Shortage of Liberals
Is there a Conservative Conspiracy?
By D.W.

There have been a number of news reports and commentaries about a supposed Liberal baby bust and a Conservative baby boom. The Liberal magazine Foreign Policy even headlined such an article on its cover.

What is going on here?

Are Liberals scared that there is some evil Conservative plan to obtain long term political dominance by out breeding them? Are liberals aborting themselves out of existence? What is the fuss all about anyway?

According to Phillip Longman, a fellow at the New America Foundation, more liberals are either childless or have only one child. He also reports that traditional patriarchal families are on the rise and many of them are having more than two children. What is more terrifying to him is that this trend is worldwide and that it will have profound consequences for global culture and politics.

Mr. Longman wrote an ominous prediction for USA TODAY:

“This dynamic helps explain the gradual drift of American culture toward religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. Among states that voted for President Bush in 2004, the average fertility rate is more than 11% higher than the rate of states for Sen. John Kerry.”

He continues his doom and gloom predictions by stating:

“Many will celebrate these developments. Others will view them as the death of the Enlightenment. Either way, they will find themselves living through another great cycle of history.”

I suppose that Mr. Longman has either found a great way to sell books or he is using this phenomenon to justify absurd social engineering policies.

Let’s think about this for a minute.

Do traditional conservatives want to destroy the developments of the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment gave us the scientific method, modern democracy, the modern nation state, and a host of other developments that are absolutely fundamental to Western civilization.

Is President Bush and the vast right wing conspiracy undermining the scientific method just because they are opposed to funding stem cell research with tax money? Are Christian Fundamentalist advocating for a modern day inquisition that will execute homosexuals? Will Conservatives recreate the feudalistic Middle Ages where only a few people own property and everyone else is a serf?

True conservatives demand less government and are angered by government encroachment on their private lives and property. As a result, Mr. Longman makes an absurd leap in logic to conclude that traditionalist will destroy the foundation of Western civilization.

Another flawed assumption is that just because someone is born into either a conservative or progressive family, they will likely maintain those views throughout their life? I was a Liberal until I actually arrived in the real world and quickly figured out that my nutty college professors were clueless. My parents even voted for Carter and Mondale before they developed some political common sense.

Incidentally, Rush Limbaugh and the new media are converting liberals to conservatism everyday. More importantly, Christian groups are reaching out and converting hundreds of secular progressives and agnostics everyday. Inversely, many other people are abandoning their faith and adopting secularism as a religion. Children of wealthy parents like Teresa Heinz are adopting liberalism and becoming big bankrollers of liberal groups. Of course these people usually never had to actually work for anything and they don’t understand how hard it is to build wealth.

But the point here is that people are not born with a gene for conservatism or liberalism. Such viewpoints are temporal ideas that evolve over time.

Perhaps more people are embracing religion and traditional values because they are wholesome and good. Maybe traditional people are having more babies because a strong family is a beautiful thing and children are a blessing since they require a lot of work and effort to raise. My mother talks endlessly about how proud she is of seeing her children thrive and is proud of all the effort it took to develop us into good human beings.

I will say that people are definitely influenced in profound ways by their parents and the values they were taught as children. In the military you run across a very wide variety of society and you can tell which soldiers were raised in homes without structure. These soldiers require a parental type of leadership and many of them thrive in the military because it provides the structure they never had as children.

People raised in traditional families with traditional values are on the whole likely to live those values throughout their lives, but not always. The same thing is true of people raised in secular families but then happen to embrace a more traditional lifestyle. I will raise my children in a much more structured and values oriented way then how I was raised because a traditional way is better.

But let’s not entertain kooky liberal conspiracy theories about out breeding because they are just plain stupid.

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