“Everybody’s Babies Are Awesome”
“Curiously enough, these two views, positivity towards high fertility and positivity towards immigration, rarely coincide…
since 2010, population growth has been strikingly low. In 2016, it was below the lowest forecast range from forecasts made as recently as 2013. That’s genuinely alarming. You should be hearing demography-sirens in your head and looking around for population growth sources…
because the academy is dominated by a certain ideological subset, conservatives see the gatekeepers to the middle class seeking to actively undermine the intergenerational transmission of love, longing, purpose, and place. We want education for our kids because we want them to be prosperous, productive members of society; and in turn the gatekeeper says, “Fine, but your child must also abandon the things you think are actually most important in life.” So we become hostile to universities. We come to view academics as “elites”…
the “elites” “destroying” “our culture” seem to have a vision of a new culture to replace the lost one: the culture of other countries. Nordic socialism with a Hispanic population, evidently. “Somebody else’s babies.”…
We need a growing population by both means to ensure that the tree of liberty is constantly renewed by those bred and raised up never knowing the bitterness of tyranny, knowing only the full flower of freedom — and also those who can remind natives why freedom matters, why our prosperity is so valuable, why our institutions are worth fighting for.”
There were a lot of ideas in here that I’d never encountered, or never heard described in this way. It’s irrelevant whether I “agree” with it, I learned a lot by spending time in a slightly different perspective and having my eyes opened to a set of deeply held concerns that I was unfamiliar with.
I realize that there are a lot of conservative policies that I can better understand with this lens. The thing I hate the most is when I look at someone’s behavior and find myself saying “Why??” because I can find no reasonable explanation. An irrational person is not someone you can really communicate with, which is frightening. It’s exhilarating to encounter the rationality
This further reminds me that the liberal mindset, and the set of problems that we are aware of and concerned with, must also be very opaque from the outside. We tend to assume that big problems, and our motivation to fix them, are obvious and universal but they really, really aren’t.
