Bonnie Blanton was thirteen years old in 1946, when she became pregnant by her soon-to-be husband, Jim Vance, who was three years older. They lived in a town called Jackson, in hardscrabble Appalachian Kentucky. To get away from Bonnie’s possibly vengeful family, and to improve their economic prospects, the young couple moved to Middletown, a thriving steel center in Ohio, where Jim got an excellent union job—when he retired, he did so with stock and a pension—and a four-bedroom house. But their baby, a girl, lived less than a week. On the infant’s birth certificate, Bonnie lied about her age to keep Jim out of jail.
In the best-selling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis,” Bonnie and Jim’s grandchild J. D. Vance portrays Bonnie’s pregnancy as a fulcrum in a generational saga. “Without the baby, would she have ever left Jackson?” Vance asks. His grandmother’s “entire life—and the trajectory of our family—may have changed for a baby who only lived six days.” “Hillbilly Elegy” charts how Vance brushed off the last of whatever Kentucky coal dust still clung to his gray flannel suit jacket, launched himself through Yale Law School, and landed in a pile of Silicon Valley venture capital; within six years of its publication, he was the junior U.S. senator from Ohio. Bonnie, for her part, never completed middle school. She gave birth to three more children and suffered eight miscarriages.
Vance speculates in “Hillbilly Elegy” that extreme domestic strife may have caused some of Bonnie’s pregnancy losses: Jim was a “violent drunk,” whereas Bonnie was a “violent nondrunk.” “I can’t help but wonder how many additional aunts and uncles I’d have today without my grandparents’ difficult early transition, no doubt intensified by Papaw’s years of hard drinking,” Vance writes. Tied to a no-good husband, far from her family and friends back in Kentucky, Bonnie was miserable. “Mamaw had little help when the children were young and required constant supervision, and she had nothing else to do with her time,” her grandson explains. “Decades later she would remember how isolated she felt in the slow suburban crawl of midcentury Middletown.” The house fell into awful disarray; Bonnie began hoarding. On one occasion, she split Jim’s forehead open with a vase. On another, she set him on fire. One of her kids—who was then eleven years old—snuffed out the flames.
Vance’s mother, Bev, raised amid violence, chaos, and alcohol, raised her own children amid violence, chaos, drugs, and strange men. But, by the time Vance was growing up, Jim had quit drinking and reached something of a cranky equanimity with Bonnie. The aging couple was able to provide the boy with a refuge from the tsunami of Bev’s addictions and frightening explosions and her revolving door of husbands and boyfriends, whose presence (or sudden absence) only compounded the volatility of young J. D.’s home life. Vance dedicates “Hillbilly Elegy” to his grandparents, who were, he writes, “without question or qualification, the best things that ever happened to me.” In his speech at the Republican National Convention, in which Vance accepted his party’s nomination as Vice-President, he referred to Bonnie as “a guardian angel by my side.” Perhaps to bolster his Second Amendment bona fides, he shared an affectionate anecdote about the nineteen loaded handguns that Mamaw kept scattered around her house. “That’s who we fight for, that’s the American spirit,” he said.
Vance concedes in “Hillbilly Elegy” that “Mamaw and Papaw may have failed Bev in her youth.” But, he adds, “they spent the rest of their lives making up for it.” He may see his mother on the same redemptive path; during his R.N.C. speech, he proudly introduced Bev—“ten years clean and sober”—to the audience, who gave her a warm ovation. In his memoir, Vance’s understandable anger at Bev is palpable, even if, in other passages, he acknowledges that he and his mother and her mother are all inheritors of generational trauma. In one key respect, though, Vance’s mother broke with her inheritance, and this departure at once brings her son’s politics into focus and explains why he chose to portray her calamitously incompetent parents as the heroes of his bootstrapping, career-making, only-in-America narrative: Mamaw and Papaw stayed married, and Mom didn’t.
It’s possible that, if J. D. Vance had his way, citizenship in the United States would be conferred not solely by birthright but by marriage and children. He has spoken admiringly of efforts made by Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, to boost his nation’s marriage and birth rates, including a policy that offers subsidized loans to couples who wed before the bride’s forty-first birthday: if the couple has two kids, a third of the loan is forgiven; if they have three kids, the loan is zapped entirely. “Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked in a speech during his Senate campaign, in 2021. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?” To this end, Vance also saw a lever to pull inside the voting booth. “When you go to the polls in this country, as a parent, you should have more power,” he said. “You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids.”
It was immediately apparent that, for Vance, fertility is a Republican. He lamented the “childless left,” who have no “physical commitment to the future of this country.” In conversation with Tucker Carlson, he despaired that the U.S. was run 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.” Vance cited several Democrats as having no meaningful interest in the nation’s continued prosperity, including Vice-President Kamala Harris, who is now the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, and whose stepchildren famously call her Mamala. (Vance is not alone in his natalist spin on qualifications for holding public office. The day that President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reëlection, the conservative activist and attorney Will Chamberlain posted to X a “simple, underdiscussed reason why Kamala Harris shouldn’t be president”: “No children.”)
Vance also mentioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from New York (who, at the time of Vance’s comments, was younger than Vance was when he had his first child), and Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, who has since had twins with his husband. Buttigieg, alas, is probably not forming a family to Vance’s liking, as the senator has indicated his opposition to same-sex marriage. Vance also voted against a bill insuring access to in-vitro fertilization—another means of family formation—which is in keeping with his hard-line anti-abortion stance. In a statement that was recently scrubbed from Vance’s Web site, he said, “Eliminating abortion is first and foremost about protecting the unborn, but it’s also about making our society more pro-child and pro-family.” About sixty per cent of women who seek abortions are mothers, and presumably pro the children they already have, but no matter.
