7/08/2017

Not What We Think Is Happening?

As much as many on the Left think that the parochial ways of non-urbanites will die away to be replaced with the values and mores of the enlightened Progressives (which resemble those of an overindulged and spoiled child), there is a flaw in their thinking and it all comes down to one simple thing – demographics.

In a comment to a post on PJ Media about Trump's visit and so-called Good News/Bad News for Poland opinion piece, one reader points out that the cultural divide between the Urban Elite and non-urban deplorables is not what some people think it is. Reader “Hornspe” uses a personally witnessed example from Paris that illustrates that division.

When a relatively homogeneous society implodes demographically, it is all well and good to draw data from the averages, but many of these European cultures are quite polarized. I was in Paris four years ago when many of the rural folks flooded into the city to express their anger about gay marriage. The French Government made it sound like an invasion, turned out huge numbers of police, shut the train stations etc.

Buses arrived with thousands and thousands of pleasant, friendly people and their children. I have never seen so many kids at a political rally. You would have thought it was a picnic (which it also obviously was). Someone unfurled a banner on top of the Socialist Party HQ that was unkind to the French President. That was the extent of the horror.

I would guess Europe is full of these people. Traditional Europeans who no longer participate in the post-modern cultural life of their country, and do not live like dissipated urban Leftists who eschew "bringing children into a broken world" in favor of being able to pay the rent in central Paris or London, and because kids don't fit in a 60sq/m flat.

If three pair of urban Leftists have no kids, and two pair rural traditionalists have 3 kids, the average is 1.2 kids. This doesn't mean the society is failing (particularly in a world of increased automation) it means the people with the really bad ideas are voting themselves off the island.

Leftism is a memetic disease. It kills its host's next generation. It is like the Black Death. It may wipe out a quarter of the population, but the death will be concentrated in the cities. If the Left is self-selecting out, let them. That's not the end of their civilizations but their renewal.

Do you have the data which falsifies this hypothesis? I can conceive that there might be demographic data cut by political or better, cultural viewpoint (since I think when your choices run the spectrum between Sanders and Clinton, if you like Trump you just quit showing up). Were that data to show this demographic collapse across the whole spectrum, that would suggest I am wrong.

I am taking a shot in the dark here, but I'll bet you'll find that Hornspe isn't wrong. And the speculation applied to Europe would hold true here as well. Many of the families I know in non-urban areas across this country have two or more kids. The single-child or childless couples are rare outside of the blue urban areas. (There aren't nearly as many Progressives outside the blue islands which may be one reason why the birth rate may be higher away from those blue islands.)

While all of this speculation is based upon anecdotal evidence, it would not surprise me in the least that the difference in birth rates is there. Whether or not there is any actual census data which shows the difference between urban and non-urban birth rates as well as differences between Left and Center/Right birth rates is something I do not know at the moment. It's something worth looking into.

If Hornspe's speculations are correct, a number of cultural and political problems are likely to address themselves as the Progressives remove themselves from the gene pool as they do not seem to reproduce in any great numbers, if they reproduce at all. But in the mean time they can cause a lot of damage if we don't counter their efforts to destroy the very things that define us as Americans.