The even greater pity is that Vance was making an important point 

Photo: SHUTTERSTOCK / LEV RADIN

J.D.Vance got off to a rough start as a candidate when a quote from a few years back about “cat ladies” — i.e., women without kids whose prime companions are their cats — got out. Among those “cat ladies,” he named Kamala Harris.

As a candidate for office, it is never a good idea to insult an entire demographic, with at least 46 million members. More to the point, as Vance has acknowledged, the term is extremely hurtful to millions of women who wanted to have children but couldn’t — either because they never married or experienced fertility problems.

Clever people, it seems, are often too clever for their own good. Things tumble out of their mouths — often insults — faster than their censoring mechanisms can kick in. My guess is that Vivek Ramaswamy had the highest IQ of any of those participating in the Republican debates last year — Harvard summa cum laude, Yale Law School, a near-billionaire in his early 30s. Every time he opened his mouth, he looked extremely pleased with himself. Yet my reaction was inevitably to reflect that intelligence and wisdom are not a continuum, and to pray that he never comes close to the reins of power.

I’ve had that experience of being betrayed by one’s own cleverness. In the early ’90s, I was a Sunday morning speaker at the annual convention of Agudath Israel of America. My subject was the effort by the Reform movement to gain a toehold in Israel — an effort that continues until today.

One of the major arguments made by the Reform movement was that it was well suited to attach “secular” Israelis to their Jewish heritage, in a way that Orthodoxy is not. That argument, even on its own terms, was ridiculous. As the Guttman Study of Israelis’ religious practice made clear, so-called “secular” Israelis are much more likely to engage in basic Jewish rituals — candle-lighting and Kiddush on Shabbos, fasting on Yom Kippur, etc. — than are the vast majority of Reform Jews in America.

I summarized that argument pithily, “Bringing Reform to Israel to increase attachment to Judaism would be tantamount to bringing back Pol Pot to Cambodia for a second try.” (Under Pol Pot’s Communist rule of Cambodia from 1976 to 1979, between 1.5 and 2 million people were killed, approximately 25 percent of the Cambodian population.)

I was rather pleased with that bon mot until it turned up as the front-page headline in the Jewish Week the following week as: “Agudah speaker likens Reform to Pol Pot.” Needless to say, that comment did not make me a more effective advocate for Torah among Reform Jews.

So I can sympathize with Vance’s rough patch. But I would prefer to focus on the lessons that emerge for all of us. The most important of which is that everything we say is recorded. And our words will come back to haunt us one day, in ways we could never have anticipated. So better to minimize our words, wait before speaking, and eschew the passing joy of being thought witty by a favorably disposed audience. Those rules will take care of a great deal of hilchos lashon hara.

THE EVEN GREATER PITY is that Vance was making an important point — or at least one that appeals to me, as I have made it numerous times: A developed country with below-replacement and rapidly declining birthrates is in trouble. For one thing, the dwindling number of young workers will be unable to support the pensions of the rapidly expanding group of elders. In 1950, there were 35 babies born globally for every person who turned 80. By 2100, that ratio is projected to be one-to-one.

In addition, human beings are the most important resource in dealing with the challenges facing mankind, not just another source of pollution. Paul Romer won the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics for his endogenous growth theory, which posits that the ideas generated by human beings are the motor of most scientific and material advances. Based on that theory, a world of rapid depopulation is one of stagnating living standards and scientific knowledge, argues Romer’s protégé, Stanford professor Charles Jones.

Whether or not one has children does not dictate any given individual’s attitudes on a host of political issues, but in the aggregate, those without children will be less invested in the future of their country. In foreign policy, the larger that cohort is, the more likely the country will be to follow an appeasement-oriented foreign policy: Better to let Iran obtain nuclear weapons than to confront the mullahs. Just let me shuffle off this mortal coil before they blow everything up.

And similarly, elders unburdened by worries about the financial stability of their children will be far ornerier about cuts to their Social Security and Medicare payments than those with children who will be left hanging if Social Security goes bankrupt.

THERE CAN BE LITTLE DOUBT that the culture is becoming increasingly hostile to family formation and the sacrifices it entails. Sure as clockwork, the New York Times will publish at least one op-ed every Valentine’s Day about how single people are happier than married ones. (That is certainly not true in the long run, and it is based upon a fallacy — the failure to distinguish hedonic from eudaemonic pleasure. Only the latter brings with it a plethora of health and mental benefits.)

Kat Rosenfeld recently wrote a piece at the Free Press, “Glamorizing a marital split is narcissism disguised as feminism,” in which she described five girlfriends of hers who suddenly decided to get divorced en masse. The first to do so landed on her feet, with generous alimony and a younger boyfriend, and soon the other four had all followed suit, even though none had ever complained of their spouses previously. At a Halloween party, after the fifth divorce, Rosenfeld was the only one there with a husband — “What can I say? I’ve always liked him,” she writes.

In the new paradigm “all choices made by women are a product of liberation, hence feminist, hence good.” The past year, Rosenfeld notes, has produced a “glut of divorce memoirs from authors celebrity and non.” Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, for instance, rejects the idea of trying to work on a marriage to save it: “Fixing something restores what is old. It is a conservative effort.... It is Republican.”

