Falling birth rates worry conservatives

Right wing bloggers have long been concerned with the U.S. birth rate, for a number of reasons. As Roy Edroso writes in today’s Village Voice,

“For one thing, they worry that if America doesn’t outbreed its enemies, democracy is in peril. ‘The Islamic world is reproducing at a rate far above replacement level,’ as Robert Maynard wrote at Renew America in 2010, while ‘America is about in the middle with a birth rate barely above replacement level.”’ The reason: “While we in the west are mired in nihilism, multicultural relativism and self-doubt, radical Muslims have a fanatical devotion to spreading their cause.” Many lunatics and at least one GOP County Committee member have picked up the theme, though its premise is specious at best.

‘That goes for rightbloggers’ domestic enemies as well: In the years before the Obama boom, rightbloggers took to reassuring themselves that, since red state procreation rates were higher than blue state rates, a Republican electoral majority was all but assured for the foreseeable future.

“That’s how Joel Kotkin explained Bush’s victory in 2004: ‘Last month, Democrats swept the largely childless cities–true blue locales like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston, and Manhattan have the lowest percentages of children in the nation–but generally had poor showings in those places where families are settling down,’ he wrote. “… the problem for Democrats isn’t that they are losing among families now. The real problem is that the electoral importance of both nuclear families and the communities where they are congregating is only growing.’

“He added that this also spelled trouble for Democrats among ‘the Latino population–which tends to be more family-oriented than any other group in society… if Latino voters continue to move into the middle class, buy houses, and relocate to more conservative areas… Democrats may have a hard time holding on to them’”

 

For more, see: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/12/drop_in_birth_r.php

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *