In the United States, where fertility has been below replacement for about a decade, the average woman now has 1.77.
.. Perhaps the United States is becoming more like the rest of the industrialized world, where declining birthrates are correlated with a lack of support for working mothers.
.. Developed countries that prioritize gender equality — including Sweden, Norway and France — have higher fertility rates than those that don’t.
.. The world’s lowest fertility rates are in countries that are economically developed but socially conservative, where women have professional opportunities but must shoulder most of the burdens of domestic life.
.. Peter McDonald theorized that if women have educational and employment opportunities nearly equal to those of men, “but these opportunities are severely curtailed by having children, then, on average, women will restrict the number of children that they have
.. in Sweden, women were more likely to have a second child if their male partner took paternity leave with their first child, a proxy for his willingness to share the work of parenting.
.. In Hungary, she told me, couples that shared housework equally had a higher probability of having a second kid.
.. This correlation between feminist social policy and higher fertility is widely recognized throughout the world
.. “feminism is the new natalism.”
.. fertility rates, after reaching a low of around 1.7 children per woman in 1976, rose over the next 30 years, even as Europe’s fertility fell.
.. There were several reasons for this, including substantial levels of Hispanic immigration, a high teen birthrate, and, some speculated, America’s exceptional religiosity.
Since then, however, the teen birthrate in the United States has fallen to an all-time low, Americans have become less religious, Hispanic immigration has slowed, and Hispanic fertility rates have declined... rising cost of child care.. If my theory is right, though, it will keep falling unless America invests in paid family leave and subsidized, high-quality child care.. if a shrinking number of workers must support a growing elderly population, even our threadbare social safety net will be strained... survey data shows that women actually desire more kids than they’re having... the “gap between the number of children that women say they want to have (2.7) and the number of children they will probably actually have (1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years.”.. One lesson of cratering fertility rates is that in the modern world, patriarchy is maladaptive.
A Reckoning with Women Awaits Trump
Omarosa Manigault-Newman, the unforgettably forgettable former White House aide in charge of nothing at all, tearfully confessing her global despair. “It’s not going to be O.K.,” she said.
.. Bannon, who is partial to grand pronouncements, acknowledged the political stakes, not least for the President. “You watch. The time has come,” he said. “Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch. This is a definitional moment in the culture. It’ll never be the same going forward . . . The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo ten thousand years of recorded history.”
.. When Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary, left his job after charges, and evidence, of abuse from his two ex-wives became public, the President showed not a trace of sympathy for anyone but Porter himself.
.. This was striking. One former wife had obtained a protective order against Porter; the other presented the F.B.I. with a photograph of herself with a black eye, the result, she said, of a beating Porter delivered her while on vacation in Italy. And yet Trump went to great lengths, in a public statement, to sympathize with the “tough time” that Porter was enduring, to praise the “very good job” he had done, and to express confidence that he had a “wonderful career” ahead of him.
.. Trump responded with similar fellow-feeling when charges were levelled at Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox News, and Roy Moore, the right-wing former judge who had seemed headed to victory in an Alabama Senate race. (Trump, of course, is unforgiving when it comes to Democrats like Al Franken and John Conyers.)
.. Kellyanne Conway, whose defenses of Trump’s most preposterous statements are sometimes so tortured that they become the stuff of late-night satire, could not bear to back the President on this one. She told CNN that she saw “no reason not to believe” Porter’s former spouses. “In this case, you have contemporaneous police reports, you have women speaking to the FBI under threat of perjury,” Conway said. “You have photographs, and when you look at all of that pulled together, Rob Porter did the right thing by resigning.”
.. It has come to the point when even Trump’s closest aides know that a reckoning is coming. It’s not going to be O.K.
We All Live on Campus Now
When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well.
If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.
.. The idea of individual merit — as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege” — is increasingly suspect.
.. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency
.. Polarization has made this worse — because on the left, moderation now seems like a surrender to white nationalism, and because on the right, white identity politics has overwhelmed moderate conservatism.
.. Trump plays a critical role. His crude, bigoted version of identity politics seems to require an equal and opposite reaction.
.. there’s a huge temptation to respond in kind.
.. anger is rarely a good frame of mind to pursue the imperatives of reason, let alone to defend the norms of liberal democracy.
.. Liberals welcome dissent because it’s our surest way to avoid error. Cultural Marxists fear dissent because they believe it can do harm to others’ feelings and help sustain existing identity-based power structures.
.. the impulse to intimidate, vilify, ruin, and abuse a writer for her opinions chills open debate.
