The Fight for More Children
On April 2, 2023, a 60 Minutes televised interview fired up debates on the post-truth irrationalism that defines our era. Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG) announced to her stunned host, CBS journalist Leslie Stahl, that all Democrats were pedophiles. In the frenzy that followed, moderates rushed to condemn her statement, arguing that it is blatantly false, that the democrats are not all pedophiles, and that MTG may be unfit for office. Observing this event over a year later, we would do well to heed the words of journalist Salena Zito who once cautioned against taking Trump’s pronouncements literally, but not seriously. We ought to do the opposite: take them seriously, but not literally.
«Won’t somebody please think of the children!» is not simply a sentence. It is a rhetorical tactic. The fight for the children, as gender theorist Lee Edelman argues in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, is impossible to refuse, because the children are the future. No children, no future. The political content of the statement «all Democrats are pedophiles» is not to say that all Democrats are child abusers, but that they are collectively stealing, stalling, or otherwise evacuating the future of (white) Americans. They are stealing the white future by favoring immigration, they are stealing the future by putting the interests of global finance (typically personified as the Jews) before those of the people, they are stealing the future by promoting «transgender ideology», a threat to reproductive futurity. All these elements cohere into the metapolitical plot in which all Democrats are pedophiles regardless of their involvement in criminal acts.
Prompted to explain her statement, Greene went on to say that «the Democrats are pedophiles because they are sexualizing children.» What she meant was that Democrats sexualize children in the wrong way: in a non-heteronormative manner. She has, of course, no problem with girls or boys being gendered through implicit social expectations: she only objects to the gender-pedagogical modalities that would lead to a non-heteronormative future and conflates these with actual abuse. No wonder the other targets of the Right’s cultural wars are female reproductive autonomy, gender nonconformity, migrant rights, and critical race theory. Central to all of these is the image of the innocent child (not to be confused with the lived experience of actual children) which, as an image, expresses a coherent ideological framework even if its politics are not immediately legible.
All the President’s Pets
JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential pick, is also fighting for the children, and, through them, for the (white) future. In a 2021 Fox News interview that resurfaced recently, Vance decried that the country, and especially the Democratic party, was run by «a bunch of childless cat ladies» who «don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren.» These cats were another dog whistle. In the run-up to Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, a tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory claimed that «cats are aiding white genocide» because they divert the maternal instinct of white women and thus cause natality to sink. The proliferation of purring cat videos on the internet over the past two decades was said to be the outcome of a Jewish conspiracy. This spoof conspiracy theory brings to light a real, middle-class conundrum: in times of permanent crisis, one must choose between having children (and reproducing biologically) or having a career (and reproducing one’s social status).
Regrettably, Vance has no time for such wit—his procreative zeal is a rhetorical weapon directed against urban elites, reminding them that the nation’s biological clock is ticking. While scorning the childless, he also suggested that parents should have extra voting rights: they are creating the national progeny and therefore expanding their share in the nation’s future. Like MTG’s, his words are more than the mere ramblings of a weirdo. They do their ideological work. And again cats are made to carry a political burden. On September 9, Vance posted that in Springfield, Ohio, «people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.» He accused Haitian undocumented immigrants, which were promptly caricatured as a machete yielding mob, of harvesting peoples’ domestic dogs and cats. In the presidential debate on the following night, Trump repeated this claim in his signature morose cadence: «They are eating the dogs, they are eating the cats.»
Nobody would deny that Trump can deliver a line; the affirmation of an image so obviously indisputable as that of the cute, cuddly, kitten whose defenselessness solicits our protection is what distinguishes sentimentality from partisan politics. But this humanization of animals comes at the expense of dehumanizing people. Toddlers in Springfield had to be escorted to kindergarten by police the next day: of course, these are not the children MAGA is fighting for.
White Suicide
Vance is far from alone in his obsession with natalism. Elon Musk famously tweeted that «population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.» Population is, of course, not collapsing, the Global North is just undergoing a decline in natality rates. But this is the point: natalism and demographic anxieties have racial undertones, they express a fear that the wrong kind of people will multiply and become the majority. The German AfD party was founded in 2013 in opposition to Germany’s role in the Eurozone. But the return of ethnonationalism to the German political center may well have happened three years earlier, when the social democrat Thilo Sarrazin, an unseeming bureaucrat and former finance senator of the city of Berlin, published the best-selling book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Does Away With Itself) in which he argued that the wrong types of Germans—Middle Eastern immigrants and especially Muslims whom he described as low-IQ—were outbreeding ethnic Germans and destroying the economy. (Sarrazin was ejected from the SPD in 2020, but the SPD-led government recently started advocating for mass deportations, a discourse that threads closely to the remigration fantasies of the far right.)