"... gave way to fears that certain populations were out-breeding their betters.... I talk with Malcolm and Simone Collins, the husband-and-wife founder of Pronatalist.org.... [They] present themselves as rationalists, techies trying to solve the looming depopulation crisis by any means necessary.... The couple is committed to fighting the 'urban monoculture' that they claim has tricked a generation of young Americans into spending their most fertile years chasing professional achievements and personal fulfillment at the expense of building a family. 'The monoculture is not an evil thing,' Malcolm... but, he continues, it’s built on false promises. 'It promises people, if you join us, you can do whatever makes you happy, so long as it doesn’t interfere with other people’s quality of life, and you can be affirmed for whoever you want to be.' In reality, though, they become casualties of an elitist scam. The urban monoculture, Malcolm explains, breeds childlessness and therefore must poach other people’s children to survive. It lures them out of small towns and into large cities, encourages them to eschew their religious upbringings in favor of hedonistic secularism, and then leaves them to die alone...."
From "The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population/Behind the scenes at the first Natal Conference, where a motley alliance is throwing out the idea of winning converts to their cause and trying to make their own instead" (Politico).
April 29, 2024
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"The future belongs to the people that show up for it."
- Old proverb
Much like the owls...
Regression to the mean.
Evolution and biology fully control the future. The recent transgender fad is the most transparent and voluntary cultural dead end imaginable. Tax "others" to pay for expensive Obamacare mutilation surgery and life-long care for mentally unstable sterile mules. These child sacrifices will be venerated on cans of Mulvaney Bud Light that are turned into votive candles.
The left is going out like Joan of Arc and ancient religious saints...as the few remaining fertile children become neo-Christian breeders. Welcome to our Amish, Mormon, and no-birth-control Catholic future.
"The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population"
Well, when the "far right" pounces on the issue of population implosion, all right-thinking people know what to think.
The left-right, authoritarian-anarchist nexus is leftist. As for evolutionary fitness, it's merely a social issue, which will be corrected through immigration reform. Keep women affordable, available, reusable, and taxable, and the "burden" of evidence sequestered in darkness.
Starts out reporting on the 'New Right', but it ends up concluding it's all 'Far Right'.
It lures them out of small towns and into large cities, encourages them to eschew their religious upbringings in favor of hedonistic secularism, and then leaves them to die alone
Oh for Pete's sake! As if those rubes in the small towns don't have a brain to think. This whole article is likely a "Look how forward-thinking I am as a globe-trotter!!"
I agree that replacement birth rates might be the best thing for a civilization, but I disagree that it's -- like so many things these days -- a crisis!
Why is this considered a far right (and hence bad) idea?
I was at the Texas Book Festival a few years back and Samatha Power was pimping her book. A stunning UT redhead asked her a question along the lines of, “How can I bring children into this world of misery and eventual destruction with climate change?”
Power backed off and gave a positive answer of sorts. But my thought was that Power - and all the other Lefties - have abused their positions of power in order to trick and influence plebes and deprive them of the joy of children so that they can continue to rule the world. What insufferable pricks!
This is a major failure in our modern culture. At least with the critical thinking I learned from the Jesuits, I can call these fuck heads out.
I earlier had called Power a liar to her face and I’m glad I did.
Conservatives should steer clear of these people. They look like weirdos, any talk of genetics immediately sounds creepy, and letting their speakers attack the Civil Rights Act as the source of all the problems sounds not only racist but nutty.
Dick Cheney thought he was "outbreeding" the lefties at one point too. Now they are both libtards, one of them gay.
"far right", "motley"...
the cope on these Politico writers is so pathetic and desperate, it's bordering on comedy.
The urban monoculture, Malcolm explains, breeds childlessness and therefore must poach other people’s children to survive. It lures them out of small towns and into large cities, encourages them to eschew their religious upbringings in favor of hedonistic secularism, and then leaves them to die alone...."
Same could be said about America's insane liberal universities.
It's pretty superficial to sneer about people who fear that if children move from the country to the city, they are likely to be corrupted. On its face this is simply true, and the decision to have kids/invest in the future or not is part of it. Preferring one's own family to others, one's own kind of people to others, is not in itself hateful bigotry. A policy of open borders does not make you Jesus Christ--and certainly not Mahatma Gandhi, who of course believed in borders.
