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.