Believe it or not, I, like Republican vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, was born in Middletown, Ohio. Admittedly, my first appearance in the world took place several decades before that of the author of Hillbilly Elegy, and in much more stable circumstances. My father worked as a salesman for a paper company whose mill was located in Middletown, and he and my mother moved there from Rhode Island the week after they were married. After a few years at headquarters, he was transferred to Boston and a few years after that to New York. For the most part, I grew up in a leafy Connecticut suburb. We were sent back to Middletown when I was in eighth grade, a bewildering dislocation. It was a culture shock for a thirteen-year-old who had been going to school with the sons and daughters of lawyers and business executives to suddenly be surrounded by classmates whose relatives had arrived from Appalachia to work in the city’s steel and paper mills. A few of my junior–high school classmates, having been required to repeat a year, drove their own cars to school. Happily, some sort of corporate turmoil at the paper company sent us back to Connecticut the following year. But that brief sojourn in Middletown has long piqued my interest in the overweening ambitions of Vance, the newly minted Catholic convert and culture warrior.
The liberal reaction to Vance’s smug remarks about how Democrats are dominated 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” was predictable enough. Vance has proposed that parents should have more voting power and lower taxes than adults who don’t have children. “Unless women are fulfilling their duties as breeders and helpmates, they’re not fully Americans?,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked incredulously, with typical hyperbole. “You get the impression that [Vance and conservative Catholics] would love nothing more than to dispatch women back to the kitchen and bedroom, turning them into what Hilary Mantel called ‘breeding stock, collections of organs.’” But libertarians are also appalled by Vance’s “social engineering,” whining about having to pay taxes to support those with children. Even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has condemned Vance. When Dowd and the Wall Street Journal agree, you know something interesting is going on.
Was my fellow Middletowner throwing red meat to the Trump base? Of course. Is he any good at it? Early reports suggest he needs to take some tutoring from the master of misogyny from Queens. But I also think that Democrats, who justly or unjustly have a reputation for disparaging the traditional family and its values, risk overreacting to such lame provocations. I suspect Vance is on to something in assuming that many Americans will welcome a politician who is willing to unabashedly defend and even privilege families and child-rearing.
When I open my now sadly abbreviated local paper, I usually come across an entire page of obituaries. Obituaries and local sports seem to be the principal reasons folks still subscribe. Most of the notices fit a familiar template. The deceased, whether man or wife, had “met the love of their life” at such a place and time. Most also testify to the fact that—regardless of any professional accomplishments—it was family and the raising of children that were their most meaningful endeavors. That might sound like boilerplate, but it rings true to me.
It is often said that adults don’t raise children; it is the children who raise adults. That was certainly the case for me. Nothing makes you grow up faster, or makes life more real, than suddenly finding yourself responsible for the well-being of others. Having come of age in the 1960s and ’70s, when motherhood and child-rearing were widely derided in liberal culture, I remember how surprisingly composed and delighted my wife was after giving birth to our first child. “When I held him in my arms,” she later said, “I knew that this was what I had always wanted.” At that time, she had been a model of meritocratic achievement, a Phi Beta Kappa college graduate with a graduate degree from Stanford, as well as a successful magazine editor and a college instructor. The last thing she felt upon having children was that she was being banished to the kitchen and bedroom or turned into breeding stock. Quite the opposite. She had found a calling, something even more rewarding than a job.
Should parents have greater voting rights than men and women who don’t have children? Of course not. Should public policy encourage the creation and stability of families? Of course it should. The future of society depends on it. Libertarians may complain about paying to support other people’s children, but we do that all the time when we pay taxes to support public schools, public health, and other programs devoted to the common good. Of course, libertarians don’t believe in the common good, only the good of individuals. It is every man and woman for himself or herself. Unfortunately, that is the sort of radical individualism that many liberals also implicitly endorse when they appear embarrassed by, or just uninterested in, traditional family values and the traditional family. Vance, to be sure, has become a caricature of someone who espouses traditional Catholic values while ruthlessly pursuing an ungodly worldly ambition. But this election will be decided by a few thousand votes in a few states where those values still matter. Take it from someone born in Middletown, Ohio: Democrats can’t afford to be painted into a cultural corner.
