Natalism, NIMBYism and J.D. Vance

There’s a phenomenon in politics I dislike: when scoundrels make a good thing look bad, or when their crude attempt to turn something basic, natural and universal into culture-war fodder creates an artificial chasm in our politics and culture. For example, I wrote last year that I didn’t like that song “Try That in a Small Town” and its implication that intolerance is an inherent characteristic of small-town life. (Some people said it was a bad article and I didn’t understand country music. Maybe one of those things is true.)

Another example of this phenomenon is J.D. Vance.

I read his book “Hillbilly Elegy” years ago, like a lot of people who follow politics. I found it to be nuanced and inspiring. It suggested that the author was someone who would, or should, have a sense of humility and gratitude. Everyone, by now, knows that Vance has flip-flopped on most of the important points in his book, and everyone also knows about his recent “childless cat ladies” remarks, which is what interests me here.

There has been a lot of high-minded commentary on Vance’s remarks: the miserable cat ladies one, or the parents-should-get-extra-votes-for-their-children one or the Democrats-are childless-sociopaths one. There’s Ross Douthat, in response to the “weird” charge from the left, saying, Well, pronatalism is kinda weird, what are you gonna do? An even more pertinent example of trying to put the best spin on these various remarks comes from Oren Cass, in a Substack post titled “J.D. Vance Is Right About Prioritizing Parents”:

[R]ecognition of an obligation to the next generation leads inexorably to an insistence upon tradition. One only need recognize—as any parent quickly does—that children are obviously incapable of autonomously developing and pursuing their own morality, values, and virtue, and so are dependent on the community of adults around them. Only a community itself committed to a shared moral vision and set of values can provide a suitable environment for children to mature, and only a community willing to embrace and work from what they have inherited will have those shared commitments. Adults concerned only for themselves may argue that an anything-goes morality of personal autonomy and self-discovery is in their own best interest, but they cannot contend it is what they themselves needed early in their lives, or that it is all they owe those who are young today.

While some might find this doctrinaire or preachy, most would probably agree it’s at least plausible, within the bounds of normal thinking on such questions. It is probably a good thing to make it easier for people to start families. Being responsible for young children does probably help many people cultivate a sense of responsibility. 

It’s just too bad that J.D. Vance didn’t actually say any of this.

Alright, he has said some of it. And to his credit, he has at times bucked some Republican economic orthodoxy on pro-family policy. And you might argue, perhaps correctly, that Vance is a politician playing to what he thinks his base wants to hear. But it is frustrating to see more serious and sober commentators strain to see the merit in his intentionally inflammatory culture-war rhetoric, or to “translate” it into their own much more defensible or even good views.

When this is done in good faith, you can say it’s doing discourse, debate, mutual understanding. When it’s done cynically, there’s a cruder term for it. I don’t blame people for trying to shoehorn a topical controversy into their signature issue, but it isn’t always wise.

More specifically, 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? What sort of person who really loves, honors and respects the idea and reality of the family winks at very-online right-wing memes about sexually undesirable librarians or schemes up ways to disenfranchise students, young people and people suffering from infertility?

And that’s the thing that really gets me: “Pronatalism”—a term most normal people have probably never heard (which is probably for the best)—means a politics and society that honors the family and promotes it. Not in an authoritarian way, or a hectoring way—at least not in my definition. What’s frustrating to those of us who do honor the family and support pro-family public policy is that none of this stuff about cat ladies and spendthrift childless millennials is actually meant to promote the family in theory or practice.

It isn’t actually addressed to young people in a position to get married and start a family. It doesn’t actually illustrate the subtle joys of family life. None of it will make someone with complicated, on-the-fence feelings about parenthood decide that maybe they want to take that plunge. Instead, all this talk is addressed entirely to people for whom these things are abstractions—people who spend far too much time on the internet and social media platforms thinking about things like “the crisis of the West,” and older folks who bought their homes and had their kids a long time ago. The essence of the culture war is that it is abstract—it treats real, complicated, multifaceted, human issues as questions of ideology, of simple assent, of yes or no.

And this is precisely how far too many people have come to view housing.

The single most “pronatalist” policy any government at any level could probably enact wouldn’t be to pay people to have kids or take the franchise away from childless people (or even lower the car-seat age or remove the car-seat requirement). It would be to force down the cost of housing through supply—getting out of the way of the normal process of building, i.e., slashing the red tape of zoning and related elements of the land use regime.

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.

J.D. Vance—not surprisingly to me—has hardly said anything about housing in all his remarks on kids and families, with the exception of criticizing institutional investors for supposedly putting homeownership out of reach for middle-class people. Most housing scholars consider this to be a minor factor in escalating home prices. But it’s an easy political talking point because, like bashing supposedly lonely, miserable feminists, it doesn’t really demand anything in actual policy. That is, again, what much of the culture war is—a kind of simulacrum of politics. Replacing a real issue with its culture-war facsimile is like buying an indulgence—pretending that one can somehow sidestep or excise the work involved in actually doing something.

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.

It is easier to somehow connect or invent a “war on the suburbs” and a left-inflected anti-family ideology. But what America doesn’t need is yet another front in the culture war—yet another once-unselfconscious thing being drafted into a political fight. What could be more horrifying—especially, one would hope, to pronatalists—than the prospect of being married with kids coding you as a Republican? It’s like a worse and less funny version of Stephen Colbert’s old quip that “reality has a liberal bias.”

Pundits and politicos who take up the mantle of pronatalism or pro-family politics but remain conspicuously silent on the economic headwinds facing anyone in their 20s or 30s who actually wants to do those things, are playacting. By their fruit shall you know them. And such people, J.D. Vance manifestly included, are barren.