JD Vance’s Dog Whistles About Cat Ladies
And why he keeps lying about Kamala Harris and the child tax credit.
FOR THE PAST WEEK, the vice presidential candidacy of JD Vance has been embroiled in a controversy about “cat ladies”—the epithet by which Donald Trump’s running mate has referred to childless women. Since a clip from a 2021 interview surfaced, Vance has doubled and tripled down while simultaneously trying (and failing) to project a moderate and reasonable image. The debacle has revealed a great deal about Vance’s character—and about the cultural preoccupations of the modern right.
In July 2021, Vance, having recently remade himself from a moderate, strongly anti-Trump up-and-coming conservative intellectual into a populist and socially conservative pro-Trump militant, drew criticism for a speech warning about a “civilizational crisis” caused by low rates of reproduction and assailing, in particular, “the childless left” which, as he put it, has “no physical commitment to the future of this country.” Discussing the next generation of Democratic politicians, Vance rattled off the names of several likely presidential candidates for 2024—Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Cory Booker, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—and asked:
What is the one thing that unites every single one of them? Not a single one of them has any children. Now why is that? Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have any children? And why is this just a normal fact for the leaders of our country to be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring?
While Vance generously conceded that some people may not have children for medical reasons or because they haven’t found the right person, he insisted that “it’s something else to build a political movement, invested theoretically in the future of this country, when not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment to the future of this country.” (For good measure, he added that the childless status of many journalists explains “the obsessive, weird, almost humiliating aggressive posture of our media.”)
In the same speech, Vance praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for subsidizing marriage and childbearing by giving newlywed couples loans that are forgiven if the spouses stay together and have kids. Vance also floated the idea of giving parents an extra vote for each of their children.
A Harris spokesman accused Vance, not unreasonably, of trafficking in “ugly personal attacks.” Enter Tucker Carlson, then still hosting his Fox News show, who scoffed that Vance was being “attacked for saying something that is so obviously true.” Carlson had Vance on as a guest to elaborate on his point—or rather, to escalate the attack while Carlson nodded approvingly:
What I was saying is that we’re 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. 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?
Notably, this time—perhaps aligning himself with Carlson’s frequent antifeminist sniping—Vance framed his attack in gender-specific terms. It is probably not an accident that Cory Booker disappeared from his list, leaving only one man, who just happens to be gay. (When Vance returned to this theme in another interview in October 2021, he dropped Buttigieg from the “childless left” roster, presumably because the Biden cabinet member and his husband had in the intervening months announced their adoption of two infants.)
Vance’s remarks received some attention at the time. But, obviously, his words sound much more inflammatory when the speaker isn’t just a loud-mouthed Senate candidate but a potential vice president of the United States. Hence the recent recrudescence of the controversy.
In an attempt at damage control this week, Vance went on Megyn Kelly’s show. He presented a kinder, gentler, even more feminist JD Vance who reminded Kelly and her audience that, far from wanting to “keep women in the home,” he is married to a career woman and deeply sympathetic to the struggles of working moms. He lamented that “that the corporate world is fundamentally hostile to working mothers and working fathers because we have made stupid and bad choices as a country”—an assessment with which, no doubt, many liberal Democrats would agree. But he also dug in his heels on the “cat ladies” comment, which he dismissed as mere “sarcasm” (and added the disclaimer that he has nothing against cats, as if that were the issue) while insisting on the basic truth of what he said.
And what is that truth? As Vance explained to Kelly, it consists of two parts: one incredibly anodyne (“having kids is good”; “it is not a bad thing to stand up for parents”) and one . . . kind of unhinged:
It’s not a criticism of people who don’t have children. . . . This is about criticizing the Democratic party for becoming anti-family and anti-child. We have to ask ourselves: Why do we have masking of toddlers years after the pandemic ended? Why do we have the Harris campaign coming out this very morning and saying that we should not have the child tax credit which lowers tax rates for parents of young children? It’s because they have become anti-family and anti-kid.
