To my very great surprise, I woke up this morning to a Democracy Now segment on J. D. Vance and the whole Cat Lady kerfuffle. In brief: Vance told Tucker Carlson, of the sunbathed testicles, that “We are effectively run in the 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.”
I was surprised because I really wasn’t expecting a leftist news program to focus on a matter that should be left behind in the dustbin of history. I don’t mean that issues related to sexism and misogyny are not of concern to the left, but that the fuss over Vance is symptomatic of an election driven entirely by the demands of a never-ending news cycle, and sometimes the “news” in question is just stale and old but is resurrected in order to grab eyeballs.
Consider this basic fact: Vance made his cat lady comment three years ago, in August 2021. In digging up the story, news outlets have reported that Vance’s views were “unearthed.”
“Unearthed?”
The word conjures an image of a journalist sleuth meeting a source in the depths of a garage somewhere, obscured by the shadows and whispering, “Follow the cats.” But Vance made the comment to Tucker Carlson: this is not the gotcha people seem to think it is. The video was shared on Twitter Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch Network, a standard issue liberal site, on July 22 of this year. I very much doubt that “unearthing” the video took more than a quick bout of googling. It surprised no one at the time, and it should surprise no one this time around. It’s old news. In fact, the comments created a backlash even in August 2021, when Vance was running for his Senate seat and Liz Szalka, reporting on them for The Blade correctly pointed out, at the time, that social media outrage was a deliberate tactic on the part of politicians across the board.
Which is to say: there are no great, new insights to be gained from all the fuss over Vance’s by now mouldy comments.
Who wins in all this? Media outlets like Democracy Now and scores of others, who succeed in getting viewers and listeners to their sites. DN went so far as to interview Jessica Grose, author of an op-ed titled “Attacking Kamala Harris for Not Having Kids Will Backfire.” The title rang a bell, and I wondered if I’d seen it in today’s paper: it turns out to be something she wrote on July 23, and I realised I had ignored it because I didn’t think I’d learn anything new from the piece. But here we are, resurrecting old op-eds to cover even older news.
It turns out that Vance once also said that people with children should be able to cast votes on behalf of their offspring. This is an absurd idea, a logistical nightmare, and impossible to carry out. When did he say it? By now, the wise reader will have surmised that the timing of such a ridiculous statement might have had something to do with his senate campaign and, yes, he said this in July 2021, a few weeks before he announced his bid. He has, in the intervening years, done nothing to suggest any actionable plan on the matter. It was, more than likely, an attempt to drum up publicity—and it worked.
Should we worry about the gender politics of Vance and Donald Trump? Of course. But instead of launching tirades and multiple op-eds, blog posts, and memes about ancient comments, we might take a moment or two or ten to consider that the threats to women’s rights come not only from the right but from liberals and even the left (a swath of which still thinks that class cannot intersect with gender and race). Take abortion, to which only people with private insurance have any kind of real access. Kamala Harris has recently been part of a bubbling campaign to rebrand abortion as healthcare. But abortion is fundamentally an economic issue (Asha Banerjee at the Economic Policy Institute is one of the few to write about this, and I’ve been writing and saying it for years). Without the right to terminate a pregnancy, at any time, a pregnant person is forced to carry a foetus to term and then raise an unwanted child, with all the attendant trauma and economic hardships that could entail. A pregnancy and parenthood can force a person to leave the workforce and live dependent on a partner or family, or to scrape by forever on low-wage jobs that perpetuate the endless cycle of poverty in which they live.
But, hey, let’s all worry about four-year-old comments made by a huckster “whose opinions shift radically in accordance with political necessity,” as Nathan J. Robinson has pointed out. Vance’s cat lady comments have now become the focus of Kamala Harris supporters, who are furious, just furious about being painted as worthless but remain curiously untroubled by the fact that their candidate has so far shown no signs of an agenda beyond “Elect me, just because.” With only three months to go, her campaign seems fuelled by little more than vibes (Coconuts! Context! Something!) and memes.
Of the latter, the most popular is, of course, this one, an image of a cat lady, created by one Franklin Habit. It features what we must assume to be a cat, dressed in a Hillary Clinton-style purple pantsuit. The whole thing is hideous, like a bad AI-generated image, and no one who has actually known cats would ever present such a thing to the world. When I showed it to my own two cats, they both recoiled in horror.1My cats may be technically dead, but they still have taste.
The cat lady issue is not a problem for anyone but Democrats. Like the couch sex story it distracts from any of the real issues facing the vast majority of Americans who are struggling with food, housing, and energy bills, and face massive amounts of medical and education debt.2Please don’t ask me to explain the couch story; just look it up. It is silly beyond words and nothing more than, “This is a disproven story, but we’re going to laugh about it anyway.” And, anyway, whatever. At this point, the Republicans are in the weaker position, having lost momentum over the assassination after Biden’s big surprise. And their cultural conservatism is not going to do them the good it did in the Eighties. Cat ladies are everywhere, and Vance’s comments about single women and traditional families aren’t going to land the same way in a country where blended families are much more common, across political ideologies (as are cats, who rule many households and all of the internet). According to the Pew Research Center, “Parents today are raising their children against a backdrop of increasingly diverse and, for many, constantly evolving family forms.” The traditional family as the norm no longer exists, for a lot of reasons that include but are not limited to women’s freedom from traditional gender roles. This is not just true of the east coast elites whom Vance and Trump (hypocritically) denounce, but of families everywhere in the country.
