J.D. Vance Being Weird and the Male Loneliness Epidemic

Why are so many right-wing men lonely and why do they all hate being called weird?

I think that the ‘weird’ argument honestly came from a bunch of 24-year-old social media interns who were bullied in school, and they decided they were going to project that onto the entire Trump campaign… I’m a normal guy. -J.D. Vance

In a 2020 appearance on the podcast “The Portal,” Republican Vice Presidential hopeful J.D. Vance extolled the value of multigenerational households, noting that his mother-in-law’s participation in the raising of his son “makes him a much better human being.” The host of the podcast, member of the “Intellectual Dark Web” Eric Weinstein, then said, “that’s the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female in theory,” to which Vance explicitly agreed. This moment has been the most recent gaffe in a broader set of scandals related to Vance and his strange comments about women and families, which have fed into a fairly effective liberal attack on both Vance and the Republican campaign more broadly as being “weird.” This line, it seems, has done a particularly good job upsetting Vance and many of those who are ideologically aligned with him. Yet why is it so effective?

Ironically, the general sentiment behind Vance’s words in this old podcast clip is not particularly unconscionable. This is in the sense that most people have a fairly positive view of multigenerational households. Yet Vance’s underlying justification for why they yield positive results is discordant with our general moral intuitions. It is as if one asked an intelligent alien life form, whose ‘moral’ or ‘social’ calculus is entirely foreign to us, what they thought about the matter. It is a strange, uncanny, even ‘weird,’ ordering of the social that does not ground itself in some moral first principle but instead relies upon a justification seemingly entirely outside of our moral understanding.

For Vance and those that think like him, the value of multigenerational households cannot be justified through reference to compassion. Vance did not substantiate his belief by saying, for instance, that his heart swells when he sees his son bond with his grandmother. He instead praises multigenerational households as a result of them being in accordance with a rational ordering of society based upon a scientific categorization of human beings that facilitates the greatest productive output. The particular, Vance’s mother-in-law, is reduced to the general, her existence as a “postmenopausal female.” Her individual experiences are subsumed under her biological sex and her life’s purpose is determined by this placement in advance. While for the premenopausal, fertile “female,” her purpose, following Vance, is to give birth above the population replacement rate, this is no longer the case for his mother-in-law. She is part of a species within the genus of “female” whose differentia is her biological obsolescence. She must therefore be given a new purpose, where she is relegated to the task of assisting in child-rearing carried out by her daughter. 

Before modernity this patriarchal viewpoint was undergirded by the passions, with heterosexual love being the worship of the feminine as unconquered nature that must be brought to heel by the masculine order of property. Yet the bourgeois age has brought about a scientific medicalization of this discourse. It has become passionless and sterilized, reducing the female to a social category made evident by biology, no longer in need of “taming” or “conquering” but instead baring its entire essence to a cold scalpel on an examination table. Patriarchy is not romanticized by those who uphold it but cynically spoken of as if it is of a nature derived from scientific discovery. Yet the “nature” of the female sex is circular. It is not so much discovered as it is invented in order to entrench patriarchal social relations and solidify them as natural. The female psyche is uncovered as biological fact in evolutionary psychology journals and alpha male dating podcasts alike. Both are able to speak of the female, her motivations, her dating habits etc., as if they are scientists in lab coats studying a new species of animal. Yet both discoveries of this ‘nature’ are only legible as a result of power. They are derived from the same domineering institutions that structure the historically contingent intricacies of heterosexual relations. They are self fulfilling observations that may only successfully speak of the ‘female’ in virtue of the control the observers have over her.

The uncaring, instrumental, bourgeois rationality has brought about an annulment of love as a mediator of patriarchal control and subjected the female body directly to the rules and laws of industry. Unlike the liberal feminist position, which attempts to turn women into rational, independent participants in the market, Vance’s patriarchal rationality is totalitarian in nature. The “postmenopausal female” must do her duty to the family, the nation, the state etc., as must we all. Her labour is, or at the very least ought to be, as publicly mediated as Value producing economic labour.

While this practical, uncaring form of reason structures our lives, we are used to the language of liberal democratic states being accompanied by a human face that alludes to compassion, love, charity, etc., guiding the underlying logic of its inner machinations. Yet Vance makes no such allusions. He does not pretend to care about childless women as ends in themselves who should be encouraged to follow whatever path in life brings them the most happiness.

It seems that the revulsion towards many of Vance’s statements is more intimately connected with the form of his ideas rather than with the content itself. He once, for instance, suggested an inverted, yet logically identical, version of tax cuts for families by saying adults who do not have children should be taxed more. While ‘tax cuts for families’ is a fairly popular Warrenite reform, Vance has managed to invert the framing of its purpose, with it now being primarily a mechanism to punish those who do not comply with the demands of the state as opposed to rewarding those who do. Yet any form of economic incentive provided by the state, negative or positive, is undergirded by the domineering structure of capitalism wherein one must compete on the market with others in order to survive. Any good state administrator can see the value in increasing fertility rates when they are below replacement level and must react to this information through the only language that the state is able to speak: coercion. 

