As Americans beyond the borders of Ohio collectively learn more about Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, the results of this mass crash education have not been pretty to behold. Originally emerging into the public sphere almost a decade ago as the author of the autobiographical Hillbilly Elegy, Vance has apparently spent the ensuing years radicalizing into a particularly nasty dreamer of MAGA-infused nightmares. Over the past week, we’ve been treated to stories about his disdain for the childless cat ladies who apparently run the Democratic Party as well as the federal bureaucracy; his suggestion that only people with children should have a say in the nation’s future (and that their influence should be amplified according to the size of their broods); his ties to the techno-fascist movement brewing out in Silicon Valley; his penning of the intro to a book written by the head of the organization leading the charge for Project 2025; and his friendship with Curtis Yarvin, a fascist who has suggested that the solution for useless poor people is to suspend them in a Matrix-like virtual reality.
For those interested in seeing Donald Trump and the larger MAGA movement defeated in November, Vance has so far proven himself to be a massive self-own on the part of the former president — a far-right VP choice based on a sense that the election was in the bag, and perhaps with an uncharacteristically broader-minded interest in anointing a successor for that distant time when Donald Trump is transported to the great Mar-a-Lago in the sky. So far, Vance seems to have done far more to rally a wide swathe of Americans against his repugnant views than to inspire MAGA-curious voters to jump on the Trump 2024 bandwagon.
I’ve heard observers talk about how Vance’s bald extremism presents all sorts of attack possibilities for Democrats, which is true; but to be more specific, in his articulation of a more cerebral and detailed framework of right-wing nationalism and misogynistic hatred than Trump aims for, Vance has offered valuable openings for a countervailing presentation of progressive and commonsense American ideas. Indeed, in his effort to be both simultaneously logically consistent and maximally provocative, Vance has laid out a hideous, constrained vision that amounts to a MAGA-friendly guide as to who should be considered a “real” American versus who doesn’t make the cut. And so, for example, the idea that only (white) Americans who have babies can be considered true Americans gets run through the thresher of anti-abortion animus towards IVF treatment, with the result that even those white people who have children via IVF are not actually true Americans; neither, apparently, are those who raise non-biological children as step-parents (as in the case of Vice President Kamala Harris) or as adoptive parents (as in the case of Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg). Logically consistent? Yes. But also alienating to most Americans? YES.
So why is Vance vociferously advocating for such regressive ideas? In the first place, he may well believe them, though whether this is the case or he’s engaging in a purely cynical play is ultimately unknowable. But at a minimum, he sees them as appealing to the conservative white Americans who constitute the MAGA base. More specifically, the appeal is designed to flatter the opinions and lifestyles of this base. For example, by suggesting that it is one’s patriotic duty to have children and for women to dedicate themselves to raising them, he isn’t just advancing a white nationalist talking point; he also validates the lives of millions of conservative women who are already doing just this. When he tells such parents that they deserve to have more votes because they have more kids, he’s telling them that their choices are amazing and that as a result they should have more political power than nulliparous liberals walking dogs instead of pushing strollers in their barren blue states.
Moreover, it’s not insignificant that Vance has over the years presented his regressive ideas in a way that is maximally divisive. In the first place, he seeks to sideline widely-held societal values, and to rebrand them as deeply conservative ideas. For instance, his suggestion that adults without children should be punished and those with kids rewarded is already U.S. policy, though admittedly less punitively so than he has proposed. As Josh Marshall reminds us, “There are dependent deductions, a refundable child tax credit, even something as obvious as public schools,” with the latter funded even by those without children, and with no broad complaining that this is the case from those without children. That is, there is already a pro-child consensus across U.S. society that provides material and less tangible benefits to parents. However, in advocating for punitive measures against the childless, Vance pretends we don’t already have a pro-child consensus that transcends the claims of either party. Not only does this flatter those conservatives with families, it also mendaciously tries to rile people up against those without children as some sort of freeloaders, when in fact those literally millions upon millions of Americans have gladly been paying taxes to help educate other people’s kids. Lara Bazelon gets it exactly right when she writes that, “This is a fake wedge issue and reveals a deep vein of misogyny. Some women get married, some don’t. Some women have kids, some don’t. The point is we get to decide and Republicans, when it comes to women’s rights, want to take our choices away.”
