JD Vance vs. the Cat Lady Caucus
Plus: THAT Ballerina Farm profile.
Programming Note: If you follow this newsletter because you started reading my political commentaries at the Portland Mercury circa 2016, you’re a real one, thank you forever, AND I have good news for you. I’ve decided to devote some of the next few months to writing about the presidential election, starting with today’s newsletter on the real and repugnant views of vice presidential candidate JD Vance. Some of these pieces may also run at the South Seattle Emerald, where I write a bimonthly column.
So welcome to the first installment of Whipsmart, where I promise to bring you electoral politics with a side of sanity. I’m glad you’re here! And if you’d like to support my sanity, you can upgrade to a paid subscription by hitting the link below. Let’s goooooooo!
Whipsmart #1: JD Vance vs. the Cat Lady Caucus
I didn’t read Hillbilly Elegy, but when its author, Ohio Senator JD Vance, was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, I wasn’t at all surprised. Vance’s performance of working-class solidarity paired with retrograde views on gender were well received at the Republican National Convention. And before Joe Biden dropped out of the race, it seemed less important that the GOP’s VP pick appeal to anyone but the Trump base gathered—and blowing up Grindr*—in Milwaukee.
But as Vice President Kamala Harris takes over for Biden in this year’s presidential election, Vance may prove to be a liability for the Republicans—and a hint as to their true intentions when it comes to abortion, which is likely to be the election’s central issue if the Democrats are smart about it.
Here’s what Vance has said about abortion and other key issues—and what it may mean after this deeply unexpected electoral vibe shift. We exist, after all, in the context of all in which we live and all that came before us. Let’s take a look.
*There is nothing wrong with blowing up Grindr. There is something wrong with blowing up Grindr while actively fighting to roll back basic rights for LGBTQ people.
On divorce
After Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate, social media posts circulated saying that he believes women should stay married even if they’re being abused. This isn’t exactly the stance Vance has taken, as Snopes reported in a hasty debunking. But his statements on divorce and marriage are troubling enough on their own.
In a 2021 talk at a high school in California, Vance attributed cultural norms around divorce to the sexual revolution, saying it had changed attitudes toward marriage in a bad way, and the divorces that followed “really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.” His stance on divorce is that it hurts children and isn’t an acceptable way to resolve marital issues, despite the fact that, legally, that’s exactly what it is.
At that talk, Vance didn’t appear to cite any evidence for his claim that divorce harms children, aside from an anecdote about his grandparents: “My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right?” he said. “They were together to the end, ’til death do us part.”
But let’s take a look at the marriage Vance holds up as an example of how “marriage was sacred.” In Vance’s infamous memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he describes his grandmother threatening to kill his grandfather for drinking, dousing his grandfather in lighter fluid, and lighting a match. (I haven’t read the book, but this content isn’t difficult to find with a cursory google search. If Books Could Kill’s explainer is also a good summary for those who want to know what happens in Hillbilly Elegy but would prefer the CliffsNotes version.)
Having some messy feelings about this is certainly valid. Families are weird! And Vance is allowed to tell whatever story he wants or needs to about his own experiences. We all do that.
But when a marital dispute involves death threats and setting people on fire, staying together isn’t a heartwarming outcome. It’s horrifying. It’s even more horrifying that someone could come away from this experience with the idea that divorce is not a reasonable option for anyone else. Using a public platform to normalize violence instead is cruel and irresponsible. I can think of few better arguments for divorce than the events Vance himself describes.
On a national abortion ban
While the GOP’s 2024 platform makes no mention of a national abortion ban, Vance has been an outspoken advocate for one. In 2022, CNN reported, he said on a podcast that “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.” He also has said he would support efforts to keep people who live in states with active abortion bans from traveling for abortion care, citing an incredibly offensive imaginary scenario in which George Soros “sends a 747 to Columbus” to transport women of color to California for abortions.
This is an insane (and, honestly, disgusting) thing to say, but it’s on brand for Vance. If he’s proven anything since he was announced as Trump’s running mate, it’s that he doesn’t really understand how to make any real critiques of the Democrats’ most winning issue, and also that he’s not a very good extemporaneous speaker. His 747 statement is also a clear argument for a national abortion ban.
This could be a problem for Republicans, who, after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, are currently trying to downplay their hardline stance on abortion, which polling predicted—and voting confirms—is an unpopular fringe opinion. The 2024 GOP platform makes few mentions of abortion, and none of a national ban, a development that upset some hard-line abortion rights opponents, according to US News and World Report, and is likely due to the fact that, as Vance has put it himself, “We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans.”
Vance’s record suggests he does.
On childless adults
In one of his more unhinged moments, Vance told Fox’s Tucker Carlson that the United States is run by unhappy animal lovers. “We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too,” he said. “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.”
Here are some other basic facts: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not a cat lady at all, but a well-documented dog person, as evidenced by her French bulldog Deco. Anyone who follows politics and has an Instagram account could tell you that. Kamala Harris is not childless; in fact, she has two stepchildren who call her Momala. And I don’t know what his views on cats are, but Pete Buttigieg is a dad. And even if he weren’t, who cares? It’s embarrassingly shortsighted to suggest that people without kids don’t have a stake in the future or any experience of caregiving, especially since the opposite is true: People who don’t have their own kids often play active roles in raising and supporting kids who already exist, in part because they have the availability.
