Are The Dems In A Demographic Death Spiral?

by John Hawkins | March 15, 2006 10:20 am

Over at USAToday[1], Phillip Longman worries that liberals are slowly breeding themselves into extinction. Incidentally, he’s probably right to be worried:

“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.

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?

…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.”

Secularism is definitely bad for birth rates and it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising if the libs’ sour, pessimistic view of the world made them less likely to want to bring children into it. But also, it’s fascinating that the word “abortion” didn’t appear anywhere in the article. Could Longman have felt that it was too politically incorrect to mention that millions of liberal votes have likely been aborted out of existence? Some people might deny that, but undoubtedly when you have one group of people who believes abortion is murder and another group that looks at it as birth control, the former group is going to have more children per capita than the latter.

Does that mean the left is doomed demographically? No, not necessarily. They might be able to make up for it in other ways. For example, giving Amnesty to illegals could help bring millions of new voters into the fold. They could also — don’t laugh — freshen up their philosophy and ideas and gain a much higher percentage of new converts.

However, in the short term, because of birth rates and Americans voting with their feet, Conservatives are slowly but surely gaining an advantage. President Bush carried ” 97 of the nation’s 100[2] fastest-growing counties” in 2004. Moreover, the blue states lost electoral votes to the red states last time around and it’s going to happen again in 2010.

This is looking like a slow motion train wreck for the left and it’ll be interesting in the coming years to see if these trends continue.

Endnotes:
  1. USAToday: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-03-13-babybust_x.htm
  2. 97 of the nation’s 100: http://www.patrickruffini.com/archives/2004/11/the_exurbs_1.php

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