I wrote an essay for The Hill, uncomfortably published on election day of all days, where it is currently on the page next to “Five takeaways as Trump wins White House for a second time,” and “RFK Jr. says ‘entire departments’ at FDA ‘have to go’.” I keyed the essay to the election, without knowing the results. Pronatalism won’t be the worst thing Trump’s new regime has in store, but still, don’t fall for it!
The whole essay is on their site, and the introduction here:
Elon Musk was beating the drum of pronatalism long before he became Donald Trump’s biggest supporter. And although Trump has yet to publicly embrace the billionaires’ favorite social cause, the ideologues of his movement surely have. Around the world, hard-right politicians are increasingly turning to pronatalism as the vehicle for their culture war messaging.
Tech bros might seem like strange bedfellows for those fixated on boosting marriage rates in decades past. But the two groups have converged on the urgent need to increase birth rates. Both demands are more tuned toward undermining modern family change than they are toward social policy.
Unfortunately, many liberals are also enticed by the idea that “population collapse” is an imminent threat. Even if they prefer policies that happen to make life better — family leave, childcare, education, housing and healthcare — than the barefoot and pregnant version of pronatalism, both approaches distract from another political problem we have to solve now: immigration.
If you expect people worried about fertility decline in wealthy societies to clamor for more immigrants to prop up our aging populations, you aren’t tracking actual right-wing politics, which has always been more concerned about restoring historical gender regimes and protecting their vision of European culture than addressing the contemporary structural challenges of modern society. That’s why they stoke unfounded fears of population “replacement” when — as it always has before — immigration is poised to elevate the nation’s economic and social prospects.
The hard policy reality is that raising birth rates enough to alleviate the problems of population aging and eventual decline is impossible on the time scale required. Our pension systems will not survive the decades it would take — and the trillions of dollars it would cost — for more babies to become the workers we need.
Keep reading.
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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License
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