Ivy-League-trained lawyer should know what constitutes good evidence—and observations made while surfing the internet is not it. He does not cite expert opinion or the results of peer-reviewed research. To make this bombshell of a claim without providing proof differs little from Joseph McCarthy’s demagoguery.
It seems to me that deciding to have children and then leaving others to care for them smacks of sociopathy far more than choosing not to have them. After all, such people have enhanced their genetic fitness by ensuring that their genes survive into the next generation while investing nothing in their children’s upbringing. (I am not referring here to people who decide to place children for adoption. This decision, usually the result of an unintended pregnancy, is usually made out of love and with the best interests of the child in mind. I am referring here to people who deny their children a stable home of any sort, thus leaving them in a kind of limbo.)
In linking childlessness to sociopathy, Vance mistakes correlation with causation. Even if there were a link between childlessness and sociopathy—a doubtful claim—it does not follow that childlessness causes sociopathy. The link may be in the other direction: sociopathy may lead to less childbearing. In the absence of evidence, it is safer to assume no link at all.
By choosing name-calling rather than a critical examination of policies, Vance has resorted to an ad hominem argument, a concept that a Yale graduate should be familiar with. He has failed to demonstrate in these emails exactly how the policies promoted by “childless cat ladies” impair the future of the next generation. Generally, liberals of the kind Vance attacks often favor assistance to parents and young children—policies that mean high taxes for the childless without benefit to them—far more often than do “pro-family” conservatives.
If the thoughtlessness of Vance’s comments were not bad enough in their own right, their misogyny is chilling. The phrase “childless cat lady” hints at the more common phrase “crazy cat lady,” which evokes images of lonely, impaired women who become cat hoarders and are subjected in their old age to the humiliation of newspaper headlines detailing the poor condition of their homes. Thus, Vance summons this image of alleged female instability without saying so directly, a tactic that leaves him with plausible deniability.
The subject heading in his first two emails—“Why are we listening to childless cat ladies” and “No more CAT LADIES”—refer explicitly and solely to women. His later emails adopt a less misogynistic tone, referring only to “childless people” and “the childless.” However, none hold childless men up to the same opprobrium he heaps on women. There are no childless cat gentlemen or childless football devotees. I can only conclude that Vance feels aggrieved that powerful women have different opinions than he has and rather than debate their policy proposals on their merits, has decided to make a personal attack. He has tried to weasel out of the consequences of his remarks by claiming that his objection lies in his opposition to leftist policies, but this point was not at all evident in his emails. He has compounded the damage by refusing to apologize, even after Fox News host Trey Gowdy offered him the opportunity.
There is a further irony in Vance’s attacks. By seeking a national political career, first as a senator and then as vice president, Vance has chosen a life that includes long hours and frequent traveling. There will be many days when he will leave home before his children get up and arrive only after they are asleep. Thus, he will spend far less time caring for his own kids than many cat ladies spend working with other people’s children.
Most important for the nation, however, is that Trump has selected a vice president—who, given Trump’s age might easily ascend to the presidency— willing to suspend reason, fairness, and kindness in favor of vitriol and demagoguery that falls most heavily on women.
Searching for JD Vance
What explains the meteoric rise of a little-known principal at an investment firm to one of the youngest, least politically experienced Vice-Presidential candidates in US history? How did Senator J. D. Vance rise from relative obscurity in 2016 to become the current running mate to Donald Trump?
Simple: groveling service to the ruling class.
In 2016, Vance published a book describing his youthful hardships growing up in the Midwest, the Rust Belt, or Appalachia, depending on what you choose to call the vast lands impoverished by corporate deindustrialization in the late twentieth century. The social, political, and economic disruptions that ensued affected millions of industrial workers and their families.
Throughout the Midwest, plant closings left– in their wake—low-paying jobs, poverty, crime, drug and alcohol addiction, broken homes, unhealthy lifestyles, and a host of other tragedies associated with economic dislocations.
Vance was one of the few who escaped this fate, joining the Marine Corps after high school and using the tuition benefits from military service to attend and graduate from Ohio State University, and pursue a law degree from Yale. Soon, he felt the need to tell the public of “the anger and frustration of the white working class” and satisfy his hunger to “have someone tell their story.”
But the story was not one that we might expect or hope for. Vance did not offer sympathy to the victims of corporate policy and political neglect; Vance did not call for help to those left unemployed, desperate, or without options; Vance did not plead their case to those dismissive of their despair.
