Invasion of the Baby-Haters

[Celerity]

Conservatives like J. D. Vance have invented a bogeyman of childlessness, and are using actual kids as political pawns.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/jd-vance-childless-left-culture-wars/619705/



Desperate times demand that America’s babies and children stand up and man the ramparts of the culture wars. The latest recruitment effort began with a declaration by the Ohio senate candidate J. D. Vance, who held that the “childless left,” exemplified, in his view, by politicians like Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris, is turning the country into a rump state of imperious cat ladies. “Let’s give votes to all children in this country,” Vance argued, by way of remedy, “but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of the children … We should worry that in America, family formation, our birth rates, a ton of indicators of family health have collapsed.” It’s no armed insurrection, but it’s still a sorry fate for a generation of children who, by no fault of their own, are being transformed into a political talisman for the right. And for no reason: Most people, regardless of politics or identity, end up having kids at some point.

Vance’s proposal was a hit on Fox and Friends, and The Federalist’s publisher, Ben Domenech, picked up the line of thinking in another segment that aired on the network earlier this week, arguing, inter alia, that “woke, socialist progressives” hate babies “more than anything else,” and that the left detests the fact that there are children, period. All the usual suspects—radical environmentalists agitating for depopulation, career-oriented girl bosses, critical race theorists—made their usual appearances, each offered as evidence of a leftward political bent that’s thoroughly anti-child.

Is it so? Seldom has it been harder to say what huge political coalitions like “the left” and “the right”—which, in the United States, are primarily characterized at the moment by infighting and high-stakes factionalism—think as corporate entities. Nor is it easy to make a statement about politics or culture that will actually be received with any kind of sincerity. The culture wars have ground on so fiercely and for so long that the very infrastructure of public debate has become one of its chief casualties; even if it were still possible to know with certainty what “the left” thinks of babies, it wouldn’t be worthwhile to say. Nobody would believe it, anyway.

And so whether you believe it is ultimately a matter of what kinds of media you like to consume. Our radically polarized discourse rewards the most outrageous expressions of either side’s respective ideas, which makes locating totally obnoxious political positions not just effortless but nearly unavoidable. If you want to find a self-identified progressive chastising breeders for saturating the planet with carbon-emitting, snot-slinging vectors of pollution and disease, some social-media site’s genius algorithm will serve such a person up to you without delay. Now that political victories are scored in liberal tears or conservative outrage, the incentives to pursue anything else are fairly minimal.

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[Ron Green]

1. If Vance were as smart as he thinks he is,

he’d be advocating for economic de-growth.