Get Busy, Liberals!

This appeared in the Opinion section of USA Today on Tuesday (trying to catch up on some stuff). It was so preposterous that it actually made me investigate the group this author claims to belong to, which is called the New America Foundation, run by Ted Halstead and James Fallows, who apparently have written the books “The Death of Sixties Liberalism,” and “The Radical Center.” Philip Longman is a “fellow” with this organization.

The liberal baby bust
By Phillip Longman

What's the difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? There are many differences, of course, but here's one you might not know. In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs.

I haven’t visited either of these places, but I have it on good authority that, if you’re looking for a place full of lefty nut jobs, Seattle is your destination (must be because of the rain – and yes, I know this is a gross generalization based on random anecdotes that I can’t link to, and I know the statement that Salt Lake City is full of a lot of uptight Mormons who are completely intolerant to any way of life except their own falls into the same general category, but there you are).

This curious fact might at first seem trivial, but it reflects a much broader and little-noticed demographic trend that has deep implications for the future of global culture and politics.

The fact that it seems trivial is because it IS trivial.

It's not that people in a progressive city such as Seattle are so much fonder of dogs than are people in a conservative city such as Salt Lake City. It's that progressives are so much less likely to have children.

Gee, I don’t know about that. We actually know couples who don’t share our political opinion who are deciding not to have kids for other reasons. Does that make them unusual somehow? I have a feeling that the answer to that question is no.

It's a pattern found throughout the world, and it augers a far more conservative future — one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default.

OK, now this is where I start to get steamed. Since when is social or political progressivism or liberalism (whichever you prefer) separate from “traditional values”? In its best moments, these attitudes are based on an understanding of spirituality that preaches and practices compassion to people who are in need of assistance for whatever reason, a fervent desire to better oneself, and the courage to speak “truth to power,” based on the teaching of the Quakers. Those values are as “traditional” as you can get as far as I’m concerned. If they need to “make a comeback,” then DON’T blame it on liberalism or progressivism.

Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists.

“Secularists” meaning those heathen lefties who are all home wearing their tie dye T-shirts, listening to Grateful Dead CDs and smoking pot, in case you hadn’t guessed by now.

As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families.

I would guess that, if a couple decides to raise a large family, some sort of trait tied to ethnicity or religion or the fact that they grew up in large families themselves would have more to do with it that political beliefs.

Today, fertility correlates strongly with a wide range of political, cultural and religious attitudes. In the USA, for example, 47% of people who attend church weekly say their ideal family size is three or more children. By contrast, 27% of those who seldom attend church want that many kids.

In Utah, where more than two-thirds of residents are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 92 children are born each year for every 1,000 women, the highest fertility rate in the nation. By contrast Vermont — the first to embrace gay unions — has the nation's lowest rate, producing 51 children per 1,000 women.

I don’t know what the birth rate in Massachusetts is, but I would guess that it is not an insignificant number since the population is largely Irish Catholic, and you’d be hard pressed to find a group with a more prolific religious/ancestral upbringing than that one. Do I need to point out to you the political persuasion of that area?

Similarly, in Europe today, the people least likely to have children are those most likely to hold progressive views of the world. For instance, do you distrust the army and other institutions and are you prone to demonstrate against them? Then, according to polling data assembled by demographers Ron Lesthaeghe and Johan Surkyn, you are less likely to be married and have kids or ever to get married and have kids. Do you find soft drugs, homosexuality and euthanasia acceptable? Do you seldom, if ever, attend church? Europeans who answer affirmatively to such questions are far more likely to live alone or be in childless, cohabiting unions than are those who answer negatively.

This sounds like a gross oversimplification to me, but I don’t know anything about living in Europe, so I can’t really argue with Longman on this.

This correlation between secularism, individualism and low fertility portends a vast change in modern societies. In the USA, for example, nearly 20% of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having children. The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and '70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of people who did raise children.

So Longman is saying that 20 percent of the women born in the late ‘50s didn’t have kids. That means (let me get out my handy dandy calculator) that 80 percent of those women did. That’s a pretty substantial number. Also, Longman doesn’t have exact numbers of how many of the 80 percent tended to be liberal or conservative, only that they were “drawn from the countercultural movement” (let’s all “paint with a broad brush,” shall we?). To quote Dubya (and how often do I do that?), this sounds like “junk science.”

Single-child factor

Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both.

I see that Longman is a bigger “math whiz” than I am.

Consequently, a segment of society in which single-child families are the norm will decline in population by at least 50% per generation and quite quickly disappear.

