J.D. Vance, red-blooded American misogynist

Immediately after it was evident that Harris was going to be the Democratic nominee for president, MAGA media influencers began to advance the argument that Harris is a miserable cat lady, which requires also arguing that stepparents aren’t actual parents. Needless to say, the Extremely Online vice presidential nominee is fully on board with this creepy nonsense:

Say what you want about policy ideas (or lack thereof) but man, so many Republican leaders are just downright mean and bitter people. https://t.co/e1mocwCJIN— Brad Stulberg (@BStulberg) July 23, 2024

He’s also made the same argument about father of two Pete Buttegeig — hating women and hating queer people is all part of the package. And a repellent one it is:

Vance is staunchly opposed to abortion, and has suggested that it is wrong even in cases of rape and incest. He has compared the evil of abortion to that of slavery, and opposed the Ohio ballot measure ensuring the right to abortion in 2023. He also was one of only 28 members of Congress who opposed a new HIPAA rule that would limit law enforcement’s access to women’s medical records. He has promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children (a new Hungarian Constitution that banned gay marriage went into effect in 2012, so these benefits only serve “traditional” couples). Vance opposes same-sex marriage. During his 2022 Senate campaign, he suggested the sexual revolution had made divorce too easy (people nowadays “shift spouses like they change their underwear”), arguing that people in unhappy marriages, and maybe even those in violent ones, should stay together for their children. His campaign said such an insinuation was “preposterous,” but you can watch the video yourself and be the judge.

In all of this, Vance fits squarely within (and identifies with) the faction of the American New Right that typically refers to itself as “postliberalism.”

Patrick Deneen, a professor at Notre Dame, captured the basic outlook on gender and feminism among this cohort in his 2018 hit Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen’s argument is that liberal modernity is based on an irreparably individualistic view of human nature, which leads to a culture that values autonomy over community and family life. “Liberalism posits that freeing women from the household is tantamount to liberation,” he wrote, “but it effectively puts women and men alike into a far more encompassing bondage,” because work outside the home is submission to the forces of market capitalism. Somewhat bizarrely, in the postliberal mind, even gay marriage — people coming together and uniting legally into family units — becomes a form of social dissolution, because it is based on individual choice rather than traditional moral forms.

Deneen is an important reference, since it’s another reminder that Vance’s reactionary cultural politics are genuine, while the gestures at economic populism are phony and immediately dispensable. “Brutally enforced hierarchies based on race, gender, and sexuality, married to standard-issue Reaganomics with some vacuous anti-corporate rhetoric added on as window dressing” is a shoe that fits Vance perfectly too.