Childless Cat Humans of America Unite: Harris-Walz 2024

Our country is in a tough spot. In these final days before Election 2024, it should be shocking that we are flirting this aggressively with hurling ourselves into an abyss; into a pure, and utter darkness. It should be shocking but perhaps the most shocking thing is that orienting oneself to this reality is, at this point, no longer shocking at all. Almost ten years into experiencing this born rich conman’s, this sexual predator’s, this (now) 34-time convicted felon’s, this (now) twice-impeached authoritarian’s, this (now) Roe v. Wade-overturning Supreme Court justice appointing right-wing radical’s, this whiny grifter buffoon of a tourist’s attempt to surgically remove our collective moral compass which we’ll venture to symbolically refer to here as Lady Liberty’s soul, it is not shocking but rather rationally sobering that the patient is hemorrhaging on the emergency room table. So yes, our country is in a tough spot. But after witnessing the 45th President of the United States recover politically from the abject horror that was the insurrection he perpetrated on January 6th, 2021, should any of us be shocked that this is exactly the spot we are in in the first days of November 2024? Should any of us be anything less than rationally in tune with how perilously close we are to the edge and soberly prepared to do everything in our power to meet this moment?

I got my start working in electoral politics as a political organizer in Detroit, MI during the 2004 general election cycle. Since having that life changing experience, it has been engrained in me to do everything in my power to meet the moment (and always, always sprint to the finish line). Needless to say, this is always my mindset in every presidential election cycle but particularly this time around. Without patronizing you with any of the "this is the most important election of our lifetimes" rhetoric that seems to have been tossed around casually in every presidential election cycle so far during this century, we all know how high the stakes are this week. To that end, while writing this post is certainly on the menu of activities I would characterize as being productive, as the hours tick down until Tuesday evening, I can say that the entree for me on said menu is the aforementioned sprinting to the finish line helping with get out the vote (GOTV) efforts in swing states. That is what is top of mind for me and for that reason, I'm prioritizing brevity with this post in order to devote as much time to phone banking as possible in these "Final Four" days before election night.

Having now clarified that we are prioritizing brevity, I want to focus our time together zeroing in on one particular topic that has been nagging me since the days following the Republican National Convention in July. For the purpose of framing a conversation on this topic, I will begin with a reminder that it used to be a widely shared belief held by Americans across the political spectrum that our president should be a role model for our children and youth. We used to have something approaching consensus that a certain level of decorum is required to be our head of state and behavior by a candidate for the highest office which sets a bad example for our children is disqualifying; full stop. I’m not going to spend a lot of time here rehashing the laundry list of reasons and ways that Donald J. Trump has disqualified himself from being that role model for our children under the old paradigm. Those reason and ways are well documented both here on this site and in thousands of other places. Instead, I want to spend a few minutes talking about the single most personally offensive revelation that has come to light during this general election cycle and examining the ocean of hypocrisy on which this revelation floats. Without any further delay in burying the lead, we are about to discuss the views of J.D. Vance, the Republican Nominee for Vice President of the United States, on "childless cat ladies."

In a 2021 Fox News interview that resurfaced since his selection as Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance called Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.” Vance has further suggested in resurfaced statements that parents should have more voting power than non parents because childless Americans are less invested in the country’s future. These views are not only personally offensive to me as a married childless American with two cats, they are dangerous. They are also completely hypocritical coming from a politician and parent who once called Donald Trump "America's Hitler" but has since reversed course with one of the biggest flip-flops in American political history to become (using his own analogy) Trump's equivalent of Heinrich Himmler. For him to use being a parent as the litmus test for being invested in America's future while simultaneously defending and excusing the behavior by his running mate that he once found abhorrent and deep down knows is objectively disqualifying to be a role model for the children of any parent with any decency plays to me as a bold new frontier in exploring the oceanic depth of hypocrisy.

I wrote about my partner Jenn’s and my pain resulting from our struggle with infertility in the 2020 Biden-Harris endorsement post. There are already enough subtle reminders in our workplaces, our places of worship, our government policies, and pervading throughout American culture at large that parents are given more value in our society than childless adults but for a candidate for Vice President of the United States to state so explicitly that childless adults SHOULD have less value than parents by way of voting power (and in so doing exploit the pain of Americans who are childless by circumstance not choice so viciously) in order to pander to a misguided cultural consensus is despicable. It's also disingenuous when you zoom out and consider this belief in the tapestry of the “Drill, Baby, Drill” policies he and his party espouse which prioritize short-term corporate greed over the health of the planet that his children and grandchildren will be left to inhabit after he’s spent his last dollar and drawn his last breath. One could argue that childless Americans like myself who are fighting for a Green New Deal, which, according to scientist, is the bare minimum we must do to have a chance at sustaining an inhabitable planet for future generations, are more invested in his children’s future than he is. Perhaps J.D. should step aside and leave the voting to those of us, parents and non parents alike, who care about things that extend beyond short-term political expediency and self-interest; to those of us who understand that our planet's diminishing resources cannot sustain our current trajectory of infinite growth in both capital and human beings and that reproduction at levels which contribute to exponential population growth should not be incentivized by the government, much less gloried by politicians in the name of American family values; to those of us who understand that we are hurling ourselves towards an existential reckoning around population, climate, and resources and that we, in the Millennial generation and older, likely will no longer be alive to have to worry about it when shit truly hits the fan; to those of us that understand that it doesn't require biological children to be invested in building towards a sustainable future and preserving a healthy planet for the future generations which he purports to have exclusive purview in determining who can be invested in.

