DOES J.D. VANCE KNOW WHAT LOVE IS?

Barack and Michelle Obama delivered the key speeches last night at the Democratic convention, but I keep thinking about dorky, endearing Doug Emhoff, who really seems to love his wife:



(His daughter, Ella, thinks this is adorable, as you can see at about 0:40.)

Emhoff isn't the only genuinely besotted husband in the Democratic Party. I know that there are a couple of canned lines in what President Biden said about his wife at the beginning of his Monday-night speech, but the bit about the heartbeat seems real:

And especially our rock, Jill, who is, those of you who know us, she still leaves me both breathless and speechless. Everybody knows her. I love her more than she loves me. She walks down the stairs and I still get that going “boom, boom, boom.” You all who know me know I’m not kidding.

It's easy to say that you can't imagine Donald Trump having a moment of vulnerability like this. He's too narcissistic. He's regarded all of his wives as trophy wives and all of his other sexual partners as conquests. But I'd say the same thing about J.D. Vance. Part of Vance's problem is that he's so tightly wound (and so full of bottled-up rage) that he can't seem to access normal human joy.

Journalist: "What makes you happy?"

JD Vance: "A lot of things, including bogus questions from the media."

That Q was the perfect setup for Vance to talk about something he loves, that would humanize him — but instead he made fun of the Q and then talked about being angry. https://t.co/ySWhqaz9oK

— Natalie Fertig (@natsfert) August 7, 2024

As for love, marriage, and child-rearing, Vance seems to regard the whole process as nothing more than a battlefield in the culture war, a social-Darwinist way to own the libs, or at least the neoliberals. He sees having and raising children as purely mechanical, as evolution and the culture working out imperatives. Instinct and cultural mores enter into the process, but human feelings seem irrelevant.

Or at least that's how Vance comes off in Jonathan M. Katz's report on the 2021 Eric Weinstein podcast in which Vance seemed to agree with the premise that babysitting for grandchildren “is the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female.”

Vance ... tells Weinstein that liberal cities like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are “bizarre ... wasteland[s] with no children.” Ignore for a second that the statistics contradict this. Also forget that the CDC has found that U.S. birth rates have been falling everywhere since the mid-2000s — in big cities, rural areas, and small towns alike. Vance doesn’t care about the facts; he sees liberals as a class of child-hating people who lack “what makes life worth living,” resulting in an “entire world of professional America” that is “kind of sociopathic and icky.”

The opposites of this are, of course, JD and Usha Vance. The lead-in to the “post-menopausal” comment was Vance recounting the couple’s decision to have the first of their three children in 2017. It was a busy time: Vance was a newly minted bestselling author and professional Trumpism explainer; Usha was about to start her job as clerk for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. As he says: “In hindsight, maybe it [getting pregnant] was a little stupid.”

Then Vance shared his secret: His wife’s mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri took a year-long sabbatical from her job as a biology professor and provost at the University of California, San Diego, to move in and help them raise their newborn son.

This is when Weinstein interrupts with his “post-menopausal female” observation — the second time in the course of an hour that he has stated the only reason human women survive past menopause is to serve as “grandmothers and great-grandmothers.” (And the second time that Vance either tacitly or verbally agreed.) Weinstein further calls Chilukurki’s decision to move in with the young couple, “this weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.” ...

Vance one-ups the racial essentialism, saying that marrying an Indian woman was “in some ways the most transgressive thing I've ever done against the hyper-neoliberal approach to work and family.”

(Wow, this guy really knows how to sweet-talk a woman.)

He then half-jokes that Dr. Chilukuri’s decision to take a year sabbatical was “painfully economically inefficient” — that it would have made more sense from a neoliberal standpoint for her to simply keep her job and pay for a nanny.

The reason Vance and Weinstein believe she didn’t, it should obvious by now, is their understanding of biology: That women care more about raising children than men is simply an “obvious biological difference,” as Vance explained earlier in the interview.... (Or, as Weinstein puts it, upping the weirdness quotient on cue, because: “sperm is cheap and eggs are dear and paternity is uncertain.”)

The [future] vice-presidential candidate concludes:

VANCE: Just to sort of bring this full circle to where we started, is that the economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society is to me, it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is ultimately gonna unwind and collapse upon itself. It has to. I think it's, yeah — it’s the abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market.

Vance is ... not entirely wrong here. Capitalism values whatever makes capitalists money; it doesn't value ordinary people having the wherewithal to raise their children well. (Vance might actually believe that he's fighting the power by saying this, but he's a member of a political party that always wants the rich to get richer. So either he cares more about his own advancement than he does about fighting neoliberal hypercapitalism or he's deluding himself into believing that he can be both a Republican in good standing and a capitalism skeptic.)

But when you step back from that aspect of what Vance is saying, you find yourself asking: Does he love his wife? Does he love his kids? Or is he just using them to make himself the embodiment of his own ideas? Does he care about anything apart from his own blather and the blather of all the theorists and crackpots he admires? Does anything else make him smile?

This isn't what I see in the Biden marriage, the Walz marriage, or the Harris/Emhoff marriage. These people think about the politics and economics of reproduction -- but they also have feelings. They feel love. They feel joy, and not just the joy of imagining a New World Order run according to their theories of correct generative practice. That might be all the reason you need to vote Democratic.