"Historians may one day reflect on the open concubinage at the end of America’s experiment with liberal democracy, and what it revealed about the disruption characteristic of our era: the compromise of the right’s typical defense of traditional families by the Nietzscheans of Silicon Valley, in favor of having children for quantity’s sake."
#ElizabethBruenig, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/democrats-pronatalism-family-policies/681827/
Just for the record, no, the left doesn't need pronatalism. In a world with a global population swelled by a temporary energy jackpot (fossil fuels) that's now peaked, we need to allow populations to drop back within Spaceship Earth's natural carrying capacity.
There are lots of debates to be had about how we minimise social disruption while we do that. But treating below-replacement birth rates as a problem to be solved in clearly anachronistic.
This is the most absurd false dichotomy.
"Should humankind continue? If the answer is yes, then we’re already dealing in the realm of pronatalism, where the good of childbearing is taken for granted—and differences in approaches would likely come down to policy particulars. But if the answer is no, then all of politics is moot anyhow."
#ElizabethBruenig, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/democrats-pronatalism-family-policies/681827/
On a finite planet, overpopulation is just as likely to wipe us out as underpopulation.
Strypey
Julian Dax
Camille Winds Down