Vance’s childless cat lady argument is obviously goofy—it also ignores the existence of Taylor Swift, who has done a lot to elevate the brand in recent years—but it’s really not about cat ladies at all. It’s about an imaginary threat, much like George Soros’ 747, to Vance’s stance on divorce and abortion. The future he describes in his stump speeches is one in which women are married and have children, regardless of how unhappy those marriages are, where abortion is inaccessible, and where single women don’t exist. Anyone who isn’t a biological parent and betrays any signs of enjoying their life the way it is punctures this “when men were men” fantasy by their very existence.
The Republicans may have kept the national abortion ban out of the party platform this time around for looks, but selecting Vance as a vice presidential candidate says much more about where the party’s priorities are: the 1950s, apparently.
In a country that’s already lost abortion rights, continuing that backward trajectory will be a hard sell. We exist in the context of all that came before us, but only one party is currently talking about how we might move forward into the future.
This commentary was originally published at the South Seattle Emerald.
What I’ve been up to:
Supporting physical media! Since I found out Scarecrow Video, Seattle’s giant and only video store, is in dire financial straits, I pulled out my blu-ray player and started renting movies again, and it is wonderful.
My first rental was the 1985 Anne of Green Gables miniseries I used to watch on PBS—it’s notoriously unstreamable—and it gave me so many nice sense memories of watching it in the summertime as a kid in rotation with Mystery!, the preferred television show of morbidly curious 10-year-olds.
I also rented and loved Impromptu, a delightful 1991 movie about the real-life affair between George Sand (Judy Davis) and Frédéric Chopin (Hugh Grant!). The Victorian era as depicted in movies made in the 1980s and 1990s is such a good aesthetic.
One of my greatest pleasures as a teenager was when I had the house to myself on a night my parents were out. Maybe you threw an illicit party or had friends over. I’d walk to Island Video (RIP) on Greenwood Avenue and rent movies—Richard Linklater! Wes Anderson! Nora Ephron!—and watch them by myself with a delivery pizza, a hobby that felt very decadent and adult in the moment and in retrospect made it very easy to jump into movie reviewing when I became an alt-weekly employee in my twenties. When Island Video closed, I was consoled knowing Scarecrow was still around. I hope it continues to be.
Succumbing to the ubiquitous wide-leg jean trend. These ones were recommended by
, my favorite esthetician, whose style and skin care tips never miss. These jeans are extremely comfortable, with a ’70s vibe that pairs equally well with T-shirts and sneakers as frilly summer blouses and sandals.What I’ve been reading:
Sheila Heti’s novel Motherhood. It made me feel a lot of things as a woman in my thirties who isn’t married and doesn’t have kids. (Yet? Ever? WHO CAN SAY [Don’t ask me because I will NOT tell you!]) The whole book is kind of a rumination on the narrator’s indecision about having kids, and how “for a woman of curiosity, no decision will ever feel like the right one.” As a woman of curiosity, I related to this sense of inner conflict deeply as it relates to so many things, and I found it refreshing and subversive to read a book about motherhood that’s about someone who decides against it and feels free after doing so.
I read some of Heti’s previous work in my twenties—it was extremely trendy when I was getting my MFA, especially in experimental programs like the one I went to—and I didn’t connect with it then. I couldn’t relate, it struck me as sort of braggy and bloggy and unfinished, and if I’m honest, I think I was just kind of jealous of how cool she seemed. I had a lot more professional jealousy as a young writer than I do now, and I have a lot of retrospective compassion about that. Once I started making a living off my writing, it quickly dissipated. Money does change things.
Anyway, I’m glad I gave Heti a second chance, because I finished Motherhood sitting on my rooftop deck with a seltzer in my paw as the sky darkened over the glittering Seattle skyline, and I very nearly cried right in front of my neighbors because I was so moved by her writing.
I’ve been thinking lately about the value of changing your mind about things, and this was a powerful reminder of how pleasant it can be. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Lana Del Rey lately, an artist who also inspired a complex revulsion in me when I was in my twenties (I thought she was Bad for Feminism, a metric I no longer find all that helpful when it comes to assessing art), and I am really loving the breadth of her musical catalog, from sweeping, vaguely mid-century, swoony David Lynch vibes to the best Sublime cover I’ve ever heard. Changing your mind about things! It’s good! I recommend it!
Moira Donegan on Christine Blasey Ford and the limits of #MeToo.
This beautiful obituary: “She was a complex woman of great strength and a strong will.” It could describe so many people I know. In this case, it’s describing Paul Westerberg’s mother.
“Some 80-year-olds are still sharp enough to be president. Biden has shown that he is not one of them.” I read this before he bowed out, but it’s still worth it.
Brandon Taylor on Alice Munro:
THAT profile of Hannah Neeleman AKA Ballerina Farm. One of my friends compared it to a Gothic novel, and she was so right. It was an especially surreal thing to read after meeting Neeleman in person earlier this summer. More on that after the paywall.
I took a class Neeleman taught at a ballet intensive, around the time she was being photographed for this story (she posted about both on her Instagram).