In a thoughtful column Monica Hesse tries to make sense of the family politics of JD Vance.

[riversedge]

long tweet but interesting.


In a thoughtful column Monica Hesse tries to make sense of the family politics of JD Vance.

She writes, "There is a chasm between the idyllic family portrait that Vance says he would like to see play out in America—one where abortions are unnecessary & grandmas are child care—and the messy realities he has described encountering in his own life. There is a disconnect between the derivative cruelty he seems to now spout (see: 'childless cat ladies') & in the human experiences that apparently led him to these beliefs. It’s incoherent.".................

Link to tweet

[riversedge]

1. What's mind-boggling to me is how *many* types of people JD Vance sees as not having a stake in the future:

What's mind-boggling to me is how *many* types of people JD Vance sees as not having a stake in the future:

Link to tweet

[maxsolomon]

2. Link to the WaPo column

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2024/10/04/jd-vances-family-politics-are-incoherent/

I don't subscribe and I don't know how to turn it into a free link.

[ret5hd]

3. it is incoherent because he doesn't believe it.

like his kindred soul trump, he only asks if something benefits him.

[Walleye]

4. "Enough, if something from our hands have power to live, and act, and serve the future hour"

William Wordsworth

[Ocelot II]

5. Gift link to the original column, no paywall:

https://wapo.st/4gQJKwO

When I listen to the fantasy narratives Vance tells about family in America — how he thinks they should live, who he thinks they should be composed of, how he thinks they should come to be — this is what so often comes to mind: a brokenhearted child. A boy who grew up in chaos, abandonment, violence and poverty and who spent it all dreaming of the opposite.

And then, somehow, through determination, luck and natural intelligence clawed his way into the sort of Norman Rockwell existence he’d always wanted. A happy marriage. A lucrative career. Beautiful children. “For both of my kids, they didn’t grow up with a positive family unit,” Vance’s mother, Beverly Aikins, recently told the New York Times. “I know that they seemed to gravitate towards that in their adulthood.”

Analyzing “Hillbilly Elegy” for the New Yorker, Jessica Winter unpacked Vance’s preoccupation with “traditional” family — mom, dad, kids, every child exclusively cared for by loving mothers rather than “crap daycare” — and describes it as such: “It is clear, on a primal, emotional level, why Vance sees this as the better deal than what he got. But what results is a blinkered, grotesquely narcissistic vision of the social contract — an identity politics of one grown child.” Is Vance, in other words, trying to legislate the country into the family dynamic he wished he’d been born into?

Maybe that’s partly right. Maybe it’s even mostly right. But what continually baffles me about JD Vance is the fact that sometimes it’s not clear whether even he believes in the vision he’s selling. He doesn’t even appear to be living the vision he’s selling.