This is a thinly veiled call for building up the Aryan race in order to win elections. Sorry, DLC apologists -- this is simply indefensible, over-the-top racist thinking.
(Note: The DLC also takes the opportunity to mallign the term "progressive" by taking it as their own while they are just the opposite of progressive.)
http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=127&subid=170&contentid=253870Baby Bust
Progressives aren't having as many babies as conservatives. Democrats should learn how to appeal to families.
By Phillip Longman
What are the differences between "blue states" and "red states?" There are many, of course. People in blue states, for example, tend to be richer and better educated, and to drink more expensive coffee. But here is another point of contrast that has far deeper implications for the future of the nation's culture and politics. People in blue states tend to have far fewer children.
Indeed, if one looks at all the states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 and thinks of them as a nation unto themselves, that nation has a European-level fertility rate of just 1.86 children per woman, which is far below the level needed to replace the population. Meanwhile, in Bush Country, fertility rates are some 12 percent higher. Producing an average 2.08 children per woman, Bush Country has the highest fertility rate of any industrialized nation on earth. It wasn't always this way. One hundred years ago, progressives like Mary Harris "Mother" Jones embraced the "family wage," "maternal feminism," and many other policies designed to protect the family from the predations of capitalists and an increasingly global economy.
During the 1930s, prominent progressives, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, denounced an economic system that forced mothers of young children into factories and clerical jobs. Common sense suggests that working class supporters of the New Deal had, on average, more children than the economic royalists who opposed it. It's thus no surprise that, in defense of the family, Perkins and other New Dealers structured programs such as Social Security so that they would reward and protect married women who took the economic risk of being full-time mothers.
Yet sometime in the 1960s, the connection between progressivism and defense of the traditional family began to break down, with consequences that today are leading to
progressives around the world being quite literally out-bred by those who adhere to more conservative values. Fortunately, if Democrats can remember and revive their pro-family politics of the past, they may once again broaden their appeal and halt this trend.
But first, progressives must acknowledge the problem. Today, a remarkable feature of our politics is that people on the left have significantly fewer children than those on the right, and by and large don't see any problem with that. Being on the left has come to have less to do with whether you must struggle to feed your children, and more to do with how you feel about abortion, environmentalism, gender equity, gay rights, church attendance, and the questioning of traditional family values.
This pattern holds not only in the United States but in all advanced societies these days. In Western Europe, for example, polling data has revealed correlations that many Americans will recognize in their own life experience. Demographer Ron J. Lesthaeghe has found that people in Europe who distrust the military; who seldom, if ever, go to church; who support environmentalism, minority rights, legalized abortion, and other "progressive" issues, are far less likely to have children than those who take opposing views.
In the United States, we see such correlations between fertility and political stance most clearly in the election maps.
For example, in eight states, 60 percent or more of all non-Hispanic white women ages 25 through 29 have no children. They are Massachusetts, in which 70 percent of such women are childless, followed by New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, California, Colorado, and Maryland. All but one of them -- Colorado -- voted for Kerry. In contrast, in eight other states, 40 percent or less of non- Hispanic white women ages 25 through 29 are childless. These are Arizona, West Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, Idaho, Mississippi, Utah, and Wyoming -- all solid Bush states. Similarly, such indicators as a state's average age of first marriage, its percentage of unmarried heterosexual couples, and its percentage of same-sex households correlate very strongly both with its overall fertility and with its voting patterns. For example, the areas of the country where Kerry prevailed in 2004 are the same areas where age of first marriage is highest and children are fewest. Conversely, George W. Bush got the largest share of votes in areas where cohabitating unions are comparatively rare and children plentiful. In a bastion of Democratic liberalism like Seattle, there are nearly 45 percent more dogs than children. In a stronghold of religious conservatism like Salt Lake City, there are 18 percent more children than dogs.
There are many reasons why progressives should be alarmed by these trends. First, of course, is the simple danger of demographic decline. Today, because of the unprecedented increase in the number of childless adults and single-child families, the next generation is being produced by a comparatively narrow, and for the most part very conservative, segment of the population. But there are also deeper reasons why progressives need to rethink their attitudes toward children and human reproduction generally. Put bluntly, progressives have much more at stake than conservatives do in promoting pro-natal policies, even if these policies are not specifically pointed at raising the birthrates of progressives themselves.
One reason, as we can see starkly today in Europe, is that low birthrates make financing the welfare state increasingly difficult. Progressives who like to start sentences with the phrases like, "In Sweden, they ..." should look at how that country has been compelled in recent years to slash pension and other old-age benefits to compensate for its low fertility rate.
In the United States, the fact that birthrates have drifted much lower than the levels anticipated by the architects of Social Security and Medicare has created huge unfunded liabilities in those programs. Part of the reason progressivism flourished in the 1960s and 1970s was that so many people thought the baby boom would go on forever, making programs like Medicare and wage indexing for Social Security seem affordable.
A stereotype about progressives holds that the reason they have fewer children is that they are too selfish or self-absorbed. Maybe some are. Others may be so keenly aware of the planet's problems, from the threat of nuclear war to environmental degradation, that they despair of bringing more children into the world. But the broader and more obvious truth is that most progressives, just like everyone else, do want to have children, and would welcome government help in smoothing the tensions between work and family.
So would many people who today vote Republican, but who have little material benefit to show for it. As Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam observed last November in the conservative Weekly Standard: "Despite the fact that families with children are among the most reliable Republican constituencies, President Bush has done surprisingly little to address their needs." Indeed, about the only measure Bush has taken to benefit parents was a minor provision in the 2001 tax cut package that increased the size of the child tax credit, from $600 to $1,000.
Yet perhaps the greatest lesson progressives can learn from these sobering demographics is that they should not fall into the trap of being perceived as the anti-family party. There is, after all, nothing about religious fundamentalists or social conservatives that makes them inherently Republican, much less inherently committed to tax cuts for the rich or pre-emptive wars. What is irreducible is their commitment to family. They will ultimately swing to whichever party seems to defend and promote the family the best, which could be the Democrats, if the party responds to these compelling demographics.
Defending the family could -- and should -- once again become an important part of the progressive agenda. What Mother Jones wrote in her autobiography is still true today: "All the average human being asks is something he can call a home; a family that is fed and warm.
Phillip Longman is a Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It (Perseus, 2004).
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