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Given the negative blowback that hasn’t let up since it resurfaced, vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance doubtless regrets his sarcastic allusion to elite female Democrats, including Kamala Harris, as “childless cat ladies” in a 2021 interview with then Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Vance reached for the trope to characterize women “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.” He also wondered aloud how it could be a “normal fact of American life” that the country is run by childless political leaders “who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it.”
Democrats and their media knights pounced on these words to brand Vance as a misogynist mired in pre-enlightenment patriarchy. It also earned him the modifier “weird,” first used by Harris’s vice-presidential running mate, Tim Walz, and then virally repeated by media to cement the charge.
Vance’s patronizing sarcasm constituted a major communications blunder for a relatively fresh political face. Making his character rather than his topic the issue, it distracted attention from the pertinent cultural warning sign he was flagging, namely the tumbling rates in procreation among American women (a far from unique, indeed near-global phenomenon). To clarify, in America that’s not the result of mothers having fewer children; it’s the consequence of more women having no children.
The stats are — or should be — alarming to all national leaders. In the U.S., it is predicted that by 2030, 45 per cent of women will be unmarried and childless. A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that a rising share of U.S. adults who are not already parents say they are unlikely to ever have children. Although some of them cited “the state of the world” or the environment or financial concerns as their reason, a full 63 per cent of those aged 18 to 49 who said it was unlikely they would have children said “they just don’t want to.” The U.S. fertility rate is, at 1.78, now well below the replacement total fertility rate (2.1 live births per fertile woman), as is Canada’s at an all-time low of 1.40.
It does not strike me as “weird” for a conservative to find these numbers culturally alarming, because there are negative consequences that flow from such a trend. Ironically, anti-procreation was a major theme at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week. Planned Parenthood was on site, offering free vasectomies and medication abortions; marchers dressed in abortion-pill costumes chanted”F–k the courts, f–k the state, you can’t make us procreate;” and one Democratic affiliate group expressed its passion for thwarted fertility by erecting a four-metre-tall inflatable IUD, named “Freeda Womb.”
The DNC’s doomographic theatre illustrates the gender lopsidedness between the parties. More married American women vote Republican than Democrat — 50 per cent versus 45 per cent. A full 22 per cent of women aged 40 or higher in America have never married, the highest percentage since data collection began in 1900. And a recent Pew survey shows that “Women who have never been married are three times as likely to associate with the Democratic Party as with the Republican Party (72 versus 24 per cent).” They are arguably the most powerful political constituency in the U.S.; without their immovable support for the Dems, Trump would win the election handily.
These foot soldiers of the Democratic Party are sometimes referred to as “brides of the state.” BOTS are brazenly courted by the Dems, and lavishly rewarded for their support, with a litany of affirmative-action policies, grants, scholarships and hiring programs, even though in many cases, such as higher education and civil service employment, women are over-represented.
Democrat courtship of the BOTS was concretized in Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign ad, “the life of Julia.” In fairy-tale format, the ad portrayed Julia life trajectory, from conception to old age, as — thanks to Julia’s benevolent and protective state “husband” — swathed in security and readily achieved self-realization, including motherhood when she “decides to have a child” (presumably by sperm donor).
The radical salience of the ad was the absence of a single male in Julia’s life. The ad served to diminish the importance of men to women and children, and by extension, to society, unapologetically insulting half the population. Joe Biden embraced the same strategy, expressing similar values, in a 2020 Build Back Better Framework campaign ad, stressing what his plan would do for women like working-class, single mom “Linda from Peoria, Ill.”
Both Julia and Linda have one child. At least they will come to understand that parenting changes your priorities in life. Parenting makes you less self-centred, less prone to believing that the state knows better than you what’s in your child’s best interests, and more prone to resist policies that undermine the family, considered by conservatives to be the pillar of a healthy society and a hedge against state tyranny. So again, though clumsily expressed, Vance had a valid point to make in his remarks about parents in general having a more “personal and direct stake” in America’s future than the childless.
But the new generation of BOTS are more likely to be childless, and therefore more credulous regarding the state’s intentions and competency to produce individual happiness at scale. And when happiness fails to materialize? The state can’t cuddle single, childless women when they’re feeling lonely and blue in their old age. The best it can do is ensure free or low-cost anti-depression meds for them.
So far we have seen no evidence that declining procreation is a matter of concern to Harris and her team. On the contrary, as noted, thwarting reproduction seems to be the jewel in their policy crown. It’s a shame Vance botched his opportunity with Carlson. If he had introduced the subject in more measured and neutral tones, he might have sparked a legitimate and necessary debate on changing demographics and their implications for national destiny.
National Post
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