Who's your Daddy?

[gaijindabe]

Lifting a good e-mail and re-posting here. Guilty as charged..

By JAMES TARANTO
Who's Your Daddy?
In the new issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Phillip Longman of the liberal New America Foundation has a fascinating essay on demographics and politics--the gist of which is that differing reproductive patterns are likely to make Western societies, including the U.S., more conservative.
Specifically, those who practice patriarchy--which Longman defines not in the crude feminist sense of men dominating women but as "a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station"--are outbreeding those who do not:
In the United States, ._._. the percentage of women born in the late 1930s who remained childless was near 10 percent. 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. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer women who had four or more children. These circumstances are leading to the emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one's own folk or nation.
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.
This of course dovetails with the Roe effect, which surely magnifies the political consequences. Support for unrestricted abortion defines the contemporary Democratic Party more than any other issue does, and abortion advocates' open contempt toward those who disagree makes it hard for the latter to be Democrats. Longman draws a lesson from military history after the agricultural revolution:
In more and more places in the world, fast-breeding tribes morphed into nations and empires and swept away any remaining, slow-breeding hunters and gatherers. It mattered that your warriors were fierce and valiant in battle; it mattered more that there were lots of them.
That was the lesson King Pyrrhus learned in the third century B.C., when he marched his Greek armies into the Italian peninsula and tried to take on the Romans. Pyrrhus initially prevailed at a great battle at Asculum. But it was, as they say, "a Pyrrhic victory," and Pyrrhus could only conclude that "another such victory over the Romans and we are undone." The Romans, who by then were procreating far more rapidly than were the Greeks, kept pouring in reinforcements--"as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city," the Greek historian Plutarch tells us. Hopelessly outnumbered, Pyrrhus went on to lose the war, and Greece, after falling into a long era of population decline, eventually became a looted colony of Rome.
Roe v. Wade thus may turn out to be have been a Pyrrhic victory for supporters of abortion.
Longman also rebuts the Platzer effect, the hypothesis that youthful rebellion, à la the 1960s, will counter the reproductive advantage of cultural conservatives:
The key difference is that during the post-World War II era, nearly all segments of modern societies married and had children. Some had more than others, but the disparity in family size between the religious and the secular was not so large, and childlessness was rare. Today, by contrast, childlessness is common, and even couples who have children typically have just one. 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 always happens. But when they look around for fellow secularists and counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.
Patriarchy does not necessarily sustain itself, Longman acknowledges; both men and women may be put off by the restrictions it imposes on their freedom. Yet freedom--in this context meaning sex divorced from obligation--appears to be self-limiting, at least over a span of generations.

[Mr_Wizard]

[widebody911]

Summary: religious conservative, anti-abortion Republicans have more kids, and therefore will wipe out secular liberals.

What I find funny is the assumption that these wealthy conservatives are not having abortions; I'll bet dollars to donuts that there's more abortions happening amongs the bluebloods than you'd like to admit; after all, they have more social standing to lose from an out-of-wedlock birth. On the flip side, the 'conservatives' that are cranking out all the kids are the PWT of the bible belt, who are Republicans because their ministers tell them they're supposed to be.

[singpilot]

What everyone is missing here is that the majority of the births here in the southern states are first generation citizens. Whose mother and father now have rights to social services from the public till. Reguardless of how they got here, drop a kid on this side of the border, and you are here forever.

Gald I am not going to be around to see the mess that makes in this country for generations to come.

[EdT82SC]

People said the same thing about the Italians and Irish 100 years ago. (I'm half Italian and 1/8 Irish, and those parts of my family came to the U.S. in the early 20th century). The amount being spent on those illegals is a couple orders of magnitude less then the amount we spend on Iraq, and that is less money then we spend on farm subsidies.

[gaijindabe]

Originally posted by widebody911

I'll bet dollars to donuts that there's more abortions happening amongs the bluebloods than you'd like to admit..

Chuckle.

Blue blood (or lack of it) also has little to do with this. This is not about immigration. Although that plays into it.

The Thurstons and their Lovies that get abortions have less kids than those that don't. Those that hold certain values have more kids. That all.

"those who practice patriarchy--which Longman defines not in the crude feminist sense of men dominating women but as "a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station"--are outbreeding those who do not"

[legion]

Originally posted by widebody911
What I find funny is the assumption that these wealthy conservatives are not having abortions; I'll bet dollars to donuts that there's more abortions happening amongs the bluebloods than you'd like to admit; after all, they have more social standing to lose from an out-of-wedlock birth. On the flip side, the 'conservatives' that are cranking out all the kids are the PWT of the bible belt, who are Republicans because their ministers tell them they're supposed to be.

That's irrellevant to this discussion. The FACT is they are having more kids.