Instead, he offered his own Horatio Alger, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps “success” story, urging the losers to take responsibility for their own choices. “Those of us who weren’t given every advantage can make better choices, and those choices do have the power to affect our lives…”
The long-standing myths of self-help and individual initiative so beloved by those born on third base find confirmation with Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy. Consequently, the book became a darling of the corporate media across the political spectrum– from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal. I wrote in 2016:
Nothing reveals the distance of the upper classes from the realities of working-class life like the current media fascination with the book Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. Writing as one of their own, J.D. Vance… relates his unhappy working-class childhood to book-club liberals and country-club conservatives.
In 2016, it was remarkable that Vance’s account appealed to the elites– the upper economic strata– whether they otherwise counted as liberal or conservative. Of course, the book allowed a peek into the world of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables,” satisfying the voyeuristic urges of the elite. But more importantly, Vance’s advance from an abused “hillbilly” youth to the higher rungs of finance capital bolstered the ethos that anyone and everyone can make it in the land of opportunity.
It was a message that both Democratic and Republican leaders and pundits like to hear. The New York Times lauded the book as a key to understanding Trump’s presidential victory, and he was “the voice of the Rust Belt” to The Washington Post. As I wrote in 2020:
Vance’s book came out at a convenient time– 2016– when East and West Coast elites sought explanations for Donald Trump’s success in the Midwest. The corporate Democrats had long taken these Midwesterners for granted, Obama calling them gun-toting religious zealots and Hillary Clinton famously describing them as “deplorables.” It was left to a “survivor” — JD Vance– to expose the pathologies and missteps of these flawed creatures. Vance had– himself– found the grit to escape the working-class ghetto of Middletown, Ohio and parlay an elite law-school degree into the riches of high finance.
While Vance earned a place on the talk-show circuit and a calling as a cable TV expert, it wasn’t until 2020 that his national political career got a boost. Director Ron Howard– a master of feel-good movies– brought Hillbilly Elegy to the silver screen and to NETFLIX. Reaching a much broader audience with his success-in-the-face-of-adversity tale, Vance was ready to pick a party and run for office. He chose the Republican Party, influenced primarily by wealthy donors, but through no great ideological commitment. Indeed, during the years of Trump’s political prominence, Vance frequently expressed scathing public criticisms of Trump and Trumpism, only to join his ticket in 2024.
For a dedicated servant of wealth and power, consistency is no obstacle. Vance can pose as the spokesperson for neglected white workers at one moment, while carrying water for ruthless capitalist billionaires like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen at another. He can be the darling of patronizing liberals when called on, while serving Donald Trump’s political machine when invited.
In that regard, he has a Democratic counterpart in Senator John Fetterman, who– like Vance– opportunistically pushed himself onto the national political stage.
But unlike Vance, whose roots drew a broader, sympathetic audience, and whose background earned a measure of street credibility, Fetterman came from privilege. Consequently, he had a more difficult journey to establish himself as a savior of the forgotten or discarded. He chose to adopt a small, neglected, predominantly Black, Rust Belt community on the outskirts of Pittsburgh as a personal experiment in elite colonization.
Fetterman convinced a critical mass of liberals that this scion of Republican parents was a legitimate answer to the souls lost to deindustrialization.
Taken in by his reverent deference to liberal social conventions, his “cool” trademarks of cargo shorts, hoodies, and tattoos, and his marijuana radicalism, he was quickly elevated to the status of a progressive icon, a fearless defender of the little people.
All this was sheer nonsense to those of us living in his backyard, watching his careful cultivation of his political opportunities. Today, after a swift rise to the US Senate, Fetterman eagerly renounces his “progressivism,” embraces Israeli genocide, and constructs a safe, centrist image.
The ruling class needs the Vances and Fettermans to benignly explain the anger and despair of those bulldozed by deindustrialization. They serve as a buffer between wealth and power, and the unruly masses.
They represent the new phony populist faces of both parties, offering bogus gestures of sympathy and loud, but meager support for destitute workers– Black and white.
More than fifty years ago, the ruling class sought similar interpreters and explainers of justifiable Black rage. Patronizing white intellectuals sprang up with comforting analyses and for-hire solutions (think Robin DiAngelo, more recently, in the Black Lives Matter moment), and many ambitious African Americans eagerly brought their political aspirations forward to dilute the rage and redirect the energy into the two-party charade. Then, as now, serving the ruling class pays off handsomely.
Vance, like Fetterman, exemplifies the current breed of bourgeois politicians of both parties, totally devoid of principles and unabashedly pledged to the service of the ruling class.
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