Masked toddlers? Have you seen one lately? I certainly haven’t. As for the child tax credit, Vance has it exactly backwards: Harris has consistently supported its expansion. I was racking my brain trying to figure out what in the world Vance meant by “the Harris campaign coming out” against the child tax credit, until I finally stumbled on the likely explanation. The Washington Stand, a publication of the Family Research Council, has also claimed that Harris now opposes the child tax credit. Its evidence: a pro-Harris Twitter account (not the Harris campaign!) zinged Vance for saying, back in 2021, that parents “should pay a different, lower tax rate” than childless adults with the same earnings. Presumably, that’s also what Vance means.
And, of course, it’s pure demagoguery. Yes, parents who get the child tax credit end up paying less in taxes than non-parents. But a tax break is not a lower tax rate, and it’s hardly unreasonable to interpret Vance’s words as proposing something different from the child tax credit—especially since he also says, “We need to reward the things that we think are good and punish the things that we think are bad.” I don’t know anyone who thinks that the child tax credit “punishes” childless people, except maybe overzealous “child-free” activists who are also obnoxious and unhinged, but not running for national office.
THE SAME DEMAGOGUERY pervades Vance’s comments about the Democratic party. Is it really, for instance, “controlled” by childless people? Granted, President Joe Biden (who had four children, of whom two are still alive, plus seven grandchildren), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (two children and three grandchildren) and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (five children and nine grandchildren) all belong to the older generation. But let’s look at the next one—starting with Harris’s prospective running mates. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has four children; Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly each have two. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is a father of two, while House Minority Whip Katherine Clark is a mother of three. Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison and Vice Chair Sen. Tammy Duckworth each have two kids. So does Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has been mentioned as a possible presidential contender or vice presidential pick. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, another Democrat with a likely future in national politics, is a father of four.
It’s not particularly difficult to find other examples, even in the party’s left wing. But I somehow doubt that Vance or his fans would congratulate Rep. Ilhan Omar for her three children.
Harris herself is a stepmother to her husband’s son and daughter from his first marriage, as Megyn Kelly pointed out while introducing Vance on her show. Vance never acknowledged this fact, though after some prodding from Kelly, he did say that “of course we love stepmoms.”
AS FOR “ANTI-FAMILY” AND “ANTI-KID,” Vance has given no examples other than the false claim that Harris opposes the child tax credit. But a 2021 Twitter thread in which he criticized proposals for universal child care on the grounds that they amount to “a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class” gives a sense of his position.
The poll data Vance cites don’t really support this claim. They show that 14 percent of parents with less than a four-year college degree but 28 percent of those with four or more years of higher education say that full-time work for both parents and full-time child care would be the best option for them when they have children under the age of 5; less educated parents are more likely to prefer other options including one parent being at home full-time, child care by family members, and some combination of part-time work and part-time child care. For one thing, “college-educated” does not equal “affluent”; for another, most college-educated parents also prefer something other than full-time child care and full-time work.
A direct subsidy to all parents with young children, a subsidy they can use as they see fit—to cut down on labor-force participation, pay for care in child care centers, or compensate relatives who provide care—might be better than the one-size-fits-all approach of subsidies for early learning centers. (Congressional Democrats’ most recent proposal would do some of both.) But Vance isn’t interested in debates about how best to support families with young children; he has to subsume every policy issue into the culture war:
So Americans with a four-year degree aren’t “normal,” at least if their preferred option is full-time work for both parents and child care for the kids? That’s especially rich coming from the guy with the law degree from Yale whose own family led the dual-career “lifestyle” until about five minutes ago. Never mind the implication that parents who support child care center subsidies want a family policy that would “shunt their kids into crap daycare.” The Trumpified Vance isn’t just a MAGA culture warrior, he’s a jerk. But maybe that’s redundant.
It may not be fair to say, as the New Yorker’s Jessica Winter does, that Vance’s “essential ideological position” is that mothers must be at home: The poll he cites includes other alternatives besides full-time motherhood and full-time work. Winter’s characterization of the Fairness for Stay-at-Home Parents Act introduced by Vance last year is also misleading; the bill does not “castigate” the Family and Medical Leave Act but simply adds the choice of at-home parenting to the list of valid reasons not to return to work after twelve weeks of leave without having to reimburse health care premiums paid by the employer. (Earlier this year, child-care policy analyst Elliot Haspel praised the bill.) Not everything Vance says and does, even in the area of family policy, should be taken as proof of villainy.
