Faux-Natalism

Housing, JD Vance, and why bashing childless people isn't being pro-family

I have a new piece in Discourse Magazine, on JD Vance and pronatalism and the whole cat-lady thing. And housing. Of course, housing. Because, as I put it in the piece (long quote up front this time):

Making housing more accessible would address the issues of fertility and family formation from an angle rather than head on—not by talking about them or treating them as floating, disembodied ideas, but by restoring a context in which starting a family doesn’t feel so out of reach. To a genuinely pro-family person, pro-family politics should mean doing what is reasonable and possible to make starting a family feel like less of a mental lift, less of a break with your life before, less of a financial sink….

Nobody likes to feel perpetually frustrated in their dreams. There is absolutely no way to know how many of the proudly childless young people on social media snickering about their parents never getting grandkids secretly, maybe semiconsciously, ache for the stability and the contentment of homeownership, marriage and kids, but feel it is so far out of reach it is not a real option for them. The only way to know would be to make that path more attainable. The only way to make it more attainable is to recognize that middle-class and even quite affluent people are increasingly stretched thin when it comes to housing—especially housing near the best schools. And the only way to make that recognition mean anything in real life is to build much more housing for many more people and see what happens. Housing policy has to talk to pro-family policy.

I’m kind of starting with the conclusion to get it out of the way, because you’ve heard me say we need to build more housing a million times. The more pertinent thing here is what exactly JD Vance is talking about when he bashes childless people.

The most charitable possible reading on his series of remarks in this vein is that he’s so online, and his algorithmic feeds are so screwed, that he’s getting flooded with these random videos of 20-somethings on the beach saying “You’re never getting grandparents, ha ha ha!” or some guy in Brooklyn saying “Maybe kids shouldn’t be allowed in stores!” or whatever tiny insane slice of reality the right-wing internet trawls up from the left-wing internet. That’s possible. I’m sure you know exactly what dynamic I’m describing, and you see it with every touchy or controversial issue.

Maybe the people who are trying to salvage Vance’s remarks or transmogrify them into something genuinely pro-family are giving him the benefit of the doubt, and assuming that that’s what he really means. Or maybe they’re cynical operators who will never acknowledge that someone on their side has said something inappropriate. I cite Ross Douthat and Oren Cass, both of whom did something like this. You decide.

This is the other part I want to quote:

You can hear J.D. Vance talk about “miserable” cat ladies and how nonparents deserve less of a vote in elections, and you can think, Well, what he really means is that it should be easier to start a family and that kids and families are good. That can be made to seem plausible enough, but the thing is, if he meant “it should be easier to start a family and kids and families are good,” then he would say “it should be easier to start a family and kids and families are good.” Doesn’t it raise a little bit of concern that he didn’t say that?

My dad says something I think about a lot: don’t listen to what a person is saying and then try to explain to yourself how it really means what you want it to mean. Rather, ask yourself “If this person were meaning to say X, would they really be saying Y?”

Likewise, would somebody who genuinely cares about families and children and making family life easier use phrases like “childless sociopaths” or allege that “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people”? Doesn’t the particular choice of words mean something?

I also want to make this point: the thing about “cat lady” is that it isn’t just sneering. It is really a sexual insult. It’s a rejected college-boy taunt about undesirable women who age out of being marriageable and end up alone with their cats. It’s a juvenile, unbecoming, and indecent thing for a husband and a father to say.

I can sense that a lot of the conservatives trying to defend or spin Vance’s remarks think the left is attacking him because of his views, not his words, and that anyone who cares too much about the family will face scorn from the left. So what difference does it make which exact words he uses? But the thing is, the guy said what he said, and it just isn’t the same thing to promote the family as it is to insult people who haven’t started families.

As a comment to my original piece put it, really perfectly. This is the whole thing: “It felt like he was trying to make parents resent non-parents rather than make non-parents want to become parents.”

And what could possibly do that? Addressing housing and other economic concerns. Of course. But not only that. There’s absolutely a cultural element. An element of imagination and possibility, too.

I saw a joke on social media—“I hope JD Vance doesn’t give normal the wrong idea about parents.” Frankly, that’s hardly a joke, given our incendiary political environment. Is there a single person grappling with any of these issues—modern dating, or housing costs, or the prospect of juggling a household of two full-time working parents with childcare—who hears Vance prattle on like a sexually frustrated teen boy and thinks, This whole marriage and kids thing…maybe it is for me. Maybe there’s something there.

Here’s another urbanism tie-in. There’s a tone that you see on urbanist Twitter or what’s left of it, sometimes, that can be hectoring, condescending, aggressive. It isn’t at all a majority view and it isn’t the tone that any important person in the movement adopts. But you’ll see it. Stuff like “Can’t wait for a tall building to block those suburbanites’ view!” or “Rural people are bad” or “Suburbs are inherently racist” or whatever. You’re gonna live in a city and you’re gonna like it, dammit! If you’ve spent any time in this issue space, you know what I’m talking about.

But what I’ve come to understand during my years of writing on urbanism is that most people out in the real world couldn’t even tell you what the hell urbanism is, let alone take the most strident, boutique positions within that broad movement. Most people have no real lived experience of how lovely urban or small-town living (real small-town living, not suburbia with a boutiquified Main Street nearby) can be. Most people never really think about the silent, invisible psychological taxes that suburbia can impose: endless lawn work, physical separation, sitting in traffic for everyday errands, strapping the kids into the car seats to go anywhere, the background risk of dying or killing with or in a car. It never strikes them that what feels like the normal or default life they just sort of ended up in is a series of policies and choices and options. I sincerely believe that when many people in opinion polls say they like suburbia, what they mean is that they’re not aware there is any real, live alternative. Of course we “like” the suburbs. How can you “like” what you’ve never experienced?

I’ve found that it is far more effective and relatable—far more normal—to draw these pictures, to invite people to see more, than it is to hector them or expect them to read between the lines and understand that when we say “war on cars” of course we’re just making fun of the people who accuse us of fighting a war on cars…

You have to understand that people’s preferences exist in a context, that many of us don’t really know what we want. The job of persuaders is not just to sell their ideas, but to demonstrate that their ideas exist and are actually possible. To help a person imagine who they might be in a universe where these seemingly strange ideas were common. Those of us who understand ourselves to be fighting to restore an old normalcy have a special duty to be cautious, thoughtful, and, well, normal.

And it strikes me that what JD Vance is doing with pronatalism is precisely what these very-online progressive urbanists are doing with urbanism. They are concealing something normal and human behind a bizarre ideological edifice. If people think cities—humanity’s default mode of settlement for millennia—are liberal, is it much of a reach to imagine they might come to see kids as right-wing?

It doesn’t seem at all like a joke to imagine that some people very much uncertain about one day starting a family could end up a little bit further away from that possibility if they think its champions are people like JD Vance.

Of course, this is all absurd. It is insane that something as deeply and fundamentally pre-political and human—not even human, biological—as partnering and having offspring is political. And I feel exactly the same way about urbanism and housing advocacy. How the hell did we get to a point where the idea of building homes in places with growing populations has become a lightning rod of political controversy? A question with opposite sides? How have our modern, advanced societies gotten to a point where we have to relitigate and ideologize and justify philosophically the absolute most basic things that society rests on? That God or evolution seemingly designed us to do?

That’s the bigger question here that, as usual, our politics has no interest in even asking.

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Related Reading:

Born This (Urbanist) Way

Have You Ever Seen A City?

Kids And The City

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