JD Vance's Natal-Futurism

On the origins of the Republican VP nominee's weird obsession with having children.

“Can anyone,” asked Pat Buchanan, “say today that we Americans are ‘one united people’?”

Buchanan was fresh off his much ballyhooed 2000 presidential election campaign — where he had ballot access in 49 states, and yet received a humiliating 0.4% of the popular vote. Undeterred, he was convinced that the country was hungry for more of his racist musings about the external and existential threat posed by everything.

“We are not descended from the same ancestors,” he wrote. “We no longer speak the same language. We do not profess the same religion. We are no longer simply Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish […] We no longer agree on whether God exists, when life begins, and what is moral and immoral. We are not ‘similar in our manners and customs.’”¹

Venerating the “heroes of old America” like Confederate Robert E. Lee, Buchanan lamented that America had become unbound from itself. By rejecting prayer in schools, forcing school integration through bussing, encouraging immigration from “the third world,” and by permitting flag-burning, abortion, and pornography, America had ceased to be a nation.

Buchanan had long tried to rouse his faithful into fighting his paleo-conservative culture war. High on nostalgia for a time that never existed, he called on his soldiers to rise up and make the future look more like the past. But he was losing faith it would ever come.

This, as the book’s title proclaimed, was “the death of the West.” It was a lament for how “dying populations and immigrant invasions imperil our country and civilization.”

Buchanan’s bleating was no more impressive in book form than it had been on the campaign trail. So the miserable old racist sold a whack of books to his militia of malcontents and continued his slide into irrelevance. The Republican Party purged the last cells of Buchananism.

That is, until 16 years on, when Donald Trump repackaged Buchanan’s rhetoric in gold leaf. In a fitting indignity, Trump gave no credit to the man he once (accurately) slammed as a “Hitler lover.” Buchanan permitted himself a victory jig anyway: “The ideas made it, but I didn’t.”

If Buchanan was mentioned, it was in an unflattering comparison to Trump. The odds seemed good that we would forget him almost entirely by the time he finally kicked the bucket.

But that changed last month.

“You and I both agree,” Saurabh Sharma put it to JD Vance, “that a lot of the themes that we talk about on the new right — whatever you want to call it — have antecedents long before President Trump started running.”

There is, Sharma offered “Pat Buchanan.”

“What's some direction that you, now, as a United States senator, would give to people who want to see that broad ideological paradigm shift in American life?” Sharma asked. “What should they be thinking about? What should they be paying attention to? And and how should they be acting at this moment in time?”

It’s a good question for a weird guy. So this week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, let’s quickly dive into JD Vance’s new-old retro-futurism.

Here’s a spoiler: It all comes back to white babies.

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Are you optimistic, are you more pessimistic, about the future of America? Not about the next election, but rather the next generation?

JD Vance: I would say I'm neither a pessimist or an optimist — I'm hopeful about America because I still think that we have the best people in the world and I think that we have an incredibly proud history and we have institutions that, though broken in a lot of ways, are still relatively responsive to to the American people. […]

The thing that I'm really worried about with America — the West more broadly — is this crisis of meaning that I talked about earlier. How do we actually identify ourselves as Americans? What unites us together, what drives us together? You see that most obviously reflected in our in our fertility numbers, right? That may be the best signal of whether you're hopeful about the future or not hopeful about the future is: Are you having kids? I have three of them and it makes me I think pretty hopeful about the future, but I worry because that's not where a lot of our fellow citizens are.

There's clearly something very broken about how we transmit values and opportunities and prosperity from one generation to the next. I think we have to figure out that problem now.

You’ve probably seen a fair bit of coverage about JD Vance’s weird, weird fixation on birth rates.

He’s railed against “childless cat ladies,” admonished the “childless left,” and declared that the most “psychotic” Americans were probably childless.

The Democrats have branded this obsessive need for women to have babies as weird. Because it is. It’s weird.

But I think in defaulting to quick clips and shorthands, we’re missing just how off-putting Vance’s message really is. There are, yes, the deeply unpleasant attacks on childless women. And there is the broad-based assault on reproductive rights.

Keep drilling down, though, and there’s even more to it. Because Vance’s oily invocation of declining fertility rates is both a salient bit of policy that we should take note of and a new front in the culture wars that should scare the shit out of us.

As we can hear in the clip above, from an interview with the Project 2025-linked American Moment (Dispatch #105), Vance’s pitch is a bizarrely optimistic appeal to the future. And it’s actually a pretty compelling one. It clearly identifies a problem (a nation with a negative replacement rate), a solution (encouraging or requiring women to have more babies), and a benefit (a more cohesive, traditional, and expansionist national identity.)

Leftists, liberals, and non-populist conservatives would do well to figure out how to reverse-engineer that message, without all the creepy trappings.

Because, as it stands, it may finally be a successful vehicle for Pat Buchanan’s lunatic fringery.

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JD Vance, in a surprising numbers of ways, bridges the ideological divide.

He’s a vocal supporter of anti-trust law, touts a particular kind of working class populism, and borrows from Catholic ideas of social justice (in some contexts.)