Really? I would think that, instead of disappearing, they would increase because single kids who marry would have single kids themselves in many cases because they would understand that kind of an environment. Also, for financial reasons (and neither I nor Longman have said anything about that, which I would argue is the number one factor behind whether or not a married couple decide to have kids), a one-child family is a practical solution.

In the USA, the 17.4% of baby boomer women who had one child account for a mere 9.2% of kids produced by their generation. But among children of the baby boom, nearly a quarter descend from the mere 10% of baby boomer women who had four or more kids.

So it sounds to me like this country’s population is going to get really gray really fast while the number of younger Americans dwindles. We’ve known that for some time, and at the end of this post, I’m going to go off a bit with my own opinion on that. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the politics of the vast majority of the people of this country.

This dynamic helps explain the gradual drift of American culture toward religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. Among states that voted for President Bush in 2004, the average fertility rate is more than 11% higher than the rate of states for Sen. John Kerry.

The divorce rate is higher also. How do you then account for the distinct possibility that many kids who grow up in some kind of custody arrangement are going to be more concerned about trying to put their lives back together than actually caring about either mommy or daddy’s politics?

It might also help to explain the popular resistance among rank-and-file Europeans to such crown jewels of secular liberalism as the European Union. It turns out that Europeans who are most likely to identify themselves as "world citizens" are also less likely to have children.

Longman keeps mixing up the populations of Europe and this country while trying to make his case, when in reality he isn’t doing a very job in either location because of the enormous amount of generalities he tries to pass off as scientific evidence.

Rewriting history?

Why couldn't tomorrow's Americans and Europeans, even if they are disproportionately raised in patriarchal, religiously minded households, turn out to be another generation of '68?

A large majority of the people who were raised during that time tended to be conservative despite their exposure to those bad “progressive secularists.” Again, I think it is because of ethnic and cultural factors that you can’t quantify for the purpose of scientific analysis.

The key difference is that during the post-World War II era, nearly all segments of society married and had children. Some had more than others, but there was much more conformity in family size between the religious and the secular. Meanwhile, thanks mostly to improvements in social conditions, there is no longer much difference in survival rates for children born into large families and those who have few if any siblings.

Survival rates have VIRTUALLY NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO with the size of the family into which a child is born! It has more to do with economic, genetic, and social factors affecting the life of the child and access to quality medical care than anything else.

Tomorrow's children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents' values, as often happens. But when they look for fellow secularists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.

Many will celebrate these developments. Others will view them as the death of the Enlightenment. Either way, they will find themselves living through another great cycle of history.

Longman actually makes a good point here about the “baby boom” generation, which may go down, collectively, as the most spoiled bunch of narcissists that the world has ever seen (and I’m a member, so I can say that). In the 50s, the entire political and economic focus of this country was aimed at perpetuating the middle class, and that was partly accomplished by journeying out of the cities into the suburbs (that also meant turning our backs on the cities, but that’s another topic). As some of us may remember, this was the era of Levittown, T.V. dinners, one-earner households and the Ford Fairlaine automobile with the wooden door slots. Those days are dust in the wind, and that is largely a negative development as far as I’m concerned. Subsequent to that, the political and economic focus of this country changed from perpetuating the middle class to acquiring and consolidating wealth for the benefit of a percentage of this country’s population that shrinks by the minute, despite Repug propaganda over lo these many years that “you can be rich too” (though that goal was achieved for a lot of people during the dot.com boom of the ‘90s under – ironically – a Democratic president). I’m hard of my generation because, in the name of drinking the Repug “kool aid” doled out more effectively by Ronald Reagan than anyone else, we allowed the institutions and sense of civic responsibility so valued by many of our parents to disappear by not fighting to uphold them (and I don’t mean to absolve myself on that either). And a consequence of this to me is the decision by many Americans to either not marry or marry without having children in the pursuit of wealth or out of avoidance of past mistakes by their parents or family.

Besides, who’s to say that younger voters who were brought up in conservative families aren’t going to take a long, hard look at their beliefs after living through the utter debacle of the George W. Bush presidency and figure that liberals/progressives/Democrats/whatever aren’t so bad after all?

Those to me are the biggest factors that decide whether or not a couple decides to have kids. Ethnic and/or other cultural factors come into play as far as I’m concerned, but political considerations to me have not one shred of impact. And to me, the capability of a child maturing into adulthood to measure life experience, acquire knowledge, and ultimately develop core beliefs that would be manifest in a political affiliation one way or another is too complicated of a process to be quantified in some half-baked opinion column such at this one.