J.D. Vance’s racist cat whistle

J.D. Vance’s creepy complaint about “childless cat ladies” being a problem for the country places him on the racist continuum in direct line with Patrick Buchanan, who made white Republicans fear becoming a racial minority.

I see the line clearly: Buchanan, who ran in Republican primaries for president in the mid-1990s, warned against the coming black-and-brown invasion and dreaded the decline in white birth rates. “If present trends hold,” he said, “white Americans will be a minority by 2050.” Buchanan warned that the U.S. was becoming “a multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual stew of a nation that has never before existed, or survived.”

The white anxiety he and other racists transformed into a conservative political dynamic is still with us, and no one has benefited from it more than Trump.

And no one has exploited it more.

So follow the line: Here comes Trump’s running mate, the weird but ambitious senator from Ohio, with his complaint that the Democratic Party is led by too many childless adults and this, Vance says, should give those adults less standing as citizens because childlessness harms the country and diminishes our future prospects as a nation. 

On the latter point — harming the country — what I hear is a clear dog whistle (make that a cat whistle?) from Vance that whites, in particular, are not procreating at a rate that assures dominance of that race for decades more, and liberals are largely to blame. I’ve heard this ugly battle cry before, just in different parlance. This might be Vance’s twisted way of “owning the libs,” but what he’s really uttering is a new version of Pat Buchanan’s warning.

It’s an uphill battle, but someone’s gotta fight it, right?

The Census Bureau has predicted that the nation will become “minority white” sometime around 2045. By then, whites will comprise 49.7 percent of the population in contrast to 24.6 percent for Hispanics, 13.1 percent for blacks, 7.9 percent for Asians, and 3.8 percent for multiracial populations.

If you’ve been wondering why Vance runs with this “childlessness” complaint and how he expects it to get any political traction, listen carefully. He’s whistling to white anxiety. He’s warning that a vote for a Democrat is a vote for even more racial and ethnic diversity than we have now, and  an end to white dominance.