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The Ezra Klein Show

By Ezra Klein

Presidential elections are too vast and complicated to be about any one thing, but they’re sometimes more about one thing than they are about other things. The 2016 election was more about immigration, about who counted as an American. The 2020 election was more about Donald Trump, about what kind of country America was and would become.

And the 2024 election is more about gender. Normally, when people say an election is about gender and family, they’re saying it’s about women, men in politics, men in power. But that is not what I’m saying is happening in the 2024 election. It’s visions of masculinity that are unstable and contested in this race.

In Donald Trump and in Tim Walz, you have two very different, but very explicit, archetypes, visions of what it means to be a man. Trump’s pitch is built on what I would call an almost cartoonish overperformance of masculinity, which is aimed at alienated young men. Having Hulk Hogan and the head of the U.F.C. on your night at the convention really puts a sharp point on that. But in Tim Walz, Democrats have found their own version of a male archetype: a football coach, a soldier, a guy who will fix your car, but also an ally, a man comfortable being in the role of supporting women, a man unthreatened by social change, a man even excited by it.

And then there’s family. Dobbs, of course, put abortion at the center of the election. But the other side of that fight this year — it’s not the pro-choice movement versus the pro-life movement. It’s something newer and stranger — a panic about falling fertility that doesn’t just want to ban abortion — though it does want to do that. It wants to shame anyone who doesn’t have kids. It wants to undermine their legitimacy as full participants in political and I would even say cultural and civilizational life. What does it mean to be pro-family? Is it to support people in finding the life path they want to walk, whether that’s becoming a parent or not? That’s more or less what Kamala Harris believes. Or is it to use policy and culture to push people to have children? To reward them for having more children? To demean and even punish them for choosing to not have children? That’s more or less what JD Vance and the people who have influenced him believe.

To understand this election, you need to swim in some ideological currents that most people don’t understand. But there are people who spend a lot of time in those waters. Christine Emba is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.” Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox who focuses on politics in the U.S. and abroad. He just published a book called “The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World.” And they are the perfect guides on this.

This is an edited transcript of part of our conversation. For the full conversation, listen to “The Ezra Klein Show.”

Ezra Klein: I want to start by playing a clip from JD Vance’s 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson. That interview is now very famous. It’s the one where he talks about cat ladies. I think that’s what most people have heard from it, but I want to play you a different piece of it.

[Audio Clip of JD Vance] And it’s just a basic fact. If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, A.O.C., 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?

I want to zoom in on that last idea — “people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.” Christine, if you know the ideological world that JD Vance has become part of, what do you hear in that? What is the clearest version of the argument he’s making?

Christine Emba: There are a couple of things going on in this statement. First, I think, is the idea that the family should be in some ways the center of government, that families are the most important part of the nation. That if you are not part of a family or embedded in this familial web, that you are therefore less committed to the country. I think that we’re also seeing JD Vance’s suggesting that also having children is kind of the purpose of citizens — a pronatalist policy, basically — that families with children are therefore furthering the nation or making America better and that families without children or people without children, those aforementioned childless cat ladies, are holding America back.

This is a thing I’ve heard people on the right say before Vance. But is it a thing people actually believe, or is it a signifier? At what level do you take it?

Emba: I think that it’s a little bit of both. JD Vance and his wife in interviews have rushed to say that, no, they aren’t talking about all childless people. They aren’t talking about people who have had fertility issues. They’re talking about the intentionally childless. So in some sense, you could say that Vance doesn’t necessarily believe the extreme version of what he’s saying, that all childless people are, in a sense, useless to America.

I think if you also look at the ideological background that he comes from, whether it’s the post-liberals or the Catholic integralists, or even just the new right generally, there’s been an increasing open dislike of those in nonfamily or nontraditional family situations, whether it’s gay people — JD Vance has spoken about how he would have voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act and against L.G.B.T.Q. rights — whether it’s in their terminology when they talk about single women and childless women. There are right-wing influencers who JD Vance has unfortunately very visibly spoken with, who have come up with the term “AWFL,” for affluent white female liberal, their conversations about the “longhouse,” a place where women rule and men don’t have a role in moving the family forward. I think he both believes in this but in a slightly different way than his most extreme statements would make it seem.

Vance has bragged about being “plugged into” a lot of weird right-wing subcultures. You, my friend, are plugged into a lot of weird right-wing subcultures.

Zack Beauchamp: That is true.

Where is he coming from?

Beauchamp: A few seconds ago, Christine mentioned something about post-liberalism. And I think that’s a very important term here. It’s also a loosely defined one. And that comes from people like law professor Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen, who is a political theorist at Notre Dame. And they basically take an argument or vision of the world that challenges liberalism’s emphasis on the individual. Instead of saying the state is meant to be an engine for individual self-fulfillment or to allow people to live life as best they want it, they argue that there’s a shared telos, a purpose, a common good to politics. And for them, it’s primarily defined by Catholic doctrine, and the purpose of politics should be moving us toward that goal. And part of that envisions the nation almost as an organic whole rather than a series of discrete individuals making choices. So it’s the question of what is good for the body politic as a unit, and that includes perpetuity, survival, children — hence the natalism that’s so important in Vance’s thought.

But this is not the only strain. It’s part of a world where many people sort of cross-pollinate. One of them is the online manosphere — a bunch of men who have become extremely resentful about the current state of gender affairs. But that also cross-pollinates a little bit with the tech right, which has its own versions of right-wing ideology, but shares a sort of contempt for democracy and liberalism with these other strains, with perhaps an even more valid contempt for democracy in the likes of Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, also known as Mencius Moldbug, both of whom are influences on JD Vance sort of directly — he worked in this tech world. And then there’s the national conservatives who are the more mainstream face of a lot of this stuff.

You’ve made this point about the differences between what you call sort of the neopatriarchy right and the Barstool conservatism right. And the Barstool conservatism right has been a little less excited about some of what it is hearing from Vance. Can you walk through the difference there?

Beauchamp: These are cross-cutting currents throughout all of those different groups that I described. The neopatriarchal right, the one that Vance has really aligned itself with, is a group that says a major focus of the state should be on fostering traditional morality and family formation. They don’t explicitly say women shouldn’t be working most of the time — though sometimes they do — but it basically means an emphasis on traditional loosely defined family structure. So you got to have kids, you got to get married, you shouldn’t be having sex out of marriage, birth control is probably bad. You can........

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