BUT THE “CAT LADIES” CONTROVERSY does reveal a few things about Vance’s ideology and style—none of them good.
One: The continued insistence that people with biological children have a more real, “physical” commitment to their country’s future underscores, like the cemetery plot story in Vance’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, the strong presence of blood-and-soil themes in his rhetoric (uneasily acknowledged even by some anti-anti-Trump conservatives). It is also an absurdly simplistic notion. As many have pointed out, George Washington and James Madison, two of the most pivotal figures in the American Founding, had no biological children. (They did have stepchildren.) And would anyone argue with a straight face that the great Polish patriot and American Revolution hero Tadeusz Kościuszko, whose statue stands outside the White House, lacked true commitment to the future because he was childless?
Two: This ideological hobbyhorse once again reflects Vance’s connections to “national conservatism,” the brainchild of Israeli-American political scientist Yoram Hazony. Hazony has articulated the view that classical liberalism, with its emphasis on individual autonomy, is fatally deficient because it was the construction of childless philosophers with “no real experience of family life,” such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant. There is certainly a place for criticism of liberalism within a liberal society, and whether liberal individualism gone too far can undermine cultural support for childbearing and childrearing is a valid question. But Hazony-style nationalism is simply ill suited to the United States as it actually exists; you might say that it is not the nationalism of this nation.
Three: While Vance’s imprecations against the childless are often (at least ostensibly) gender-neutral, his “cat ladies” riff indicates the degree to which he is willing to play to misogyny for the right audience. It is also indicative of his immersion in the toxic online swamps of the far right. (While the trope of the cat-crazed spinster long antedates the digital age, the use of “cat lady” as a generic slur for just about any single and childless woman over 20 is definitely associated with those online spaces.) It’s a two-way street: Look at the threads discussing Vance’s “cat ladies” comments and you will find the predictable sewer of woman-bashing, especially directed at single women or women seen as prioritizing careers over motherhood.
Four: When Vance is in a hole, he really doesn’t know when or how to stop digging. After his appearance on Megyn Kelly’s show, Fox News host and former Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy gave him another chance at damage control. Gowdy bluntly told Vance that he was hearing from many Republican and conservative women who were very disturbed and “disappointed” by his comments. He practically coaxed the vice-presidential nominee to apologize or at least walk back his remarks.
But Vance would not be moved. He did concede, eventually, that people without children could be good and productive members of society; other than that, he dug in yet more, insisting that he never said what he clearly said, unconvincingly shifting the subject to Democrats being “anti-child and anti-family,” and repeating the easily debunked lie that Harris had opposed the child tax credit.
Since then, new revelations from CNN reporters Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck and Media Matters staffer Matthew Gertz have made it clear that Vance’s 2021 remarks about the “childless left” and “cat ladies” were not a onetime thing. It was a frequent theme of his Senate campaign, brought up in speeches, fundraising emails, and interviews. While Vance’s discussion of declining fertility in a 2019 speech stressed the positive effect parenthood can have on people (including himself and his friends), his later comments on the subject shifted toward a bitter, nasty, and partisan tone. “We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths,” he wrote in one fundraising email. Another email hit all the familiar notes:
Our country is basically run by childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too… What I want to know is: why have we turned our country over to people who don’t have a direct stake in it?” [Emphasis in original.]
In several Fox News interviews in July and August 2021, Vance opined that the Democrats had become dominated by “childless people” or “sociopaths who don’t care about children”—and specifically mentioned “the AOCs of the world [and] the Kamala Harrises of the world.”
Even “cat ladies” came up:
This isn’t just “weird,” per the new and wildly successful Harris label for the Trump-Vance tandem. There is also a real and disturbing ugliness at the heart of this story. And, especially given Vance’s shockingly bad public relations skills, it probably isn’t going away anytime soon.