Laws for Themselves and Not for Me

 Childless people are having a miniature news cycle devoted to us this week, after J.D. Vance's mean-spirited comments on the subject from a 2021 interview resurfaced in the context of Harris's election campaign. The remarks, in which Vance suggested that all childless women are "miserable cat ladies," prompted many people on the internet to leap to the defense of people who—whether by choice or by force of circumstance—currently do not have biological offspring. 

You might expect me to feel vindicated by this. But to be honest, I have spent so much time feeling insecure about living outside of a conventional romantic partnership, I'd almost forgotten that, even if you have a partner, people then judge you for not having children with your partner. And then, if you do have a child, you still have to hear from the "you're not a real parent until you have two children" brigade. In short, it never ends. Social conformity is an infinite treadmill. 

My usual rejoinder on this subject, when it comes up, is to borrow a line from A.E. Housman. To people like J.D. Vance, who demand some greater degree of normativity of my lifestyle, I say: Let them "decree/ Laws for themselves and not for me./ And if my ways are not as theirs/ Let them mind their own affairs." But of course, as Housman goes on to acknowledge, they never will. They fear that if I simply opt out of the treadmill, it reduces the value of their own submission to it. 

This is the psychological basis for why the Vances of the world will never rest content with having children of their own and meanwhile allowing other people to structure their families as they see fit. They need people either to live as they do, or to be making conscious efforts to try to do so, in order to burnish their lifestyle's status-value. So, as Housman puts it: "they must still/ Wrest their neighbor to their will/ And make me dance as they desire/ With jail and gallows and hell-fire." 

I went back to look up the rest of Housman's poem, by the way, and I was struck all over again by just how apt it really is to the situation. "Their deeds I judge and much condemn," he writes. Ah yes, I certainly do judge Vance and Trump for their various iniquities. But he adds: "Yet when did I make laws for them?" Quite so! I certainly have no opinion on the number of children Vance chooses to have. I merely object to him trying to foist his preferences on other people. 

"They will be master, right or wrong," Housman concludes. "Though both are foolish, both are strong." Ah, sigh. Yes, indeed they are. Deeply foolish; and yet—strong, and intent on gathering even more strength and power. Trump and Vance have no intention of going anywhere, and no sign of getting either less foolish or less fascist. Vance especially does not want to stop at merely criticizing people who don't conform to his lifestyle; he wants to bring in the "jail and gallows and hell-fire" for real!

The only thing that can be said in partial extenuation of such people is that their actions stem from deeper anxiety on their part. They evidently feel insecure enough in their own attachments and choices that they need to have society pay regular obeisance to their decisions. They need to be told that they have lived the "right" way. And if others are not living as they do, the latter must show that they are green with envy. They must thereby express their fealty to the correct path, even if it is not their own. 

In a world where community ties have actually weakened and the unremitting change of postindustrial capitalism makes it harder for people to keep their personal connections secure, it makes sense that some people react this way. Cultural conservatism and family structure chauvinism, as we might call it, is a kind of dysfunctional backlash to this change. It is a foreseeable, if regrettable, byproduct of a world where all that is solid is melting into air. 

But the same could be said for virtually every form of fascism. It is always an exercise in scapegoating—as Vance himself once recognized to be true of Trump, before his MAGA conversion. It is identifying a real source of social insecurity in people's lives, but then using it to shift the blame to a disfavored minority that has done nothing wrong: they, the fascist says, the immigrants, the foreigners, the intellectuals, the nonconformists—they are responsible!

And so, such cultural chauvinism is always bringing the "jail and gallows and hell-fire" in its train. The "miserable cat ladies" are at first blamed for all of society's ills. "She cast a spell on me! She gave me the evil eye!" And it is only a small step from there to burning them at the stake.