Is America deliberately foreclosing its future?
No, but unwarranted leftist pessimism isn't helping.
“A culture that kills its children has no future.” That’s the title of an article by Elizabeth Bruenig in The Atlantic. It was prompted by the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
As Bill Otis points out, however, school shootings have accounted for 169 deaths in the past 23 years. Even if one attributes these death to “culture,” school shootings aren’t threatening the culture’s future .
There’s a sub-culture to which gun violence arguably poses a genuine threat. According to data from the CDC, 2,811 Americans between the ages of one and nineteen were killed by guns in homicides during 2020.
African-American kids made up a vastly disproportionate number of these victims. According to Heather Mac Donald, “black youth between the ages of 10 and 17 were killed at 11 times the rate of white youth in 2020.”
By itself, the high incidence of gun deaths in poor black neighborhoods doesn’t mean this subculture has no future. Other American subcultures were plagued by gang violence, but eventually joined the mainstream and flourished. Yet, taking into account high rates of other crimes, drug use, school drop-outs, and absent fathers, it’s fair to wonder about the future of inner-city blacks.
However, when Bruenig frets about our culture’s future, she isn’t talking specifically about black lives. Instead, she’s airing a list of non-racial left-liberal grievances — problems she describes as “morbid symptoms of a society coming undone [that] arise largely from policy choices made by interested parties with material motives.”
Call that deliberate foreclosure of the future, a category of offense that also includes the impoverishment of American mothers and children far out of proportion to their international counterparts; blithe indifference bordering on outright malice toward any policy or practice suggesting care for the climate, environment, or preservation of the majesty of the natural world; the subtle but rising set of pressures and risks coupled with an overall sense of stagnation that, taken together, amount to the reason Millennials now have the lowest birth rate of any generation on record.
Extremely low birth rates can doom a culture, and U.S. birth rates are too low. Once, they stood out as an exception to declining rates in Europe. Now, as Nicholas Eberstadt says:
U.S. childbearing patterns no longer look so exceptional: Fertility has been sliding steadily since the Great Recession and, in 2019, was almost 20% below replacement level. With the Covid-19 pandemic shock, U.S. fertility fell further in 2020 — and probably did so again in 2021.
But the U.S. is still doing better than our “international counterparts” — the European countries that, I assume, Bruenig holds up as nations not plagued by gun violence, intentional impoverishment of mothers and children, lack of care for climate, etc.
Changes in childbearing patterns are a complex matter. They aren’t all that well understood even by people who, unlike me, know what they’re talking about.
However, as Eberstadt says, demographers accept the unsurprising view that wanted fertility — the number of children women say they desire — is an accurate predictor of a nation’s fertility. And it doesn’t seem like a stretch to believe that wanted fertility declines when large numbers of people believe our culture is racist; that its policy choices are about to produce an environmental apocalypse; that it is “killing its children” — that, in sum, it is deliberately foreclosing its future.
There’s a saying that 90 percent of life is showing up. When it comes to the future, the percentage is closer to 100. The future belongs to those who show up for it.
Immigrants will continue to show up for the future of America and its culture (a partial answer to declining birth rates) which, of course, they will affect. The offspring of the great number of Americans who, while acknowledging serious flaws in our culture (different ones than those Bruenig asserts), believe in the future will also show up. They, too, will affect the course of our culture.
We’ll see to what extent they are joined by the potential offspring of those who see America in the morbid terms with which Bruenig and so many others on the left seek to define it. But with or without them, our culture likely has a robust future.