The Savage Republican

The gents at Powerline direct our attention to this article (via the Washington Times) in Foreign Policy magazine.

"Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It’s more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe that father knows best."

Count this household in that number!

There is much good information in the article that you really should read, but I would like to point you to a couple of paragraphs in particular that spell good news if you are of a conservative bent (as we here at Savage Republican are).

"Falling fertility is also responsible for many financial and economic problems that dominate today’s headlines. The long-term financing of social security schemes, private pension plans, and healthcare systems has little to do with people living longer. Gains in life expectancy at older ages have actually been quite modest, and the rate of improvement in the United States has diminished for each of the last three decades. Instead, the falling ratio of workers to retirees is overwhelmingly caused by workers who were never born. (ed - or were aborted????) As governments raise taxes on a dwindling working-age population to cover the growing burdens of supporting the elderly, young couples may conclude they are even less able to afford children than their parents were, thereby setting off a new cycle of population aging and decline."

Which is exactly why Social Security reform is essential. Without reforms that will allow younger workers the opportunity to take care of themselves, we will never be able to take care of the elderly.

" By comparison, nearly 20 percent of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having had 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 their parents.
Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Nor do single-child families contribute much to future population. The 17.4 percent of baby boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 percent of children born in the next generation."

Our family, sadly, is part of that 7.8% of the population that only had one child...and it was not by choice. I'm certain that the use of DES in our parents generation had something to do with that.

"This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism. Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry. It may also help to explain the increasing 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 those least likely to have children."

And there is the rub dear readers. This explains the rancor, the bile, the vitriol and the anger that you hear out of the left. They know that as divided as this country is, they will soon be outnumbered by those of us in "Jesusland". I will leave the final word, to author Phillip Longman.

"Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father."