The contempt for traditional family structures and the behaviors that sustain them fall into the category of what Rob Henderson labels “luxury beliefs,” in his memoir, Troubled. He lived in nine foster homes before the age of eight, and never in a stable two-parent home, before ending up at Yale as a 24-year-old freshman. His affluent classmates — more came from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent of the population — were wont to say things like “monogamy is outdated and not good for society.” But they came overwhelmingly from families in which they were raised by both birth parents, and when pressed, they admitted they aspired to create similar families themselves.

It is their poorer, less educated fellow citizens who have borne the brunt of those “luxury beliefs.” In 1960, 95 percent of children in both affluent and working-class families lived with both biological parents. By 2005, the percentage for affluent families was still 85 percent, but had plummeted to 30 percent among the working class. College graduates are the most likely to say that marriage is unimportant before having children, but overwhelmingly they marry before starting families.

The claim that stable, traditional family relationships are not important is refuted by the wealth of evidence, cited by Henderson, who now holds a PhD in psychology from Cambridge. Later life happiness, as well as mental and physical health in adolescence, are far more likely to be determined by whether a child felt loved or not than by financial status. And stable two-parent families foster that feeling of being loved. Thus, for Rob Henderson, as for J.D. Vance, the most important goal is to be “a better dad than any of my ‘dads’ were for me.”

But as Rosenfeld’s piece makes clear, the growing disdain for commitment to marriage and parenting is taking a toll on the more affluent and college-educated as well. Writing in City Journal, Lexi Boccuzzi describes the reactions of 45 of her fellow students at University of Pennsylvania, after reading Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, which argues that one loses herself by becoming a mother. (Certainly one’s self-centeredness would be right.) Over half the class said confidently that they have no desire to have children, and another 30 percent were uncertain, citing fears of climate change, the desire to focus on their careers, and concerns over their mental health.

Boccuzzi cites a Pew survey in which 38 percent of respondents cite as a reason not to have children their concern about “the state of the world,” 26 percent worry about “the impact of children on the environment,” and 36 percent cited fears of being unable to afford a child. (Obviously, these categories overlap.)

Boccuzzi sees in these numbers a sign of hopelessness about the future, in part the result of grievance politics and general negativity. Not a good take on the future.

ROSENFELD HAD TO stifle the urge to be sick over Lenz’s description of working to save one’s marriage as being conservative, even Republican. But in a way, Lenz was right. There appears to be a strong correlation between marriage and fertility rates, and political affiliation.

While fertility rates are generally declining across the United States, the 17 states with the highest fertility rates are all classified by the Cook Political Report as Republican or Republican-leaning, and the nine with the lowest fertility rates are all Democratic or Democratic-learning. Only two Democratic states have fertility rates above replacement, whereas 20 Republican states do. Nine of the ten states with the lowest marriage rates and eight of those with the highest percentage of never-marrieds are Democratic, low-birth-rate states.

Steven Malanga in City Journal finds a correlation between certain government policies and fertility rates. Where housing costs are high, birth rates tend to be low. High housing prices are often a function of zoning regulations. A recent study of the so-called “zoning tax” — the effect that a city’s strict development regulations has on housing prices — in 24 metropolitan areas found that the highest zoning taxes were overwhelmingly in Democratic states, and those with the smallest zoning premium in red states. The ten states with the lowest median housing costs are all Republican.

Malanga also notes the impact of Covid policies — e.g., how soon businesses and schools reopened. According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 17 of the top 20 states in terms of recovery from Covid were Republican, and nine of ten with the slowest recoveries were Democratic states. Greater levels of economic and social stress are associated with lower birthrates.

Boccuzzi cites studies that conservatives are happier than liberals, and that happy people tend to have more children.

ATLEAST WITH RESPECT to a certain strain of conservatism, family formation is fundamental at a philosophical level. In Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Yoram Hazony defines national conservatism as “a standpoint that regards the recovery, restoration, elaboration, and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time.”

That transmission requires people living what Hazony calls “conservative lives,” which is closely related for him with the development of strong families. For such families are the best at passing down traditions and values from generation to generation.

In the final section of his book, Hazony describes how he met his future wife in a physics lab during their freshman year at Princeton. They married as undergraduates, and their nearly 40-year marriage has produced nine children. Together they also founded a conservative magazine, the Princeton Tory, and committed to advancing both conservative ideas and to living a conservative life.

The latter required, he writes, locating an actual conservative community in which the tradition still lives and is being handed down to new generations. For Hazony and his wife, that was the Orthodox Jewish community.

He quotes Irving Kristol’s description of democracy as a form of self-government that ultimately depends upon producing people possessing a “self” worthy of governing. Were government to produce people who are “vicious, mean, squalid, and debased,” it would forfeit its right to exist, argued Kristol. Or as John Adams, one of the founders of American conservativism, put it, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Morality and virtue are the foundation of our republic and necessary for a society to be free. In short, a dissolute personal life cannot be reconciled with a genuinely conservative politics.

How such moral people can be produced and what role government can play, if any, given the Constitution’s prohibition on the establishment of religion, and the long American tradition of freedom of religion and conscience, remains to be seen.

But the willingness to introduce the traditional values around which strong families are built and perpetuated into the national conversation is salutary. That cannot be done, as J.D. Vance has learned, with catty quips, which are the very opposite of moral suasion. But only by example. And in the latter, the Orthodox community has an important role to play.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1023. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)