AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Childless cat ladies - that's how JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, once described leadership on the progressive left.
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JD VANCE: 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.
CHANG: Now, we should note here that the, quote, "basic fact" that Vance describes is actually not factual. Harris does have stepchildren, and Pete Buttigieg has adopted children. This clip is from an interview he did in 2021 with Tucker Carlson. Now, for years, Vance has promoted policies that incentivize families to have children and penalize those who do not. He's called the drop in birth rates in America a, quote, "civilizational crisis." He's even suggested that people with children should get more votes in elections than people who do not have children. For more, we're joined now by Jessica Winter of The New Yorker, who just wrote a piece about Vance's politics on families and children. Welcome.
JESSICA WINTER: Thank you so much for having me.
CHANG: Well, I want to start by looking at JD Vance's policies on this front because - what? - he's only been a senator for a couple years, and he's already introduced legislation that gives us some glimpse into his family politics. Tell us about the policy positions he's proposed.
WINTER: Yeah. I think it's fair to say that his policy positions are somewhat friendlier to working families than that of your average conservative establishment Republican. I think a really good example of this is that he's voiced support for Josh Hawley's child tax credit proposal from a few years back. He pointed at Hawley's proposal as something that, quote-unquote, "normal Americans want," rather than, quote-unquote, "shunting their kids into crap day care."
But what's interesting about that proposal was that Hawley explicitly positioned it as having a marriage bonus, that married couples at the same income threshold as single parents would receive what he called a 100% marriage bonus. And I think that's very much in keeping with JD Vance's focus on the ideal family as being one where mom is at home with the kids, Dad is at work, and they're getting by on a single income. And I think that squares with Hawley's as well.
A kind of small-bore proposal that Vance introduced that I think is also telling in its way is that he wanted to close a loophole in the FMLA...
CHANG: The Family Medical Leave Act.
WINTER: That's right - where, at times, mothers who take maternity leave but then ultimately decide not to return to work, sometimes they're on the hook for premiums that their employers have paid into health care plans, and he wanted to eliminate that. But again, he explicitly positioned it for mothers who choose to stay at home and prioritize their children. And he did say mothers. He didn't say parents. So again, I think that was very much in line with this larger ideological project that I think that he has regarding the family.
CHANG: I mean, despite some of Vance's policies appearing to be family friendly, a very specific part of his politics here seems to be in opposition to child care, right? Like, can you explain the way child care fits into the picture here?
WINTER: Right. When he talked about day care being crap, he was making a lot of assumptions about day care workers, the day care industry and also parents who might choose to enroll their kids in day care. He doesn't see the day care industry as a job creator or something that could boost communities that might need good jobs in good industries. He does not see day care workers, who are typically underpaid - he doesn't see them as possible constituents whom he can help. And I think most importantly, he does not see why a woman, a working mother, might want to work outside of the home just for her own fulfillment.
CHANG: Well, I also want to talk about the voice that Vance wants to give people with children in a democracy. Like, I want to play you a piece of tape. This is Vance in 2021 speaking to a political conference in Virginia.
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VANCE: Let's give votes to all children in this country, but let's give control over those votes to the parents of those children.
VANCE: When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power. You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don't have kids.
CHANG: People with children should get more votes. Is this a view that's shared by others in Vance's political ecosystem? And do you think he's suggesting this as a real policy, or is he just trying to stir the pot there?
WINTER: I mean, I think it's possibly a view that's shared but not voiced. I think what it does is, again, show his priorities, show his hand in terms of what's important to him and what kind of sociocultural family ideal he wants to hold up, however not based in reality it might be. The fact that he's voicing it, the fact that he's saying that some people are more important than others, their vote is more valuable than other people, I mean, that's startling unto itself.
CHANG: You write in your piece about Vance's own family history, which he wrote extensively about in his memoir "Hillbilly Elegy." We can't, you know, obviously, get inside his brain to know exactly how his own personal experience impacts his politics on families and children. But what insight did you get from his family story that might be relevant here?
WINTER: Vance has spoken a lot in his memoir and also, notably, in a TED talk that he did around the time of the memoir, which is a really interesting artifact, I think, about how he could have been a statistic, that he could have fallen prey to kind of generational trauma in his family. You know, his mother struggled with drugs. She cycled through many, many boyfriends and husbands who added a great deal of volatility to an already-volatile household while Vance was growing up. And the reason, he says, that he beat the odds was, in great part, because of his grandparents. He had these...
CHANG: Right.
WINTER: ...Wonderful grandparents who were so supporting and encouraging of him and who offered him a refuge from the chaos of his mother's household. And he's very frank about his grandparents' flaws. His grandfather struggled with alcoholism for a long time. They were violent toward each other. And I think a crucial, crucial difference that he draws between his grandparents and his mother is that they stayed married. He really praises and extols the virtues of the fact that his grandparents, no matter how bad, how violent, how affected by alcohol their marriage was, that they stuck it out. And I think there is ample evidence in everything that he's said and everything that he's written that this allegiance to the sanctity of marriage and a certain kind of marriage is really central to his politics and his morality.
CHANG: Jessica Winter is an editor at The New Yorker who writes about families and education. Thank you so much for this conversation.
WINTER: Thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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