A strategy to divide Americans with reactionary rhetoric, in a way that flatters believers and denigrates the unworthy, is also visible in Vance’s attempts to provide substance to Trump’s broad declarations of nationalism and America-First-ism. Writing for The Atlantic, Adam Serwer zeroes in on Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention, in which the Ohio senator asserted that the United States is not just a set of principles, but a “homeland” and a “nation” that encompasses both the living and their ancestors. But an apparently unobjectionable idea (the seemingly banal observation that the U.S. is an actual place with actual people) is immediately conditioned and restricted in Vance’s telling, in which coming from generations of Kentuckians who have lived and died in the same geographical territory constitutes a badge of true citizenship:
Now, in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.
Now, that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.
Clearly, Vance’s story-telling is meant to evoke a sense of nostalgia and recognition in receptive listeners — that these traditional, authentic Americans outright deserve not only their citizenship but pride of place in the American nation, through continuity, longevity, and a willingness to defend their territory and their achievements. But as Serwer observes, “if real Americans are those who share a specific history, then some of us are more American than others”:
In Vance’s definition of what it means for America to be a “nation,” these people who sacrificed their lives to preserve the republic are less American than the soldiers of the slaver army that sought to destroy it. Some of those Union veterans are buried in cemeteries like the one Vance describes, after being forced to bear the kind of nativist bile spewed at the RNC. Vance’s definition of America is less a nation than an entitlement, something inherited, like a royal title or a trust fund. The irony is that Vance’s idea of the nation is as much an abstraction, an imagined community, as the American creed he disdains; it is simply narrow, cramped, and ugly. Unfortunately, people fight and die for those too.
And just as with Vance’s attacks on childless women, his effort to present a conservative worldview that is both propagandistically appealing and logically coherent leads to absurd, untenable conclusions. Is it really obvious, as in Vance’s tale, that a family descended from ancestors who raised arms against the Union is to be considered “more American” than than a woman who emigrated to the United States from Nigeria in the 1980’s? According to Vance’s hierarchy, yes. But this is as nonsensical as proposing that a Mississippian whose great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy should be looked at with disdain in comparison to a person of good Yankee stock whose distant forebears came over on the Mayflower. Once again, Vance is giving voice to archaic concepts that flatter those who meet their qualifications — in this case, white Americans whose families have lived for generations in the same place — that begin to crumble once you start peeling apart their assumptions.
Not only does such genealogical balderdash privilege the status of America’s white population versus more recent arrivals (read: people of color), it runs up against a tacit but bedrock liberal principle that there is in fact no hierarchy of citizenship, and that every American is to be considered equal, regardless of heritage. More abstractly, but just as importantly, this reactionary vision suggests that there is an objective, quantifiable way to judge each person’s relative worth as a citizen — a notion that due to its actually subjective nature is unresolvable and subject to abuse by those wishing to denigrate their fellow citizens, as we can see quite clearly in the case of Vance and his slanderous propositions. The liberal attitude, in contrast, rests on mutual respect towards fellow citizens, alongside an implicit belief that we all belong, and that judgments and hierarchies only bring us all down.
So while Vance’s reactionary schema is insidious and divisive, appealing to base hatreds and insecurities, we should also understand that this is also an opportunity for the rest of us to make explicit those widely-shared ideas of equality, tolerance, and mutual respect that are too often left tacit in American society. We should be able to articulate the consensus that already exists among the American majority regarding families and citizenship; in fact, I’d argue that taking this consensus for granted for too long, and not more overtly praising and celebrating it, has opened the door for reactionaries like Vance to come along with their commonsense-sounding notions that are actually quite backwards and self-serving. The majority believes in the value of families, but not that those families must be defined in an outdated and self-serving way that puts down anyone who doesn’t fit the “right” way of doing things; and the majority believes in our common citizenship and love for country, but not in a way that claims special status for a privileged minority based on un-American claims that they were here first.