In that same American Moment interview, Vance mused that he’s worried about the state of the Republican Party “if we're not willing to accept that something has gone terribly wrong on American health care, especially for young mothers.” Vance recounted how, when his wife was giving birth to their second child, the couple booked an anesthesiologist who was outside of their insurance network — racking up a $20,000 bill.

“We could either be on the side of the insurance company or of young mothers,” Vance posited. It’s a stark choice, as the Republican Party has historically chosen the insurance companies. While Vance’s desire for healthcare reforms don’t seem to go beyond birth, it nevertheless fed into a catchy and compelling program that he’s enthusiastically endorsed: Make birth free.

It’s an unexpected meeting point for “the new right,” as Sharma deputizes them, and progressive liberals, who have also tried to bring costs down for young families.

And it gets us into a very interesting debate about families and whether the state ought to have a preferred fertility rate. (I, if you’re curious, tend to come down on the side of ‘no,’ as I tend to think it will always lead to society-wide social engineering which is, almost always, a bad idea.) It’s a debate that the progressive side tends to hate, with some successful exceptions. (Justin Trudeau, e.g.) But I think we can agree that it is a perfectly sensible goal for the state to remove as much friction as reasonably possible between the desire to have children and the ability to do so.

Whether that’s reducing the cost of essentials, improving access to high-quality housing, providing an abundance of childcare spaces, building more walkable and accessible cities, expanding adoption programs, offering more choices in IVF and fertility treatment, augmenting family reunification programs in our immigration system, and so on — making it easier to start a family, however that looks, seems to be one popular policy objective that cuts across just about every demographic.

More than just good policy, Vance gets something even more fundamental about the benefits of family-oriented politics: It’s a wonderfully long-term bit of rhetoric and governance. It forces people to think in terms of decades instead of months, both at the micro and macro levels.

The fact is, our politics have become rather mechanical, actuarial, and transactional. Blame the neo-liberalism/conservatism of the 90s, or perhaps the hope boom-and-bust of Barack Obama era, but too much policy-making now revolves around taxes lowered, debt added, tanks built, roads constructed, and trees planted. Less and less in politics seems to envision a society expanded or communities built.

Contrast that with Vance when he proclaims: “The country's not going to be saved by people who are depressed and have given up. It's going to be saved by people who believe in the future.”

Vance seems to understand in a rather natural way that people are strivers — some strive to climb the corporate ladder, some to build families and local community, but almost everyone strives to live in a society that is more robust, friendly, and prosperous than the one they were born into. He leans into it.

Now I obviously think, and most people seem to agree with me, that there is something obscene and offensive about the idea that child-bearing families are the only conduit to such long-term planning. Or that building a family requires a god-fearing man and a woman who knows her place. But, rather, an ambitious and expansionist view of what constitutes a family is one rather great window into an optimistic future.

But enough about what JD Vance gets right: Let’s understand the corroded battery at the center of it.

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Thanks to big-brained phrenologists like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, the ‘the great replacement theory’ has become frustratingly mainstream, with major Republican politicians openly endorsing its tenets and Donald Trump wholesale adopting the language of “invasion.”

This fear has been elucidated since the earliest incarnation of America, used to target Catholics, Jews, Chinese, Mexicans, and a host of others. Over the past century, it was the bedrock for David Duke’s quixotic political career, Pat Buchanan’s sad little forays, and Donald Trump’s first presidential bid.

But for each of those gas bubbles of paranoid racism, there has been a second piece: Fertility. It has always been the sunnier flipside to these racist tirades. Because the initial salvo has generally been understood as so obviously racist and unpalatable that further obsession with female fertility hasn’t been well-received.

Now that Trump and his crew have successfully mainstreamed the dour fearmongering of invading hordes, the sunny rhetoric of maternal health has been allowed to cast a glow around politicians like Vance.

And too few commentators seem to appreciate just how interconnected the two are, and how subtly toxic this idea really is.

At the core of how Vance pitches this concern with a declining birthrate is an accusation: That the unpatriotic elites are actively encouraging the decline in white births to usher in those who are not like us.

The us vs. them dichotomy was integral to Vance’s selling of this language, up until it became a political liability. As Vance explained on a podcast in 2020, he is convinced that having children is a levelling-up experience that makes you “more thoughtful and empathetic.” Having kids, he says, “actually makes you a better person.” Whereas being without children “makes people more sociopathic.” America’s leadership is “less mentally stable” and its voters are “most deranged and most psychotic” if they don’t have kids at home.

That is, of course, as clearly a projection of his own insecurities as it is patholigizing of his political opponents. It is not scientific or even rational, but emotional and childish. And it betrays the cultural war raging underneath all this flowery language about mothers.

But these childless or anti-family liberals and leftists, in Vance’s world, want to hollow out what makes us (white anglo-saxons) us and replace it with what makes them (Muslims, Mexicans, atheists) them. And so the first enemy of his vision of this communal, happy, moral, family-first America isn’t foreigners: It’s the domestic traitors.

Earlier this year, at the American Moment gala, Vance took aim at “the concept that America is an idea.” It’s not true, he argued.