.. An entirely intended byproduct of this kind of bullying — and Roiphe is just the latest victim — is silence.
.. only a member of a minority group can speak about racism or homophobia, or that only women can discuss sexual harassment.
.. The only reason this should be the case is if we think someone’s identity is more important than the argument they might want to make
.. left-feminists are not just interested in exposing workplace abuse or punishing sex crimes, but in policing even consensual sex for any hint of patriarchy’s omnipresent threat.
.. In the struggle against patriarchy, a distinction between the public and private makes no sense.
.. There’s a reason that totalitarian states will strip prisoners of their clothing. Left-feminists delight in doing this metaphorically to targeted men — effectively exposing them naked to public ridicule and examination because it both traumatizes the object and more importantly sits out there as a warning to others.
.. Besides, if they’re innocent, they’ll be fine!
.. can anyone justify why the POSSIBLE innocence of men is so much more important than the DEFINITE safety and comfort of women?”
.. we now have a “gender editor” at the New York Times, Jessica Bennett
.. Does she understand that the very word intersectional is a function of neo-Marxist critical race theory? Is this now the guiding philosophy of the paper of record?
.. At The Atlantic, the identity obsession even requires exhaustive analyses of the identity of sources quoted in stories. Ed Yong, a science writer, keeps “a personal list of women and people of color who work in the beats that I usually cover,” so he can make sure that he advances diversity even in his quotes.
.. there is no art that isn’t rooted in identity.
.. I don’t doubt the good intentions of the new identity politics — to expand the opportunities for people previously excluded. I favor a politics that never discriminates against someone for immutable characteristics
.. what we have now is far more than the liberal project of integrating minorities. It comes close to an attack on the liberal project itself. Marxism with a patina of liberalism on top is still Marxism — and it’s as hostile to the idea of a free society as white nationalism is.
.. the core concepts of a liberal society —
- the individual’s uniqueness,
- the primacy of reason,
- the protection of due process,
- an objective truth
— are so besieged, this is one of the reasons.
.. The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke. You see: We are all on campus now.
.. prudence that worries about unintended consequences; that values thrift; that tries to insure itself against future risks; that takes the responsibility of government seriously; that worries about extreme rhetoric; that balances the budget; that insists on constantly taking pains to protect inconvenient constitutional norms; that defends existing institutions. I could go on. It all began with Burke’s recoil from the French Revolution.
.. Is there any institution in the West that is currently less conservative than the GOP?
.. No institution that is integral to our liberal democracy is immune from attack. This includes law enforcement (the FBI), the Justice Department, an independent and free press, the prerogatives of the opposition party, and regular order in the Congress.
It is a party that would impeach a State Supreme Court rather than give up its gerrymandered districts.
.. its cult leader never misses an opportunity to deepen racial divides and to inflame the gender wars.
.. Whatever else this record is, it is an open and outright assault on any concept of prudence, responsibility, or moderation. Which is to say it is an assault on conservatism itself.
.. If there is any future for the conservative soul and mind in America, it will have to start with the wholesale destruction of the current Republican Party. I made that case more than a decade ago now.
‘The Lowest White Man’
Trump is not committed to that wall on principle. He is committed only to looking good as a result of whatever comes of it. Mexico is nevergoing to pay for it, and he knows it. He has always known it. That was just another lie. Someone must have stuck the phrases “chain migration” and “diversity lottery” into his brain — easy buzzwords, you see — and he can now rail against those ideas for applause lines.
But he is completely malleable on actual immigration policy. He doesn’t have the stamina for that much reading. Learning about immigration would require reading more words than would fit on a television news chyron.
.. If Donald Trump follows through with what he said during that meeting, his base will once again be betrayed. He will have proved once again that he was saying anything to keep them angry, even telling lies.
.. And once again, they won’t care.
.. That is because Trump is man-as-message, man-as-messiah. Trump support isn’t philosophical but theological.
.. when Alabama called a constitutional convention in 1901, Emmet O’Neal, who later became governor, argued that the state should “lay deep and strong and permanent in the fundamental law of the state the foundation of white supremacy forever in Alabama,”.. In his essay “Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880,” W.E.B. Du Bois discussed why poor whites didn’t make common cause with poor blacks and slaves but instead prized their roles as overseers and slave catchers, eagerly joining the Klan. This fed the white man’s “vanity because it associated him with the masters,” Du Bois wrote... If he had any ambition at all it was to become a planter and to own ‘niggers.’ To these Negroes he transferred all the dislike and hatred which he had for the whole slave system. The result was that the system was held stable and intact by the poor white.”