The nativist, tariff-happy brand of economic populism that Vance espouses is exemplary of the New Right, the young conservative movement that sees itself as the heir to Trump’s MAGA throne. Vance’s policy portfolio is somewhat friendlier to working families than that of the typical establishment Republican, but, again and again, the flavor of his positions matches his particular taste in family. “If you work hard and play by the rules,” he has said, you should be able to “support a middle-class family on a single wage.” When he introduced a bill that would modestly expand provisions under the Family and Medical Leave Act, he called it the Fairness for Stay-at-Home Parents Act. He voiced support for the Missouri senator Josh Hawley’s 2021 plan to expand the child tax credit, which included a “marriage bonus” and catered to two-parent, single-income households. “Millions of working people want to start a family and would like to care for their children at home, but current policies do not respect these preferences,” Hawley said when the bill was introduced.
One of Vance’s spiciest takes on family-first policy appeared shortly before he announced his Senate candidacy, when he tweeted, “ ‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.” To support this provocation, he linked to a survey that presented parents with a range of child-care scenarios and asked which of them “would be best for their family while they have children under age 5.” Forty-four per cent of those without a four-year degree preferred that one parent work full time while the other care for the children at home; just thirty-five per cent of those with a college degree shared that preference. It was unclear whether Vance was defining “normal people” as those without a bachelor’s degree or those who offered what he believed to be the correct answer to this poll. Either way, “normal Americans,” he went on, “want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare.” An abnormal American, it follows, is somebody like Harris, who, in her first speech as the Democratic Presidential nominee, on July 22nd, imagined a country of the near future “where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care.”
There are close to a million day-care workers in the U.S., the vast majority of them women, most of them with a high-school education, virtually all of them underpaid. If Vance and others in power saw these workers as constituents deserving of higher wages and a brighter future, it would be more difficult for him to describe all day-care services as “crap.” But it would also contradict Vance’s essential ideological position. The text of his Fairness for Stay-at-Home Parents Act, for example, castigates the F.M.L.A. for “penalizing mothers who choose to prioritize their child’s early development” rather than returning to work after maternity leave. Normal people want their kids at home with one of their parents, and we all know which one.
In his acceptance speech at the R.N.C., Vance said, “Our movement is about single moms like mine who struggled with money and addiction but never gave up.” Of course, a person can be a single parent or a stay-at-home parent; it is exceedingly difficult to be both. One must choose. The survey that Vance cites as indicative of “normal” views about child care doesn’t include single parents at all. His movement is, nonetheless, “about” women like his mother, in the sense that it seems deeply motivated by what she didn’t give him, and by what Vance longed for most: a traditional nuclear family.
Marriage, in Vance’s rhetoric and policy stances, is almost always better than the alternative. Having a family makes you a sovereign adult and a political actor, but it is marriage alone that makes the family possible. In 2021, Vance told an audience of high-school students that the sexual revolution of the nineteen-sixties convinced people of the mistaken idea that ending imperfect marriages would improve people’s lives. Such marriages “were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear—that’s going to make people happier in the long term.” They were maybe even violent. Aptly, he invoked Bonnie and Jim. “My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right?” Vance said. “They were together to the end, ’til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather.” Vance also made the flabbergasting assertion that easier access to divorce causes domestic-violence rates to increase, which is patently false—in fact, the rate has been shown to decrease by thirty per cent. Appearing on “Morning Joe” to endorse Harris’s candidacy, Andy Beshear, the governor of Mamaw and Papaw’s home state of Kentucky, excoriated Vance for suggesting “that women should stay in abusive relationships.”
Did Mamaw stick it out with Papaw out of piety and Appalachian grit? Or was she just stuck? She had meagre education, no skills or training, little in the way of a social network, and, quite possibly, serious mental-health challenges. For about a decade, she was almost constantly pregnant, which can be physically and emotionally debilitating, and which was a fireable offense in the workplaces of that era. The state of Ohio effectively lacked any mechanism of child-support enforcement until 1975, when the youngest of her three kids was a teen-ager. A close read of Bonnie’s plight, incidentally, reveals striking similarities between Vance’s “guardian angel” and the ideal matriarch who emerges from his political platform. Their place is at home. Their job, which they have no choice whether to quit, is to have babies. Their entire material well-being is tied to one fallible man. 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. And it’s precisely this inability, or refusal, to see past one’s own subjectivity that allows Vance to write off a person such as Kamala Harris as having no stake in the country’s fortunes.
When Vance says that it was a baby who altered his family’s trajectory, it’s a sentimental flourish, a fillip of “Choose Life” romance. Another writer might have identified the agent of change as child abuse, or statutory rape, or limited access to contraception in postwar Appalachia. At some point during his upbringing, Vance writes, Bonnie entertained a vague notion of becoming a children’s-rights lawyer. “She seemed to feel the pain of neglected kids in a deeply personal way and spoke often of how she hated people who mistreated children,” he explains. “I never understood where this sentiment came from—whether she herself was abused as a child, perhaps, or whether she just regretted that her childhood had ended so abruptly. There is a story there, though I’ll likely never hear it.” But, in his own way, he’s been telling that story all along. ♦