And about those “coastal elites”: the Right is correct to point to the influence of such, but not in the way it thinks. One major problem in political discourse today is that media outlets are dominated by people who write from the heart of Brooklyn (a city unto itself at this point) or Los Angeles, and who have no idea how people and institutions function in the rest of the country (this explains, in part, why so many liberals and lefties were enraptured by Hillbilly Elegy, which affirmed all their stereotypes of working class white people). Mainstream media relies on the idea of a “heartland” that is simple and uncomplicated and too stupid to think for itself. Many commentators note ruefully, for instance, that the people who live in this non-existent place might not accept a Black woman as a candidate. This is one way to write in Harris’s failure as an inevitability: if she chooses, say, the gay Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as a running mate and loses, the loss will be chalked up to this mythical heartland having refused to accept such an unconventional pair.
And yet: Chicago got rid of a Black, neoliberal, lesbian mayor and elected in her place a Black, socialist mayor who came up out of the ranks of the Chicago Teachers Union.3No, he’s not perfect, but who is? We’re handling it, thank you. What have you got, New York? Oh, right: Eric Adams. Be serious.
All of this theorising about what “real Americans” want is stuff and nonsense. You could have, as presidential candidates, either a buttoned-down, steadily married 60-year-old white man or a 53-year old ex-punk rocker with pink hair and six ex-wives: what will get them either of them elected is their ability to convince voters when they say: “I can and I will ensure that your lives will be better if you vote for me.” The culture wars stuff—and “stuff” is the only word that’s worth using here—is what op-ed writers, television shows and podcasts, columnists, bloggers, and wanna-be political and cultural influencers want to pretend is what matters because that is the material, the content, that keeps them in the news. And they aren’t even talking to voters: they only talk amongst themselves. Actual voters might have cultural issues of some sort or the other with one or more candidates, but at the end of the day what matters is the material conditions of their lives, and that includes abortion. If Kamala Harris loses, it will be because she entered the race with the same arrogance as Hillary Clinton, who informed people that she was the only choice between them and the apocalypse, with no real sense of how she would be different from either Biden or Trump.
In this we might take a lesson from the recent elections in the United Kingdom, which saw record gains for Labour, now with an astonishing majority of 158 seats. But Labour won not because of a clear enthusiasm for its policies—which, under Keir Starmer, are more Tony Blair-Labour-light than Tony Blair—but because of widespread anger at the Conservatives. In the runup to a hastily called election, the Tories tried to resurrect every possible culture war issue, and all of it landed like uncooked pasta hurled against the wall: trans rights, immigration, gender politics, and so on. But at the end of the day, the public understood only too well that 14 years of Tory leadership had only made everything from healthcare to housing worse.
In the U.S, opponents of the Republicans can’t count on such stark evidence of how much worse things have been under them, and voters may well begin to question—as they should—when, exactly, the Democrats and Harris knew that Biden was no longer fit to stay in the race. Or, as I’ve pointed out before, the extent of the damage done to him by COVID. Most of all, an emphasis on culture wars distracts only Democrats who will doubtless claim these as reasons for a loss or a win.
I’m a queer, never-married Cat Lady who resolved, at the tender age of eight, that she would never marry and never have children. Despite my “childless state,” I care fiercely about public education and free college. I also call, constantly, for the right to free abortion, on demand, and without apology.
My response to Vance? Whatever, dude.
There are cat ladies everywhere who don’t share my politics but might still not vote for a Trump/Vance ticket. I sense that Vance is soon to become a liability for his boss and may well find himself thrust off the ticket: a fundamental rule about vice presidential candidates is that they’re not supposed to actually do much beyond look running-mate-ish and sombre, standing quietly beyond the main man or woman on the ticket. Vance has already broken all the rules by garnering this much (mostly unwanted) attention.
Trump is not a threat to our imagined or real lifestyles, but to so much more. The task ahead for any opponent to him is to focus on what a disaster he will be for everyone, including Republicans, to make it clear that he’s bad for anyone who understands that everything from the state of the climate to the price of groceries is a sign of our calamitous times. For that, “Cat Ladies Arise!” is not much of a clarion call, and we need to leave these culture wars behind.
The task ahead is to point out, forcefully, with or without cats in tow, that Trump would be the biggest calamity of all.
See also:
“On Joe Biden and COVID.”
“Hillary Clinton Needs to Retire.”
“Some Quick Updates and an Introduction.”
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