Here's my piece from the Aberdeen American News:
Demographics Key to Determining Future
Hannibal of Carthage ranks as one of the most successful generals ever to lose a war. He invaded ancient Rome and by brilliant stratagems destroyed one Roman army after another - all to no avail. The Romans kept producing new armies, and Hannibal was ultimately forced to retreat back to North Africa where, years later, he chose suicide over submission to Rome.
The Romans did not defeat Hannibal on the field. Instead they defeated him in the nursery. The matres and patres of the eternal city begat larger litters than the Carthaginians or Greeks or any other ancient peoples they had to contend with. Demographics turned out to be destiny.
This lesson is not lost on Philip Longman. Writing in Foreign Policy, he argues that developed nations are about to witness a resurgence of patriarchy and religious conservatism. "Patriarchy," he tells us, does not "simply mean that men rule." It means that men select wives according to their status as potential mothers. In such a system men invest loads of time and money in their children, and want a lot of children to invest in.
Human societies have a demographic trajectory that is biologically odd. Precisely at the point that they become most powerful and prosperous, they all but stop making babies. It's just more fun to spend the profits of empire on lavish parties, home improvements and long vacations, than on diapers. This would result in depopulation except that, inevitably, someone among their neighbors will discover the virtues of patriarchy.
This may be a neighboring people, or it may happen in a ghetto three streets over. Either way, those living the high life will sooner or later be overwhelmed by folks who prefer parenthood.
Pagan Rome gave way to Christian Europe not because the Emperor Constantine baptized his soldiers by marching them under rain-laden trees. Christianity won out because its patriarchal followers matched every pagan infant with four or five of their own. It's no coincidence that their religion encouraged them to sacrifice self-fulfillment for the sake of their children.
If Longman's argument is right, then modern liberalism has long been in the business of putting itself out of business. Consider the "Roe Effect." One of the greatest achievements of modern American liberalism occurred when seven members of the Supreme Court scribbled the right to abortion into the margins of the Constitution. But a million and a half abortions a year would have serious demographic consequences.
Black women have a higher abortion rate than Hispanics, who have a higher rate than white women. This means that abortion takes progressively larger cuts out of groups that are more likely to vote Democrat. Women who were never born couldn't punch a chad for Gore or tap a screen for Kerry, nor will their children vote Democrat in 2020.
But even without the Roe Effect, Democrats would be in trouble. A woman who supports gay marriage, who advocates socialized medicine, who is instinctively opposed to the war in Iraq, is likely to have one or no children. A married woman who has four or more children is likely to take the opposite view on each issue.
Do the math. Or let me do it for you. George W. Bush carried 30 states in 2000. In the 1980s, those states commanded 267 electoral votes, not enough to win. In 2000 Bush got 271 electoral votes, one more than he needed. Today those same 30 states command 278 electoral votes.
So far this reflects population shifts more than fertility, but people who move to Republican districts are at least a little more likely to vote GOP later on. Moreover, the fastest growing neighborhoods in the country are in the exurbs, areas detached from city centers but dense enough to support an Olive Garden restaurant and a Barnes and Nobles.
These districts also support a lot of churches and on Sunday mornings bunches of kids are pouring out of scores of minivans. Democrats like to think they are smarter than Republicans, and maybe they are. But Hannibal was smarter than the Romans, and it did him no good at all.
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