The bourgeois liberal subject is used to a version of this language altered by a propagandistic, sentimental moral filter. In virtue of Vance campaigning within a liberal democracy his rhetoric is a strange blur between the practical reason of the sensible bourgeois politician, who must humanize himself and demonstrate his compassion to his constituents, and the totalitarian instrumentalized reason of the ascendent fascist, who no longer must make his cruel, sadistic, amoral urges answer to any other law than the ones that govern economic production. Vances is openly guided by a form of reason freed from the burden of moral sentiment. This reason is not weighed down by the requirement of understanding other human beings as ends in themselves and thus allows them to be treated as things. It is as if the ordering and administration of people becomes an end in itself. This cold rationale removes compassion as a mediator of human social relations, as it has become superfluous for the one and only task of practical reason, the domination of nature.

We should understand the right’s obsession with “wokeness” as connected with this tendency. Fascism’s ascendency necessitates the destruction of the last remnants of Enlightenment utopian moral ideals embedded within civil society. Any attempt to shame acts of cruelty committed by an ego that is unburdened by compassion can only be understood by this ego as a threat against its nature which therefore must be destroyed.

Vance and those like him despise the term “weird” in a similar sense that they hate “wokeness.” Both serve as reminders that to many, their cruel amoral urges are despised. The term weird, though, is particularly effective as a result of the fact that it is an attack against these sadistic urges that is not moralistic. The sadist loves when they are considered “dangerous” and a threat that should be feared. It makes them feel ‘aristocratic’ in the Nietzschean sense. It reminds them that they are the oppressor and that the “natural order” they see themselves on top of remains intact. Yet the “weird” line does not paint the right as something that should be feared. Instead, it reeks of the subtle forms of domination that structure juvenile social hierarchies. This line places them in a subordinate social position, under those whose political rhetoric incorporates compassion as a virtue (known to them as “virtue signallers”). It is thus an inversion of their ‘natural’ order, an articulation of Nietzschean slave morality wherein the last shall be first and the first shall be last.

It is important to take note of the feminine associations that many on the right have with this line. Members of the far-right “politically incorrect” forum of 4chan seem to associate the “weird” attack with conventionally attractive ‘popular’ women. One reason for this relates to the increasingly large ideological gap between young men and women. Many-right wing men feel as if the destruction of old patriarchal bonds has ‘robbed’ them of a wife. In a sense they feel the fallout of patriarchal institutions no longer being mediated by heterosexual love. Yet while they might imagine that they desire a ‘return to tradition,’ they react to this ‘problem’ through an intensification of the cold, cruel, instrumentalized reason that abandoned the passions as useless in the first place. Their unrequited object libido has been redirected towards an increase in ego libido, drawing them further and further away from an ability to love, only allowing them to conceptualize the problem through the “female” being an unruly disobedient sex that ought to be made to perform in accordance with their biological duty. Yet even J.D. Vance, who one might think ought to be the incel’s hero, is decrying them as useless. The male sex, too, has been given a ‘purpose’ within this totalitarian logic which the ‘incel’ has failed to live up to as a result of their failure to find a mate.

Some may frame the “male loneliness epidemic” as the fault of women or, at the very least, the result of the fact that the ‘left’ has not sufficiently coddled misogynistic men. However, these diagnostics fail to account for the ways in which the sentiments that undergird this so-called epidemic result from intra-patriarchal discourses. Vance’s contempt for the young male who is not doing his biological duty of starting a family is a microcosm of this discourse. Young right-wing men feel a gap between what they are told they deserve and what they are actually able to attain. They are promised that their placement in the natural hierarchy entitles them to one of their lessers, a ‘female,’ who must do her duty in accordance with her biological essence. They are no longer even promised the love that mediated patriarchal relations of old, and no longer seek it as it could only possibly get in the way of their desire to control and dominate nature as they were told was their purpose. Their rabid misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia are symptoms of the feeling that the natural order they were promised has been slowly deteriorating and only unmitigated cruel, sadistic violence may bring it back into focus. We cannot possibly be naive enough to think that the solution to this problem is to coddle these men. As if their worldview in its most cynical, depraved, and sadistic form is not merely the bourgeois subject freed of all moral tutelage, no longer weighed down by the social rules of polite society which the right currently decry as “woke.” They, as a demographic, will continue to hold on to this domineering attitude towards nature so long as market relations continue to deceive them into believing that the gratification of their desires lies in treating other human beings as a means to an end instead of as ends in themselves.

For more:

Adorno, Horkheimer, “Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality” in Dialectic of Enlightenment

Butler, Gender Trouble

Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1