In last week’s newsletter, I took a stroll through small independent bookstores in search of the condition of the liberal mind, discovering eco-pessimism and existential angst, a mixture of anxiety about the human future and ambivalence about whether we deserve to have one.
Shortly afterward, the data maven of the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch, delivered what feels a bit like a statistical correlative to my impressionistic diagnosis: a set of charts showing that birthrates among progressives are declining much faster than birthrates among conservatives in America and elsewhere in the developed world. As recently as the 1980s, conservatives and progressives were about equally likely to have kids, but now there’s a widening gap, with fewer and fewer left-of-center people reproducing — almost as though a spirit of pessimism is encouraging the left to cede the future to conservatism.
Does political or cultural pessimism really have a fertility-suppressing impact? On the margins, maybe so. For instance, the first election of Donald Trump seems to have produced a genuine “baby bust” in liberal states, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the second one had a similar effect.
Or again, I’ve listened to enough people talk seriously about the supposed dilemmas of starting a family in a warming world to believe that climate change anxiety has some modest effect on when progressives start a family and how many kids they have.
But if you look at Burn-Murdoch’s data, it’s clear that a self-defeating pessimism can’t be the main driver of liberal childlessness. The ideological divergence starts decades ago, at a time when there was general confidence that the future belonged to liberalism, that the arc of history was likely to bend leftward and that the right would age and die and disappear. (Yes, there has always been progressive angst about fascism or theocracy or environmental disaster, but these were not the defining themes of, say, 1999 or 2008.)
Rather than being primarily about progressivism’s sudden loss of faith in the future, then, falling progressive birthrates should probably be seen as a predictable aspect of the general late-modern fertility decline. To the extent that progressives are just more late-modernized than the right — more secularized, more urbanized, more socially liberal and gender-egalitarian and oriented toward educational attainment — they will inevitably participate more in the era’s defining demographic trend. Or to put it another way, the left is still at the vanguard of historical development and change; it just turns out that the arc of history bends away from human reproduction.
Of course there is more than one way for a worldview to reproduce itself: You can have children or you can convert other’s people children. And it’s here that I suspect that the turn toward liberal angst and pessimism may turn out to matter most for America’s ideological future.
For much of the era quantified in Burn-Murdoch’s charts, progressives were having fewer children, but their cultural influence was steady or increasing, such that it was easy enough to assume that any conservative fertility advantage would be erased by the tendency of young people to adopt progressive politics.
Can that pattern still hold, however, if progressive culture seems both depressing and depressed, besieged and insular, unable to tell stories that young people find attractive?
This isn’t just the kind of problem for the left that many people have identified in the Trump era, where the moralistic intensity of wokeness seems to turn off young people (young men, especially). At least ideological moralism has a certain confidence, a clear ethos, a set of concrete action items. A progressivism that doesn’t know what it wants or where it’s going might be even less attractive.
Let me offer a concrete example, not from independent bookstores this time but from the world of children’s entertainment. In the 1990s the most potent force in that world was the Disney renaissance that began with “The Little Mermaid,” while in the next decade it was the Harry Potter saga.
Neither of these phenomena was overtly political, but both told stories that were deeply compatible with liberal ideas. The Disney movies emphasized the autonomy and self-actualization of their heroines and heroes over and against clueless parents and authority figures, while the Potter universe presented a clash between good-guy meritocrats and bad guys who believed in the purity of aristocratic blood.
Crucially, though, these stories were structured around a promise that liberal individualism could coexist with traditional cultural forms and small-“c” conservative life scripts. Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” could escape her provincial life, refuse her sexist alpha male suitor and find a good man who appreciated her for her intellect — but the good man also turned out to be a handsome prince underneath all the fur! The heroes in Harry Potter could be egalitarian and multicultural and antifascist while also embodying the fusty traditions of an English boarding school — and then go on to get married, have kids and send them on to Hogwarts, too.
More than the allure of libertinism and rebellion, it’s this kind of appeal that seems most likely to draw young people raised by conservative parents toward more liberal ideas and norms: the promise that you can leave behind some of your family’s more constraining beliefs and practices, embrace a certain degree of self-actualization and individualism and still find yourself inside a structured world where various traditional desires are satisfied and honored.
But the cultural shifts of the past decade, the woke turn and the pessimistic hangover, have yielded a different kind of storytelling-for-kids: Romance has diminished or disappeared, villains are amorphous or impersonal, exploration is regarded skeptically, and a kind of communal hand-holding is the order of the day. In Disney’s recent movies especially, both the excitement of individualism and the reassurances of happily-ever-after traditionalism seem notably diminished, and the stories are not so much didactic (though they can be that) as they are unfocused, boring and a bit depressing.
I’m not saying that children brought up in this landscape will all become traditionalists in some kind of reaction against the mediocrity of “Lightyear” or “Wish” or “Moana 2.” The culture as a whole seems to be generating fragmentation and extremity, and most right-wing cultural paths have their own profound problems.
All I’m suggesting is that for most of my adult life, there were smooth and natural-seeming pathways from a relatively conservative upbringing into a relatively liberal young adulthood. And those roads aren’t nearly as smooth and appealing anymore. The extra children being born to conservative parents right now may not keep their inherited worldviews. But their conversions and rebellions are likely to look quite different from those in the Clinton or Obama eras and involve strange ruptures rather than a simple glide path to the left.
Breviary
Max Colchester and David Luhnow on Britain’s immigration debacle.
Mark Lilla and Henry Oliver on Sam Tanenhaus’s biography “Buckley.”
Helen Andrews on Joan Didion’s political illusions.
Julianna Ress on Hollywood casting what-ifs.
Alan Jacobs on selling the poison and the cure.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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