John Locke, perhaps the most important thinker behind the American regime, had difficulty explaining why anyone would care for a young or helpless child. There must be an implied contract: help the youngster now, in her nonage, she might help you in your dotage. It would be foolish to try this if you didn't have any inheritance to offer her. The disabled or truly helpless, and many seniors are almost automatically on their own. Do healthy children really have anything substantial to rely on? Somewhat through the back door, almost desperately, Locke brings up the tenderness that parents feel for "their" children. Although in some passages he implies anyone can become a parent of any child by way of contracts (if the birth parent, and Locke means primarily the mother, doesn't want a child, someone else can take over), one can guess tenderness is more to be counted on in birth parents than anyone else. God knows it is somewhat questionable even in them.
P.T. Barnum introduced family entertainment with his Museum in Manhattan (big city alert!). To some extent adults taking part in childish pursuits, both supervising the kids and keeping them company. An educational component with pseudo-scientific exhibits. Disney magnified all this by at least a thousand, pseudo history and anthropology, etc. Non-human species are superior to humans, children to adults and so on. The nuclear family might seem to have a certain vitality once we jettison many members of the extended family--too rude at Thanksgiving. The way American parents sacrifice for their kids, letting them enjoy an endless adolescence during the years when Locke seems to assume they should be supporting themselves, is indeed amazing.
Perhaps Locke under-stated the attraction of caring for children as a way of being connected with eternity. He wanted to encourage a focus on this life, protecting one's rights, gaining economic security. No metaphysical double-talk. The Bidenistas seem to think that by ensuring there is no separation or detention of children at the border (or at least no photos of such--AOC isn't showing up in her angelic white outfit), they are showing they love all the children in the world. Bullshit.
Having a family, food that is not poison, a home, a garden, the right to be left alone- thats right wing now.
Insanity is becoming normal now in the bubble world.
It is the nature of existence that even for happily married couples, one of them is destined to die alone.
It is about money. You now need two good incomes to maintain any sort of standard of living. Gone are the days when a household was sustainable on a single income.
When all parents are working all hours in the name of "shareholder value" no one has either the time or energy for children.
On the plus side, we do have more billionaires shooting themselves into space. All good then.
Far right to show that mass consumerism is just a way to keep people compliant, lazy and weak?
So dumb. Yes, Netflix and Chill is the way to true happiness Politico. I will believe.
Seriously, I had my 6th child last summer, a caboose that has brought nothing but joy to every single member of our family. My oldest kids love him even more than my younger children. If more people chose to have more children, teenage and middle age selfishness would evaporate and families would be happier and healthier, especially mentally.
The "urban monoculture." Sounds a bit like how the Shakers grew their numbers -- or failed to grow near the end.
I saw the headline elsewhere and thought it quite disingenuous. With the quoted section, I see it is what I thought. Interesting that DEI demands we have some sort of proportional involvement of Genders/Race/Ethnicity etc... but if anyone suggests "hey, this particular set of people are demographically shrinking and we should understand why", that is called far-right.
Again with the "far right."
“I’m not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare,” Dolan says. “We’re here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on.”
That's just so far right.
“Over and over” describes the last decade
From the article:
the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount.
The writer eventually does get around to noting that these natalists believe that the solution to the problems of The future can be going in the past, but the above statement caught my eye because we've just been through the "total social overhaul." Our time and culture are unique in history for not positing that child-reading is paramount.
I read the whole thing; the writer teased racism some, linked natalism to white supremacy in a spot or two, and overall left me with a feeling that the desired takeaway was something between "we have to stop these kooks" and "wow, look at the okapi." But - going on the words alone - it is possible to read the article as factually, "this is a small phenomenon in which a number of disparate movements have found common cause - here are some of them, and their primary arguments."
[shrug] I'm a big fan of people who live in and value modern liberal democracies' having lots of kids. I wish I'd gotten an earlier start so we could have had four, maybe five, instead of stopping at three, even though our initial aim was the common liberal two. (Surprise!)
And I'm curious about Diana Fleischman's presence there. I haven't exactly worked out how natalism goes with her much-bruited-about polyamory - but then I've never been fully convinced that her polyamory is really a deep commitment rather than an implicit acknowledgement that if she wants that particular man, she has to accept this particular arrangement. I haven't heard her talk about how or if she plans to have a number of children while maintaining polyamory (which pretty much rules out all the most effective forms of birth control if she wants to have one particular man father all the kids - or leads to some very complicated support arrangements if that isn't her plan) - just that she and whatsisname are ?planning? ?in the process of? procreating.
