The Road to Splitsville SUFFRAGE THE LITTLE CHILDREN

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

J.D. “God’s Gift to Democrats” Vance has some creative ideas about representative government in what he calls “our democratic republic.” Read (or listen to) this quote and enjoy the moment when it blows up like a trick cigar:

Let’s give votes to all the children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.

It reminds us of a high school student we once heard about. In the mid-1960s, this lad grew his hair longer, apparently, than the school’s dress code allowed. He was sent to the Vice-Principal’s office, where he was issued, by the V.P., this arguably schizophrenogenic ruling: “We respect your right to wear your hair as long as you want. But you have to respect our right to tell you how long you can wear it.”

Thus with Vance’s “give kids a vote” scheme. He expressed it very badly but, in his defense, the idea itself is very bad, and Vance has demonstrated repeatedly that he doesn’t know how to talk to normal people. Then again, why should he? The milieus (or is it milieux?) he comes from—Silicon Valley; venture capital; Republican politics—have one thing in common: a preening sense of superiority and contempt for everybody else. In addition to that, Vance and the rest of them are all really—to use our nominee for 2024 Word of the Year—weird.

Still, eventually you realize what he means. Vance thinks that people who have children have more of a “stake in the future” than those without children, and so should have…something. More votes. Or votes that count more than other votes. Or votes that are turbo-charged in ways that those of childless people (if they’re even allowed to vote) are not.

You may be tempted to dismiss this with a bluff, hearty, “Who cares what this soulless-but-clumsy opportunist thinks?” And we might ultimately agree. But a lot of the traffic on the Road to Splitsville is driven by fatuous/evil excrescences much like Vance—reactionaries, monarchists, fascists, libertarians, and other right-wing deep-thinkers for whom the druggy high of privilege they get from mainlining conventional conservatism just doesn’t satisfy any more. So let’s explore the implications of Vance’s voting proposal, if only to understand why, when we get stuck in front of one of these choads in a traffic jam on The Road to Splitsville, this idiot keeps honking at us.

Let’s start with the Never Minds.

·         Never mind that it’s a bit rich for someone in the party that calls climate change “a hoax” to express concern over his and others’ children’s future.

·         Never mind that it’s similarly a bit much for a Republican to claim to champion children and families, when the GOP does everything it can, every day, to oppose sensible gun legislation, while firearms are the leading cause of death among children and adolescents.

·         Never mind that the only time Vance isn’t piously preaching about the inherent virtue of families, and supporting a program that calls for the end of no-fault divorce, is when he’s slapping the back and kissing the ass of a thrice-married, world-famous adulterer and rapist.

But look—nobody ever said Republicans weren’t hypocritical swine devoid of principles, honesty, and integrity. So let’s examine the proposal itself. Resolved: that people who have children have more of a stake in the future than those who don’t, and so should be accorded more political power to elect people who will shape that future.

Yeah, it sounds borderline reasonable—until you think about it for more than two seconds. Then you might wonder:

·         Is that what we’re voting for? The future? Instead of people to staff a government to solve problems now?

·         Don’t people with two children have twice the stake in the future as people with one child? And so on, up the numerical scale? Which means—

·         —the more children you have, the more political power you should wield. This, somewhat hilariously, might result in—

·         —the so-called “Welfare Queens,” i.e., single mothers who pumped out children strictly for the government money each brought in, so mocked and derided by Republicans during the Reagan era (whether they actually existed or not), having the most politically potent votes of all.

·         Meanwhile, what if a child dies? As so many do, thanks to the second Never Mind, above. The parents’ vote-potency should be reduced. But—

·         —how do we determine what that potency should be? Presumably, Vance would say, we’d calculate how much future a given child has. Let’s stipulate that the child no longer qualifies as someone whose future we must care about when he or she reaches voting age at 18. If X’s two kids are 16 and 17, and Y has twin two-year-olds, X’s kids have a mere 3 total years of future ahead of them, while Y’s have a whopping 32. Should Y’s vote be worth roughly ten times X’s? If so, how are those differing powers to be distributed? In brute numbers—i.e., when your child is born, you get 18 votes per election? You get one fewer each year, for that child, but more for each additional child born? To stay on top of these computations, the Deep State would need an entire new department, the Bureau of Offspring Voting Calculations.

·         Recall Vance’s original quote: Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. Of course, in good Republican households, wives are obedient, and children are obedient, and no one would dream of disagreeing with the religious beliefs, or the politics, of Dad and, by extension, Mom. But—call us cynical—we can imagine a scenario in which a huffy 15-year old adolescent (and is there any other kind?) vehemently objects to his parents casting “his” 3 remaining child-votes for, say, an asshole like J.D. Vance.

·         There are other issues—e.g., who gets what votes in the case of divorce and shared custody?—but seriously: Is this what Vance means by “our democratic republic”?

·         Do trans kids get a vote? Gay kids? Liberal-commie kids? We’re just asking questions.

Finally, there is a sinister paradox lurking at the heart of this entire project. No one will disagree with the familiar phrase, “Our children are our future.” But it is a sad, if indubitable, fact that the overwhelming majority of children between the ages of one day and 18 years, have no children of their own. This can mean only one thing: those children have no future. In which case, what the fuck have we been talking about all this time?

J.D. Vance is the protégé of Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who was behind the “seasteading” plan to create an independent nation on barges and rafts and pontoons and—you can never tell with these people--possibly rubber duckies in international waters (a thing we’ve ridiculed in The Split itself!). In fact, the novelist Richard Powers’ newest book, Playground, deals with just such seastead cities. It comes out in September and is long-listed for the Booker Prize. You wonder, as we do, “why isn’t The Split long-listed for the Booker Prize, too?” Probably because it won’t be fully published until November. And even then, it won’t be a book-ish Booker type-book, that you can “crack open” and “curl up with” and “throw across the room in a rage.” It will be digital, don’t ya know.

Thiel also has recently expressed doubts that democracy is compatible with freedom. So we’re the opposite of shocked to hear Vance share musings about how everyone who lives the way he lives should be able to tell everybody else how to live. (Don’t even ask about “neo-monarchist” Curtis Yarvin, an “influence” on Vance’s thinking.)

Vance was chosen as the GOP veep when Biden looked like he would be the Democrats’ nominee and Trump was leading in all the polls. He was selected as something of a luxury: kind of an attack dog, kind of an intellectual, kind of a way to inject some Silicon Valley coolness (and cash) into the cause. But so far Vance has been a joke on the stump. He aspires to be Trump’s Mini-Me but presents more as a Micro-Me—all of the lies, none of the charisma, just as tone-deaf as he is smug.

It will be interesting (speaking of one man/one vote) to see if Vance remains on the Republican ticket, or if he’ll be thrown overboard by the only man whose vote, in the GOP these days, counts.

If/when Harris beats Trump in November, many of the visionary douchebags on the right, who today dream of inflicting their techno-theocracy on the rest of us, may, as often happens during a Democratic administration, decide they’re rather pull out and start their own country. Vance, with his pious misogyny about childless cat ladies, his pseudo-deep suggestion that people without children are sociopaths, and his tech-bro’s delusional sense of superiority, might find that prospect appealing. And he’ll have more than adequate contacts and notoriety to lead such a campaign.

That’s why he’s tailgating us on the Road to Splitsville, honking like a New York City cabbie when the light turns green. He’s got places to go! And fast!