J.D. Vance Is the Key to Understanding the American Right

Trying to make sense of J.D. Vance’s sexual politics is, frankly, exhausting. The junior Republican senator from Ohio and newly minted vice presidential candidate has ventured loads of seemingly purposefully retrograde takes on how to preserve what he calls the traditional American family; as Vance has said, “it’s OK to troll when you make and speak fundamental truths.” So does he really want to ban porn to correct “America’s low fertility” rates? Does Vance really want to “END ABORTION” without exceptions? Who knows? What matters is that underneath it all, Vance has one consistent view: If you don’t procreate, you aren’t entitled to be part of the American project. For J.D. Vance, real Americans procreate, and only “real” Americans ought to procreate.

This pro-natalist, nationalist belief has long been out in the open, part of Vance’s political grievances and his persona. It drove Vance’s most infamous rant, in the early stage of his campaign for the Senate in 2021, in an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show. Vance attempted to explain, at Carlson’s urging, what he meant when he recently castigated the left for producing insufficient numbers of babies: “We are effectively run in this country, be it the Democrats, be it our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” Vance began. “It’s just a basic fact—Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg. AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” Vice President Harris is a stepmother to two children; Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, has adopted twins with his husband, Chasten. But these details don’t seem to matter much to Vance.

In order to have “a healthy ruling class,” as Vance put it, “we should support more people who actually have kids, because those are the people who ultimately have more of a direct stake in the future of this country.” Childless adults, Vance continued, “hate normal Americans for choosing family”; they are different from “normal” people, people “who know where they came from.”

This fearmongering over birth rates—a shrinking pool of “normal people” who aren’t procreating, as Vance put it—bears remarkable resemblance to the racist conspiracy theory that outside forces are engineering the “replacement” of the declining population with outsiders, foreigners. Vance has espoused multiple facets of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, particularly in his comments that Democrats are encouraging the “invasion” of immigrants “by design,” in order to “replace the voters that are already here.”

Vance has vehemently denied believing in or spreading the great replacement theory. In a debate during the 2022 Senate campaign, when his opponent, Senator Tim Ryan, said that Vance “was running around with” people who support the racist conspiracy theory, Vance exploded. He was incensed that Ryan had accused “me, the father of three beautiful biracial babies, of engaging in racism.” Of the conspiracy theory itself, all Vance said was, “It’s disgusting, and I’ve never endorsed it. It’s disgusting and such an unbelievable accusation.”

Nevertheless, Vance’s argument that only those with a “physical commitment to the future” should wield power is the kind of political project that those pushing the great replacement conspiracy theory might see as a solution. You could hear it as a reply to the speech given by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2022: “Whether we like it or not, the peoples of the world can be divided into two groups: those that are capable of biologically maintaining their numbers; and those that are not, which is the group that we belong to.” Vance has praised Orbán’s focus on increasing Hungary’s birth rate, including by making loans to married couples contingent on them having children and not divorcing. “Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked at a 2021 event in Ohio. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

Vance and Carlson are both fans of Orbán’s Hungary. Carlson, of course, was also one of the chief promoters of the great replacement conspiracy theory in the United States. Carlson was likewise quite effective in promoting the J.D. Vance project, hosting him on his (canceled) Fox show 46 times, according to Media Matters. Carlson, along with X owner Elon Musk, reportedly pushed Vance on Trump as an ideal vice presidential pick.

Around the time Vance was launching himself on Tucker Carlson’s show in 2021, he spoke at a private conference for the Teneo Network, a group imagined by its founders as a kind of Federalist Society for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Appropriately, the Teneo Network is chaired by conservative dark money–mover Leonard Leo, who reportedly sees it as a way to influence Silicon Valley and other industries. “Teneans” have included Senator Josh Hawley (also a co-founder) and a number of staffers for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, along with Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro and leadership from the far-right youth group Turning Point USA. Vance has been a member of the Teneo Network since 2018.

In his 2021 remarks to this pro-industry crowd, Vance spoke freely on sex and gender politics, returning several times to the then-new Texas anti-abortion law S.B. 8. He appeared to see the law as something of a failure for conservatives. Vance said that “the fundamental problem” with the law was the opposition from major corporations, citing statements in their press releases that Vance said were “in support of not the unborn babies, but in support of people who might want to abort them.” Vance said he wasn’t qualified to offer an opinion on whether the law would pass constitutional muster (“I don’t know; I went to law school, but I went to Yale Law School so I’m not a very good lawyer,” he said). The problem with this anti-abortion law, in Vance’s view, was that it hadn’t sufficiently disciplined their opposition: “Challenge number one,” he said, was that “we’re unwilling to make companies that are taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain.”

This is a relatively unvarnished look into how sex and gender politics function for this segment of the American right that Vance increasingly embodies. In public, Vance and others will say that we need to protect families and children from “sexualization” or “groomers” or whatever bogeyman is in vogue; in private, though, they acknowledge that culture war is an important tool conservatives can use to threaten people who do not conform to their anti-abortion, anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ political agenda. Actually believing in or achieving that agenda, as evidenced by Vance’s remarks on the Texas abortion law, appears to be secondary to the goal of conservatives acquiring more coercive power. To the extent that legislatures and the judiciary help conservatives build that power, they absolutely matter, but the laws themselves don’t.

This is where Vance’s pro-natalism is intertwined with his anti-immigration politics. Vance has framed deportations as a service to those American families he says are under attack. “We have a lot of young people in this crowd. You know what happens when you bring in 20 million people and you have to give them all shelter?” said Vance at Turning Point USA’s “People’s Convention” in Detroit. “Well, not only do your taxes go up because somebody has got to pay for that shelter, but homes become so expensive that our young people can’t afford to raise families in them anymore. So that is the problem. And the solution is to deport every single illegal alien who came to this country under Joe Biden’s regime.”

Vance is exaggerating wildly about the number of undocumented immigrants—according to Pew Research Center’s estimates published in 2023, there were 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States in 2021. But Vance’s 20 million figure is also used by Trump in promoting his mass deportation plans. “We have probably close to 20 million people that came in from all parts of the world,” said Trump in June at a Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. “They’re gonna have to be gone.”

If you are facing challenges raising children, according to Vance, immigrants are to blame. “Try to take your kid to an emergency room. How are wait times? I bet they’re higher, and for that, you can thank Biden’s open border,” Vance complained on X. And if you really support families, Vance has argued, you would support deportation. “If you allow folks who should not be in this country to begin with to take from the mouths of American poor children so that we can fund their health care, then whose side are you really on?” said Vance on Glenn Beck’s show in May.

In Vance’s soundbites, who he means by “our” and “us” is often left unsaid, but he has elaborated on this point enough elsewhere. As Vance said at the 2019 National Conservatism Conference, “Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us.”

These messages about “our” children and “our” future—which Vance has insisted cannot be racist—could be a rote, flags-and-apple-pie appeal to what Vance has also called a “physical commitment to the future of this country.” They could simultaneously be an allusion to the noxious slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children,” coined by an American white supremacist. Is this more Vance “truth telling”? Or trolling? Does it matter?