The
Fertility Gap
Liberal
politics will prove fruitless as long as liberals refuse to multiply.
BY
ARTHUR C. BROOKS
Wall Street Journal Op-Ed
Tuesday, August 22, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
This is the second article that is speaking specifically of "liberal" birthrates in the US, Canada and Europe, being in free fall.
It is not the "Liberal" non-believers and liberal non bible believing churches committing suicide en masse that is our real concern here. Our major concern is the infiltration in other guises of their teachings and doctrines among Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Pentecostals and Charismatics. (all of which Which has been at work for some time) which is causing the bible beleiving church o abort itself en masse out of existence as well.
From the article below we see that Liberals are having 1.5 children per household. and that Conservatives are having 2.0 per household. The article in viewing this as political polling data falls far short of the meaning of these figures as to the future of our nation and western civilization.
There are other News Articles posted on this site where the meaning of these falling population figures spelled out in a more meaninful way.
On
the political left, raising the youth vote is one of the most common goals.
This implicitly plays to the tired old axiom that a person under 30 who is not
a liberal has no heart (whereas one who is still a liberal after 30 has no
head). The trouble is, while most "get out the vote" campaigns
targeting young people are proxies for the Democratic Party, these efforts haven't
apparently done much to win elections for the Democrats. The explanation we
often hear from the left is that the new young Democrats are more than
counterbalanced by voters scared up by the Republicans on "cultural
issues" like abortion, gun rights and gay marriage.
But
the data on young Americans tell a different story. Simply put, liberals have
a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a
long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result.
According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you
picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find
that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives,
you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable
party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates
into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future
elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%--explaining,
to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns
today.
Alarmingly
for the Democrats, the gap is widening at a bit more than half a percentage
point per year, meaning that today's problem is nothing compared to what the
future will most likely hold. Consider future presidential elections in a swing
state (like Ohio), and assume that the current patterns in fertility continue.
A state that was split 50-50 between left and right in 2004 will tilt right by
2012, 54% to 46%. By 2020, it will be certifiably right-wing, 59% to 41%. A
state that is currently 55-45 in favor of liberals (like California) will be
54-46 in favor of conservatives by 2020--and all for no other reason than
babies.
The
fertility gap doesn't budge when we correct for factors like age, income,
education, sex, race--or even religion. Indeed, if a conservative and a liberal
are identical in all these ways, the liberal will still be 19 percentage points
more likely to be childless than the conservative. Some believe the gap
reflects an authentic cultural difference between left and right in America
today. As one liberal columnist in a major paper graphically put it,
"Maybe the scales are tipping to the neo-conservative, homogenous right in
our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the
ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious
sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the
health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation." It would
appear liberals have been quite successful controlling overpopulation--in the
Democratic Party.
Of
course, politics depends on a lot more than underlying ideology. People vote
for politicians, not parties. Lots of people are neither liberal nor
conservative, but rather vote on the basis of personalities and specific
issues. But all things considered, if the Democrats continue to appeal to
liberals and the Republicans to conservatives, getting out the youth vote may
be increasingly an exercise in futility for the American left.
Democratic
politicians may have no more babies left to kiss.