As they say, the future belongs to who shows up.
This would be the same Politico that just ran an article suggesting that the most effective political consultant on the Right, Susie Wiles, works in politics merely because she has daddy issues and she could just retire and bake for her grandkids instead of working? I wouldn't exactly trust their opinion on anything. That was the most sexist thing I've ever read outside a bathroom stall. If I could have sent it to rhhardin, it would make his day.
That said, conferences like these are not representative of the vast majority of conservatives and others who feel blessed with large families. And while there may be some unsavory people who attend these things, how do you explain the left's embrace of Al Sharpton, most recently featured at the White House Correspondents Dinner?
Even purportedly unsavory people make solid points on policies and issues. Older, unmarried, and childless women are unhappier than other people. So are their male counterparts. We do have both a population problem and a vast problem with government dependency by dysfunctional people and families. Illegal immigration is illegal, and socially and financially destructive.
You should check out the backgrounds of some of these professors being arrested at pro-Gaza riots. Some are literally fascist, even as they are celebrated and advanced through university culture. Nobody ever criticizes or combs their vitae when they go to a conference with domestic terrorists and cop killers -- on our dime.
The pronatalists tend to be good at diagnosis, bad at prescription.
You would think that a publication with intellectual pretences would have figured out that "Far Right" doesn't mean what they think it does, and hasn't for at least forty years. I don't tend to listen much to people who can't see the obvious about themselves.
I was surprised it was not as blatant a hit piece as expected. She let's them speak. The above excerpt continues:
Malcolm compares the “urban monoculture” to the boarding schools the Canadian government forced Native children into, in which indigenous children were forcibly assimilated into white culture. (The U.S. government had similar boarding schools.) “It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to convert them to a culture that’s closer to mine — what you’re doing is wrong,” he says. When I tell him the boarding schools were a state program, not a voluntary form of acculturation, Malcolm becomes animated. “This is a state project! What’s going on in the public schools is a state project! The mechanisms that the urban monoculture uses to de-convert people are primarily a state funded educational system,” he says.
Of course, this (very young-looking) reporter's beat is "the far right." So it's not a neutral act of journalism, it's a warning dispatch. But it's enlightening.
The loss of church has exacerbated this situation.
Wow, Dave Begley. Now I have to imagine Samantha Powers adjacent to sex acts. Thanks for that.
"Our Posterity", evolutionary fitness, shared responsibility, etc. are universal concerns.
Of course it may also be that once a couple have struggled through and finally feel comfortable they actually just want to enjoy that and not make themselves precarious or stressed again by adding the complication and commitment of children.
"It is about money. You now need two good incomes to maintain any sort of standard of living. Gone are the days when a household was sustainable on a single income."
Those days would come back if we got away from leftist over-regulation and redistributionist policies and let free market capitalism work.
As I noted in yesterday's post on the same topic, urbanization does seem to be the common link for declining birth rates across both geography and history. Ancient cities weren't exactly healthy environments for kids. Lower population density in the US helped power the post-WW2 baby boom. People keep trying to shoehorn their priors into their proposed solutions, however.
Rich,
It is about money. You now need two good incomes to maintain any sort of standard of living. Gone are the days when a household was sustainable on a single income.
This is not only wrong, but actually the reverse of the truth. Look at the standard of living a century ago, never mind two centuries, and ask yourself how much of what feels "indispensable" now didn't even exist then. Yet people lived, breathed, ate, read, played music, and had kids, and a good hefty fraction of them on a single income. You are so certain that "gone are the days" that you don't even recognize how the vast majority of the world lives right now.
Not the evil "far-right" again! What horrible thing won't they do? Encouraging people to give birth? That's about as lowdown as you can go.
I love how it's become "far right" to hold views that were completely normal and mainstream to hold until maybe five minutes ago.
Politico thinks this is a "new idea" on the Right? Hmmm
About 20 years after James Taranto first posited "The Roe Effect" on the Best of the Web blog, 19 years after turning it into an editorial published by the WSJ and 18 years after Mark Steyn published his famous "demography is destiny" book America Alone, now this know-nothing from Politico is surprised to find a group concerned about depopulation? They used to have intelligent writers there.
