Conservatives are not at fault for leftists living like, well, leftists.
The grim realities of demographic collapse are becoming clear, even to some on the left. Naturally, they’re still trying to deflect blame onto conservatives. For example, prominent left-wing writer Matt Yglesias recently complained that “an interesting feature of conservatism is that the right is very interested in fertility, yet nobody criticizes Trump for neither trying nor succeeding in doing anything about it. Nor does anyone ever express any doubt about the ‘tweet charts while doing nothing’ strategy.”
This is false. Tim Carney, who literally wrote a book on this, commented that “an interesting thing about Matt is that he never reads conservatives and then opines boldly on what they don’t say.” Others, including conservative demographer Lyman Stone and my Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague Patrick Brown (who puts out an excellent weekly newsletter on family policy), chimed in with similar sentiments.
There are indeed conservatives who are working on and writing about family policy, and they are willing to criticize Republican politicians, including the president, when needed. But there is more here than one writer’s echo chamber. There are many divisions between right and left on family policy and fertility, but underlying them is the reality that conservatives are the ones still having babies.
The fertility collapse is primarily a problem of the left. Conservatives, especially religious social conservatives, are doing our part to be fruitful and multiply, whereas childbearing declines as leftism increases and religion decreases. Conservatives are more likely to marry (and marry younger), and then to hope for and to have more babies. Religious believers, especially those who attend services weekly or more, are especially likely to have more children. And those having large families (five or more children) are overwhelmingly religious.
The baby bust has a simple solution: Get married and go to church. A nation of devout, married conservatives would be comfortably above replacement fertility. Of course, we don’t have that sort of nation (anymore), and so we face the problem of how to get everyone else, from nominally religious moderates to angry atheist Democratic Socialists, to have babies like the religious right. Or to join the religious right.
Good luck with that.
After all, though cratering fertility has enormous social, political, and economic ramifications, the government cannot address it directly. Our leaders cannot just order up more babies; rather someone has to have them. Some people don’t want to, and many who do nonetheless feel that they are not yet ready to have children — often because they are still looking for someone to conceive and raise children with. Thus, the birth rate problem is really a problem of marriage and sex and culture.
Thus, the indirect efforts that the government can use to try to raise fertility will often implicate the most contentious parts of the culture war. And, of course, there is also a lot of potential for ugly unintended consequences. This doesn’t mean that government can do nothing, but it does mean that raising the birth rate is difficult, and that those efforts cannot be neutral about the nature of the human person and the good life.
Family policy means viewing statecraft as soulcraft, nudging people and culture toward a vision of the good. In short, effective family policy means getting leftists to live more like conservatives, and that’s a sticking point.
Yet we know that the left’s approach to sex, marriage, and family doesn’t get it done. To the extent the left has a positive model for marriage and children, it is as a capstone following an extended adolescence — explore, indulge, achieve, and then settle down and have a baby or two sometime after age 30 — but don’t let them derail your career!
The left’s preferred family policies are structured around this model, and so they focus on subsidized childcare, subsidized IVF, and so on. But stacking ever more government subsidies on ever more social liberalism does not work. Well, at least it doesn’t work to meaningfully raise the birth rate, though it may boost the bank accounts of those already committed to it.
And the left’s model of marriage and family — sow your wild oats in your 20s, and then settle down into a (kinda) conservative life in your 30s — especially doesn’t work for the working class, which has been devastated by the sexual revolution.
Meanwhile, religious conservatives keep having babies. As a matter of policy and practice, it is the religious right that has got this figured out. Imperfectly, yes, of course — we’re still human, but social conservatism’s pro-life and pro-family policies and culture are proving to be the most coherent and successful pro-natal agenda we’ve got.
And the culture goes with the policies. Social conservatism encourages adults to put children’s needs first, and to care about family before self. This makes marriages more stable and provides more community and family help for those with children. Thus, a conservative culture also requires fewer government interventions and subsidies. And this culture is self-reinforcing; being around married couples having babies creates social norms and behaviors that encourage (and make it easier) for other young people to get married and have babies.
Policy matters, of course, from housing to education to the tax code to public safety. And, judging by internal migration patterns within America, conservatives are doing a better job for families on those as well. So Yglesias and others on the left who claim to care about the baby bust ought to pay attention to the religious conservative family policy wonks, because they represent the only Americans still having plenty of babies.