JD Vance: America is a lot more than an idea. Why do I why do I think this matters? Well, one, is: If you think that America is just an idea…then anybody can become an American, no matter where they are, and no matter what their core purpose, and no matter what they add to the American nation state as it exists. […]

A lot of good people out there believe in American constitutional principles. That doesn't mean that we should bring them into our country and invite them to become citizens. If we did that we would be overrun, right? [Applause]

But the more that I think about this the more that I can't get out of my head that there's even something more sinister about this this concept of ‘America as an idea,’ because there's an inverse of what I just said. If America's an idea, yes, anybody who believes in that idea should theoretically be entitled to the benefit of citizenship. And that's absurd…But the reverse of that is that people who don't share progressives’ idea of America no longer belong. […]

I was walking on Capitol Hill not too long ago, and I actually saw a house that had three separate flags outside of it — three separate totems. So one was the Ukraine flag, one was a Black Lives Matter flag, and one said: “In this house we believe in science.” […] There's really something to this idea that to be an American progressive, to participate in the community these days, you have to believe in these particular totems of the modern American left. Now, of course, we can criticize this stuff and say that it's all crazy — but it really is not a set of political ideas to these people, it is a core part of their identity. They've forsaken their religion and they've absorbed this new religion, and anybody who doesn't participate in that faith, anybody who doesn't agree with its tenants, is no longer a welcome part of the national community of this country. That's a really crazy thing that has happened in just the last few years.

Not one to let subtly reign, Vance proceeded to question his colleagues’ commitment to America because they support Ukrainian self-defence and don’t, apparently, care enough about the border crisis — and then he launched into this.

JD Vance: That's to say nothing about the decline of democratic power. When you import millions of people and assign congressional seats based on population, even the people who are here illegally, you destroy the Democratic power of American citizens in their own country.

Now ignoring the fact that counting undocumented migrants on the census rolls makes a comically insignificant impact on Americans’ democratic representation — Pew Research calculated that it gave California, Florida, and Texas an extra House seat each; while it probably unfairly took one apiece from Alabama, Minnesota, and Ohio — Vance is doing the exact thing he fantastically accuses the left of doing.

Because Vance does genuinely believe that America is not an idea. It is, instead, a curated and cohesive community of like-minded Christians. And those Christians ought to police each other to be the right kind of American, to go through the rites of passage necessary to upgrade you into being American, while America’s door policy should be more about cultural fit than fairness, need, or want.

Vance’s pitch isn’t for freedom at all, but for uniformity and a narrow sense of duty. And that duty, all too often, is an obligation to birth more white babies to keep the game going.

As he explained in a speech actually entitled “The Universities are the Enemy,” delivered to the Edmund Burke Foundation’s National Conservatism conference: “The fundamental lie of American feminism over the past 20 or 30 years is that it is liberating for a woman to go and work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at Goldman Sachs…and that is liberation compared to the problems of family and patriarchy in our modern society.” Vance’s views on maternity, past all the progressive trappings, are that women should be pushed by the state into motherhood. That’ll fix our fertility crisis, he believes. That will build the tactile America, one that is much more than an idea.

This speech is interesting for another reason. Because, towards the end, Vance pays a weird homage.

“We are celebrating, today, the birthday of Pat Buchanan-” the crowd breaks out into applause “-who first got his start in the Nixon administration and is the genesis of many of the ideas that we discussed here.” (Vance wanted to leave the audience with a quote from Tricky Dick himself: “The professors are the enemy.”)

Vance’s feting of Buchanan — an anti-semite, a racist, a chauvinist, a homophobe, and many other unpleasant things — has got to be the most revealing thing about his family fetishism.

So I’ll close out on some more tripe from Buchanan’s irritating 2002 book — the genesis, according to Vance himself, of much of his core philosophy.

Pat Buchanan: The America many of us grew up in is gone. The cultural revolution has triumphed in the minds of millions and is beyond the power of politicians to overturn, even had they the courage to try. Half a nation has converted. The party of working-class Catholics is almost 100 percent “pro-choice” and pro—gay rights. The party of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition has thrown in the towel on the social issues—to go out and do the Lord’s work growing the Department of Education. Young people are not concerned about their souls; they’re worried about the Nasdaq. Most of the intellectual and media elite are fighting allies of the revolution or fellow travelers, and many conservatives are trolling for the terms of armistice. […]

Only a social counterrevolution or a religious awakening can turn the West around before a falling birthrate closes off the last exit ramp and rings down the curtain on Western Man’s long-running play. But not a sign of either can be seen on the horizon.

JD Vance is that counterrevolution.

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That’s it for this mini follow-up dispatch.

I’m about neck-deep in a big primer on the state of the war in Ukraine that’s taking slightly longer than I envisioned, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

I’m in the Toronto Star this week, taking stock about the state of our broken media market, and in The Walrus raking aim at McKinsey & Company’s toxic influence on our government.

I dunno about you folks, but my brain has been moving at a glacial pace this humid summer. So apologies for the slower state of content than per usual.

As always, subscribers can comment below — so chip in your thoughts, questions, observations, rants, or unrelated musings!

Until next time.

1. The Death of the West, Pat Buchanan