There's a reason illegal immigration is outpacing births in America and that Japan and Western Europe are facing economic disaster because of demographics. But let's make fun of the far-far-right, at least long enough for the demographic problem to become untenable here. Then the idiots at Politico can write "why didn't somebody do something before it was too late?"
"Yet people lived, breathed, ate, read, played music, and had kids, and a good hefty fraction of them on a single income."
To be fair, a century ago working people weren't taxed to support non-workers to the extent they are today. *Somebody* has to work to pay for all the freebies the government hands out to those who won't work, after all.
It is about money. You now need two good incomes to maintain any sort of standard of living. Gone are the days when a household was sustainable on a single income.
It's not primarily about money. The way we can know this is that it's only in the richest societies that birth rate is falling off a cliff. Though of course the people in those societies often tell themselves it's about money.
It is about lifestyle.
My youngest is a sophomore in college, so I haven't been out of the biz for all that long - and what's more, I can go back to the neighborhood where we raised our three and observe the number of families still doing it the way we did, with one or one and a half careers, usually the women taking a hiatus (or just "retiring") or dropping to part time once children came along, then picking up again once the kids went to college or started their adult lives.
It was about 30 years old when we moved there, and quintessentially suburban - no restaurants or shops in walking distance (actually the supermarket was an easy half mile, but the area doesn't have sidewalks, so it's not very walker-friendly). It was in a good school district - not as good as the one we're in now but quite solid. The houses were 4-5 bedrooms, each on an acre, unfenced by neighborhood rules (a boon for raising free-range kids), and with septic tanks rather than sanitary sewers. The nearest towns were 10-15 minutes away. So, not stylish. It was about 45 minutes from Philadelphia city center.
The residents were and are professionals and small business owners, probably mid-30s or older, up to well into retirement age - a mixed-age, mixed-occupation, mixed-education neighborhood.
When we lived there, and according to our friends who are still there (all of us/them in our 50s now) this is still true of the new young residents, our entertainment was games at one another's houses, backyard barbecues, neighborhood gatherings at the old clubhouse or, for smaller groups, in someone's basement to watch football or hockey, with kids roaming in friendly packs that all adults looked out for.
It is hard to save up a down payment. And interest rates stink right now. But it can still be done if you have a goal you're determined to meet. If, however, your goal is a fabulous city pad and two high status careers, you're right, Rich, you're probably not going to want to put a crimp in those plans by introducing unpredictable and time-consuming and anxiety-producing small humans. All the more so if you're apt to pay attention to all those cultural messages that tell you that these characteristics are the only things that childrearing comprises.
Of course it may also be that once a couple have struggled through and finally feel comfortable they actually just want to enjoy that and not make themselves precarious or stressed again by adding the complication and commitment of children.
I see that Rich makes my point for me: once your "comfortable" (that is, leading a life beyond the wildest dreams of emperors even a hundred years ago), you don't want the complication of children. Because that's what children are - a complication.
Don't be so afraid of children! What you get is ineffably more than what you sacrifice, unless you are incredibly unlucky enough to raise a Dahmer or something. And even then, I daresay that the act of being a parent, and doing it with attention and care, renders you a better human than when you began.
Unfortunately it's one of those things that you can't fully understand without experiencing it - and we have lost the cultural storyline that used to teach us this very thing, that you'll get it when you do it, in the postmodern mire.
I look forward to the way this conversation will change on a dime when the colleges realize they won't have youth fodder coming in in the near future. How many schools will shut down?
There are many ways to look at this issue. One of them is to acknowledge that a multitude of critical social, military and economic processes are predicated on an assumption that the people within the society are going to use sexual reproduction to replenish the supply of needed young people.
Why is this even controversial? Does anyone notice that the sexually abstinent Shakers are no longer a religious community? It wasn't enough to build beautiful furniture. You need to make beautiful people.
No, you don't "need" two working spouses to support your "lifestyle", because you don't "need" that "lifestyle". If American couples CHOOSE a "lifestyle" that precludes children, they should understand the price they must pay for it.
As a society, if that's the choice our young people are making, then we need to reexamine our immigration policies.
So as not to be misunderstood: I mean that we should welcome immigrants who are (or potentially are likely to become) like the children we are choosing not to have.
@MadisonMan
I agree that replacement birth rates might be the best thing for a civilization, but I disagree that it's -- like so many things these days -- a crisis!
