From saying the country was run by “childless cat ladies,” to suggesting women should stay in abusive marriages, to arguing that parents should get more votes than people who don't have kids, Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s “strange” view of the American family has turned heads and raised eyebrows among voters.
“Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power – you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic – than people who don’t have kids,” Vance said in a 2021 speech.
According to Vance, parenthood should equal power, those who have children entitled to more influence over the direction of the country than those who do not.
“Let’s face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice,” he said in the speech. “If you don’t have children, you don’t have any “skin in the game.”
Vance is not alone in his seemingly niche views on family. Across the Atlantic, his vision for families has been playing out over the last 14 years.
In Hungary, right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban has cracked down on immigration, demonized LGBTQ+ people and used the power of the state to encourage young people to get married and have kids, all in the name of protecting a population he deems “at-risk”: the white, Christian family.
To Orban, the biggest threat to Hungary’s homogenous population is simple: low birth-rates and high immigration.
“We [Hungarians] are not a mixed race … and we do not want to become a mixed race,” Orban said in a 2022 speech. He added that countries where European and non-European people “are no longer nations: they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples.”
When Orban’s party first came to power in 2010, birth rates were at an all-time low. Since then, he has pushed a variety of incentives and policies to get people to have more children.
Women who have four or more children don’t have to pay taxes. Young couples are offered interest-free loans that are canceled once they have three children. First-time home buyers with kids get an extra €35,000 (around $38,000). There are also government-owned fertility clinics across Hungary. According to reporting from Politico Europe, the Hungarian government spends around 5% of its national GDP to try and boost birth rates.
“Why can’t we do that here? Why can’t we actually promote family formation here in our country?” Vance asked in a speech in 2021, referring to Hungary’s family policies. “Why can’t we give resources to parents who tell us the only reason they’re not having kids is because they can’t afford it?”
The Hungarian autocrat's desire to preserve a homogenous population is popular not just with Vance, but among much of the New Right, a reactionary movement favored by some American elites that emphasizes national sovereignty and pairs opposition to abortion and immigration with skepticism of democratic institutions.
In recent years, Orban has invited a number of conservative thinkers and politicians to Budapest to learn about the Hungarian government and its policies. The Danube Institute, a think tank financed by the Hungarian government that "encourages the transmission" of conservative ideas between Europe and the "English-speaking world," has invited a number of far-right conservatives to visit Budapest, a city Orban hopes can become the "intellectual home of 21st century conservatism." The Danube Institute has ties to The Heritage Foundation, the organization responsible for Project 2025.
In April, conservatives from across the U.S. and Europe gathered in Budapest for the third annual Conservative Political Action Conference, where Orban publicly declared his support for Trump’s re-election.
“Make America great again, make Europe great again!” Orban told the crowd.
These connections are no coincidence. Orban's government has spent billions of taxpayer dollars to lobby in the U.S. and make Hungary a more significant player on the conservative world stage, Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former member of Hungarian parliament and director of the CEU Democracy Institute, said in an interview with Salon.
Over the last 14 years, Orban has built a government that exists within democratic institutions — the country has elections and a political opposition while being part of the European Union — but which uses that facade to undermine democracy itself, Szelényi explained.
Through the changing of election laws, skewed taxation and regulation and control of the media and messaging in schools in schools, Orban has built what he boasts is an "illiberal democracy," Szelényi said.
"This is a system which looks like democracy because all the institutions are there, but basically just to maintain that the leading party stays in power," said Szelény, author of the book, "Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary."
On the surface, Hungary’s family policies may simply seem like a way to increase birth-rates. But these financial incentives and policies are just one of the ways in which Orban has manipulated state resources in service of building an illiberal state and pushing a specific ideology Szelényi explained.
Orban has used tax dollars, his control of the media and perversion of the education system to push an ethnocentric, nativist ideology, she explained.
As Hungary is a country of just 10 million and has a fairly homogenous population, it's easy for right-wing politicians to push a "threat to Hungarianness" and a "fear of the other," Szelenyi explained.
Hungary has some of the strictest immigration policies in the European Union. Despite pressure from the EU to accept more migrants and asylum seekers, Orban’s government has reiterated that immigration is an attack on the country’s sovereignty. In his 14 years as prime minister, Orban has repeatedly pushed rhetoric related to the “Great Replacement" theory, a far-right, whitevnationalist conspiracy theory that argues Western elites are conspiring to replace white Americans and Europeans with non-white people.
“I think there are many people who would like to see the end of Christian Europe,” Orban said in a 2018 interview. “They believe that if they replace its cultural subsoil, if they bring in millions of people from new ethnic groups which are not rooted in Christian culture, then they will transform Europe according to their conception.”
Pushing family values is a positive, digestible cloak for Orban's nativist ideology, Szelenyi said. Family marks the "renewal of society," and that helps Orban link family policy to the "issue of constant demographic threat and decline that Hungary has been witnessing for more than 50 years," she explained.
"He basically says that we don't need foreigners, we have to make our own kids," Szelenyi said.
Like Orban, Vance has warned of today’s American society becoming increasingly anti-family and anti-children. In an interview with right-wing podcast host Megyn Kelly, Vance criticized the country’s low birth rate and the “childless left” for believing it could “replace American children with immigrants.”
“But if your society is not having enough children to replace itself that is a profoundly dangerous and destabilizing thing. You look across history — that’s a real problem,” he said.
Vance has also echoed warnings of the Great Replacement theory. In 2022 Vance told Fox News that Democrats were planning an “immigrant invasion” to replace American voters in the next election. He’s pushed for anti-immigration policies and support for mothers to stay home to raise children instead of returning to work. Vance's economic populism is designed to support job creation for “normal” men in middle America so families can more easily survive on a single income - the father works and the mother stays at home.
The Republican vice presidential candidate's admiration for Orban is not just ideological, but structural too. In September, Vance praised Orban's control of the education system, where he has banned critical race and gender theory.
It's clear that Vance would justify almost any means, even undemocratic ones, to secure his vision for the U.S. “Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people," Vance said in a 2021 podcast interview.
For both Orban and Vance, family is to be at the center of a larger vision, more dangerous ideology.
"It's really beyond the family story," Szelenyi said. "It's not even a conservative, but a traditionalist and autocratic worldview. Family represents a larger society and within this ethnocentrist, nativist view it really serves this ideology that looks at the multicultural society and the globalist elite as its enemy."
