Res Publica 2005

There is a group out there that issues something called the Darwin Awards...given to people who kill themselves off for doing really stupid things and thus remove themselves from the gene pool so their stupidity can't be passed down.

Perhaps, there should be cultural Darwin awards for cultural movements that get so involved with other things that they fail to do those things that keep people happy and in sufficient numbers around. This has happened more than once in history, and the result has usually been replacement by another group, or conquest or civil war. Never a pretty picture.

It is wise to remember that the basis of human social organization is the family, first the nuclear group that comes together to pass down the goods and folkways from one generation to the next, and then the extended family, the clan, the kinship group that helps its relatives by being a support group and a way of identifying one's place in the world.

Societies that screw around with this usually get replaced by groups that understand it better.

Western Europe is below replacement levels. England has decided to discard the real family and has nearly half of its children born out of wedlock and in unstable relationships. Replacement is knocking at the door, mostly in the form of Islamic immigrants that are having babies in enough number to take over the land, if not the culture of the people who are too selfish to give themselves a future.

In America, this last election might be the first ringing of the demographics bell. Many people who would have been there once upon a time, voting for the democrats (who should have been there as children of those who feel this way) didn't exist - aborted, birthcontroled out of being.

Asia Times has a good piece about what this might mean to the US:

A correspondent in New York reports that one of the local magazines proclaims that city "the one-child-family capital of the United States". That illustrates why the influence of American metropole will continue to fall.

The demographic shift in favor of "red" (Republican) versus "blue" (Democratic) states helped President George W Bush win last week's election, American commentators have observed. What we have observed thus far is only the thin end of an enormous wedge. Religious ("red") Americans will continue to have children, and secular ("blue") Americans will continue to extinguish themselves.

That America is two nations has become a commonplace. But what is the destiny of these two nations? Demographics is destiny, said August Comte, and the demographics of "blue" America closely resemble the dying Europe with which the "blues" identify. "Red" America, characterized first of all by evangelical Christianity, is thriving.

"Where will the children of the future come from? They will come disproportionately from people who are at odds with the modern environment ... or who, out of fundamentalist or chauvinist conviction ... reject the game altogether," wrote Phillip Longman in The Empty Cradle (review, Faith, fertility and American dominance, September 8). "The religiously minded generally have bigger families than do secularists. In the United States, for example, fully 47% of people who attend church weekly say that the ideal family size is three or more children, as opposed to only 27% of those who seldom attend church."

Surging evangelical participation in last Tuesday's vote surprised the Democrats (' It's the culture, stupid', November 5). That was not the beginning of the end for the Democrats, but (in Winston Churchill's words) the beginning of the beginning. America's population will change and its politics will change as well. Twenty years from now the US religious majority may have a super-majority at all levels of government.

The liberal dystopia has no room for children. Homosexuals, the vanguard of liberated culture, have none, and heterosexuals preoccupied with cutting-edge sexual experimentation have few. The coastal metropolitan regions that gave John Kerry overwhelming support in last week's election resemble Western Europe in some respects (although they attract far more talented immigrants than ever Europe will). The population of New York City will not shrink as fast as Frankfurt's, but the direction is similar.

Take this simple calculation: 44% of the US population of 285 million as of the year 2000 census were evangelical (or "born again") Christians, according to an August 2000 Gallup poll. Let us assume that these 125 million evangelicals average three children per family during the next generation, and that the non-evangelical population averages 1.6 children per family. Within one generation (assuming a 0.5% death rate for both groups), evangelicals will form a majority of 61% of the population. This does not take into account the higher birthrate of devout Catholics, who tend toward social conservatism.

These are simplistic calculations, but it will not take long for the professionals to produce more accurate ones. Like the French and German general staffs before World War I, the strategists of both US political parties will spend the next four years analyzing demographic tables. Apart from the evangelical surge, the failure of the "youth vote" to buoy the Democratic side was another election surprise. In the future, the youth vote will belong increasingly to the Republicans.