Ross Douthat has argued for years that America is a decadent society; his Exhibit A is our, to him, unacceptably low birthrate. More recently, however, he has finally looked around the world and ascertained that other, more socially conservative countries have even lower birthrates than we do. His new conclusion is that only America can save the world from the declining population bomb. What is going on here?
The reasons for, and solutions to, a declining birth rate are perfectly obvious. If you have a society that gives women lots of opportunities for economic advancement–in all likelihood, requires them to work–but also puts virtually all of the demands of bearing and raising children on them, you’re not going to have many children. There aren’t enough hours in a day.
The reactionary “solution” to this is to envision a country in which men do all of the paying work and women can afford to stay at home and have children–America in the 1950s, in other words. Of course, the reactionaries have no idea how to get there from here except through tariffs. The more plausible approach is to encourage men to play a much bigger role in taking care of children. If you’ve seen the new Amazon commercial that uses the Chicago song “25 or 6 to 4” as a background, you have seen the ideal type for this more feminist society; the stay-at-home dad does a great job with the baby and is rewarded with sex by the mother for his hard work.