Kamala Harris, triumphant cat lady The political family has lost its sparkle

Back then, the platonic ideal of a presidential candidate was comfortingly familiar: a clean-cut, straightlaced, middle-aged man in a business suit, flanked by a pretty-but-not-too-glamorous wife and a couple of school-aged children. The aspiring president whose family didn’t fit within this model faced an uphill battle for legitimacy; the one who was different in some other way could earn America’s trust by adhering to it as closely as possible. It’s surely not a coincidence that Barack Obama, our first black POTUS, was also aesthetically indistinguishable from the average dorky suburban dad on a weeknight sitcom. Compare this to Kamala Harris, whose personal history and political vibe is less Leave It to Beaver, more House of Cards — or maybe Game of Thrones, if you believe that her romantic relationships have been as much about making strategic alliances as genuine affection.

But then, nothing about our current crop of political families is like it used to be — as exemplified by the Republican candidate, who makes the once-scandalously libertine Bill Clinton look like a boy scout. Donald Trump is twice divorced, has five children by three different women, is infamously crude, and recently racked up multiple felony convictions for using campaign funds to buy the silence of the porn star with whom he had an affair while his wife was pregnant. He is the furthest thing possible from the “family-values” types favoured by his party in the pre-Y2K era.

The result is a profoundly confused discourse, in which nobody knows whether to clutch their pearls or let their freak flag fly. The queer polyamorous progressive types who once mocked Pete Buttigieg for not being gay enough are sweating with the cognitive dissonance of remaining sex-positive and fancy-free, while simultaneously condemning Trump for being a disgusting boor with, to quote Joe Biden, “the morals of an alley cat”. Meanwhile, the conservative Right excoriates Harris for being a slutty, baby-murdering, communist diversity hire beloved by childless cat ladies — right before cheering the machismo and sexual prowess of their thrice-married adulterer-in-chief.

The inconsistency is symptomatic of the total breakdown of political identitarianism as practised by partisans on both sides. It’s not just the spectacle of Democrats who backed Bill Clinton claiming to be scandalised by Trump’s extramarital affairs, or Republicans, allegedly the party of family values, bemoaning the drop in American fertility rates one moment and then flirting with the idea of banning IVF the next. The tension is profound: we can no longer reliably draw a line connecting family structure to voting habits, let alone political identity.

This realisation can be disorienting, and sometimes actively alienating. During the Republican National Convention earlier this month, progressives professed distress and horror that Usha Vance, the Indian-American wife of Trump’s vice presidential pick J.D. Vance, appeared on stage in support of her husband (instead of, I guess, divorcing him on the spot). One journalist openly speculated that Usha, who was once a registered Democrat, must have been there against her will, a hostage to the political aspirations of her loutish troglodyte husband. Other commentators were even more bewildered: shouldn’t both the Vances be Democrats?

Meanwhile, Vance himself has landed himself in hot water with his own party’s supporters after a 2021 Fox News clip resurfaced in which he derided his ideological opponents as “childless cat ladies” and suggested that people without children, Harris included, were unfit for public service. Perhaps there was once a time when a Republican politician could equate childlessness with selfishness and not suffer massive public blowback from his party’s female voters; in today’s culture, conservative women are not having it.

At this point, there seems to be no straightforward answer to the question of when or whether a candidate’s family life, or family members, can be held up as evidence of his unsuitability for office. Insofar as we ever had rules about this, they’re increasingly impossible to enforce on a rapidly evolving social landscape. There was a time, for instance, when attacking a politician’s wife was supposed to be beyond the pale — a norm memorably shattered by Trump during his own party’s primary in 2016. But why was this, really? Did the norm exist out of a noble consensus that a politician’s family life is sacred and separate? Or was it simply a vestige of a time when women were walled off from political life?

If anything, today we believe in the opposite: that family is not just fair game, but part of the political package. Perhaps this was an inevitable by-product of the American political dynasty, the closest democratic equivalent to the British line of succession. Since the country’s founding, our elections have been a litany of familiar, familial names: Adams, Roosevelt, Rockefeller. Bush, Kennedy, Clinton. Electing one man to office opens the door for a flood of family members to follow in his footsteps — or lurk behind the scenes in unelected positions of power, like Hunter Biden, or like Trump’s children.

Either way, the gloves are off now; there is nothing too personal to be political, including a politician’s family. But the irony is, the more that politics is treated by both Left and Right as necessarily intermingled with the personal, the less appealing public office will be to people with families, who understandably do not want to place a target on the backs of the people they love the most.

As such, both sides would benefit from a change of mindset. Progressives, rather than demonising someone like Usha Vance for sleeping with the enemy, should be encouraged by the implications of Vance’s marriage to a woman who apparently does not share his every political sensibility. And conservatives, rather than writing off childless people as unfit for public office, should continue to promote family values while also recognising that family is an evolving concept. The landscape of American life is changing in a way that cannot help but be reflected in our elected officials — not just in diversity of race, ethnicity, religion or sexuality, but also in terms of who they call “family”. The millennial generation, now entering the prime of middle age in which political careers are made, is the most childless in history.

The savvy political move is not to dismiss these people as unelectable or unworthy of participation in democracy; it’s to realise that the childless cat ladies of the world have an unprecedented amount of bandwidth for ambitious, time-consuming activities like, say, running for office — or, as the case may be, voting someone out of it.

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Kat Rosenfield is an UnHerd columnist and co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Her latest novel is You Must Remember This.

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