J.D. Vance is couching corporate greed in his warped version of America family values and he's doing it by dividing people. He's doing it by suggesting that not only should he not have any obligation to have empathy for the pain my partner Jenn and I carry from our struggle with infertility, but that it should also be normalized that we are lesser than. He's doing it by suggesting that our immediate family of two adult humans and two cats is less valuable than someone else's family that includes children and oh by the way, should a family that doesn't include children even be called a family at all? The views of J.D. Vance are disgusting and not only should he be ashamed of himself, he should never, ever be anywhere near the type of power that he seeks. At 78 years old, Donald Trump is the oldest major party nominee in the history of our country. In 2022, the average life expectancy for an American male was 74.8 years old. Purely from an objective, scientific point of view, J.D. Vance could become president during the next term. It does not get talked about nearly enough.

It is for this reason and uncountable others that theLeftAhead endorses Kamala Harris for president and Tim Walz for Vice President in Election 2024. Look, it’s no secret to our readership that this site and me, as its Editor-In-Chief, are to the left of the Biden Administration on many issues and this will continue, in all likelihood, under a Harris Administration as well. As one example, I remain a concerned critic of the Biden Administration’s role in not just allowing but funding the war crimes that Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government are perpetrating in Gaza. The continuing slaughter of innocent Palestinian life is unconscionable. But as the Working Families Party's National Director Maurice Mitchell brilliantly observed in WFP's endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket, “political endorsements are not a love letter, they are chess moves.” The way to view endorsements, according to Mitchell, is "they are how we move towards the best conditions to organize and build to the world we want." I have found this framing rather helpful in balancing my frustrations with the Biden Administration with my unwavering belief that a second Trump Administration will be unequivocally worse and will worsen the conditions under which we can organize to build a better world. I have found Mitchell's framing grounding as I have worked tirelessly over these past couple of months to do everything in my power to ensure that Kamala Harris becomes the 47th President of the United State of America and becomes our second African American president, our first Asian American president, and our first female president.

I will end by giving credit where credit is due to the Biden-Harris Administration. As any of you with any prior amount of engagement with this site know, being Editor-In-Chief of theLeftAhead is an unpaid passion project of mine. Maintaining content here is something I have tried (an increasingly failed at in recent years [the site is hanging on by a thread at this point {the code for the mobile site is currently broken *so thank you to anyone who has hung in here with me this long to read the desktop version of this post on a phone*}]) to work at outside of the demands of my full-time career as a union organizer. In other words, for me, creating content for and maintaining theLeftAhead is a labor of love (to use a shamelessly on the nose metaphor). I want to provide this context for any readers that don't know me on a personal level because it is in relation to the work I do in my full-time career where I want to give the Biden-Harris administration credit for their record. The current administration has been the most pro union and pro worker administration in my lifetime (I was born during the Carter Administration). From the appointment of Jennifer Abruzzo as General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to making history by becoming the first sitting president to show up in support of striking workers on a picket line, Joe Biden’s record on labor is nearly impeccable. Vice President Harris has also demonstrated by her actions that she is in lockstep with the president and will continue to advance a pro union and pro worker agenda for the next four years, if elected. As a unionist and labor movement organizer, I can tell you this is one area where the contrast could not be more stark. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are scabs who will eviscerate workers’ rights. For any union workers who are considering casting a vote for Trump's brand of populism, please remember that he also has a record and it's an objectively horrible anti-worker one which the labor movement must be unified in repudiating. To bring this ship full circle (after sailing it through through the treacherous waters of J.D. Vance's ocean of hypocrisy), it is my sincere belief that the type of foundational and structural change which is necessary in order to create a hopeful future and preserve a sustainable planet for OUR children and OUR grandchildren is impossible without a thriving, vibrant, and powerful labor movement. The forces that benefit from the corporate greed of late stage racial capitalism are too entrenched in our economic system to be defeated without one. A Harris-Walz administration will allow us to move towards the best conditions to organize the fighting labor movement we need in order to topple these entrenched forces and build a future where we prioritize people over profits.

On May Day 2022, President Biden (with Vice President Harris by his side) did something that hadn't happened before in the modern era of the American presidency. He did something that would've seemed impossible to conceive of for the entirety of my career in the labor movement up until that point. President Biden invited a group of worker organizers into the Oval Office to hear their stories, learn more about their challenges to establishing a union in their workplaces, commend them on their organizing, and take a photo in front of the Resolute desk with the group. It was my distinct honor and one of the highlights of my career as a union organizer to be able to help send a leader from one of my campaigns to Washington D.C. to take part in the unprecedented event and be included in that historic photo. As I prepare to pivot back from writing this labor of love (this side dish) to digging back in on the entree that is my GOTV work, I am visualizing that photo and will continue to do so as a visceral reminder that the impossible can be made possible when we achieve the best conditions possible to organize for a better world and as a reminder that as I continue to work tirelessly pouring myself into doing the work that is necessary to achieve these stated conditions, I'm as invested in our future as anybody else. Also, my cats rule. Back to the phones.