Given that Social Security and Medicare depend on intergenerational transfers, I'd say we're already deep into a birth rate crisis. In fact I believe that's why no one in DC is talking about it, because they know the problem is unsolvable: can't cut benefits, can't raise taxes.
I note that while Kennedy talks about national debt and interest payments, even he hasn't said anything about Social Security, Medicare and how to pay for them.
Around the year 2000 the eugenicists suddenly abandoned population control as a major means of achieving eugenic goals. The American eugenics society aka The Society for the Study of Social Biology did not elect new officers or board members for seven years. The journal was discontinued for several years. All this reflected a bitter dispute over population control. When the Society resumed yearly elections it had a new name Society of Biodemography and Social Biology; it's journal had a new name, Biodemography and Social Biology; and it had a new slate of officers and directors. Notably there were no population control supporters among them, the first time that had happened since 1926 when the Society incorporated. Biodemography had replaced population control. But what was biodemography?
Biodemography regards demography as the most important element in biology because the fittest survive to reproduce. Demography tells you who is reproducing thus showing the direction of natural selection and biodemography considers the implications for human society of these demographic trends and the eugenic policies to propose.
When then the biodemographers observed that Europe was being wiped out by a growing birth dearth, they formed an Institute, The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, to study the disaster and formulate eugenic policies. The founder and first Director of the Institute (1996) was James Vaupel, Vaupel and others sought to redirect the eugenics societies from the emphasis on population control which was wiping out Europe and they called the field they developed "Biodemography." In the end as, we we see by the name change they took over the American eugenics society. Vaupel was member of the Board of Directors of the Society from 2008-2011.
All this is background essential to understanding. Here's the point,
Vaupel concentrated the eugenic society's efforts on understanding and overcoming the birth dearth which he was aware of back in the Nineties when it first manifested itself. (Only a demographers would note the implication of falling birth rates before it manifested itself in a shrinking workforce and so on but Vaupel was a demographer. Only an organizer would form an Institute to study and counter the trend, Vaupel was an organizer.) BUT he never found a way to counter the shrinking birth rate. He studied all the solutions now being proposed in the US for their effectiveness in the countries in which they had been adopted and his Institute reports show that no social program works. None. Zero. Religious believers of any kind as a group keep up their group birthrate. No one else anywhere is doing so and there is nothing to be done.
This does not mean that only religious believers have children. It means that the only groups keeping up their birthrate are the groups who truly believe they are connected in some real way with the Creator of the world in which they find themselves.
The US is increasing in population regardless of its birthrate because of immigration. Ironic, huh? Lefties say it's wrong to have their own children who will use up resources and pollute but it's right to bring in other people's grown children to replace the children the lefties aborted.
One of the consequences of a shrinking population will be an inability to sustain the welfare state. The people not having children right now are temporarily better off but they will be poor in old age. There will be no Social Security for them. If you are young now, you can beat this trap. Have children. Have three children. The majority in the next generation will come from those who had three or more children and they will legislate for their own benefit and that of their parents, not for the people who are going to Hawaii instead of being a Mom or Dad. Join that majority.
Demographics Determine Destiny
" It lures them out of small towns and into large cities, encourages them to eschew their religious upbringings in favor of hedonistic secularism, and then leaves them to die alone...."
Yes, just like cities have since the dawn of time. Before sanitation and disease control, children were born in the country, adults moved to the city where they worked till they died. Alan Macfarlane credits tea with permitting London and Tokyo to escape this cycle the earliest. Tea apparently had anti-microbial properties that is passed to the child through breast feeding.
And early observer of the impact of urban life on freedom of thought:
"Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are catchpenny phrases. There is much of the former, but very little of the latter. Speech is generally the result of automatic thought rather than of ratiocination. Independent thought is of all mental processes the most difficult and the most rare; habit, tradition, and reverence for antiquity unite to forbid it, and these combined influences are strengthened by the law of heredity. The tendency to automatic action of the mind is still further promoted by the environment of modern life. The crowding of populations into cities, and the division and subdivision of labor in the factory and the shop, and even in the so-called learned professions, have a tendency to increase the dependence of the individual upon the mass of society. And this interdependence of the units of society renders them more and more imitative, and hence more and more automatic both mentally and physically."
—Charles H. Ham, Mind and Hand: manual training, the chief factor in education (1886)
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