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Douthat's Birthrate Obsession Launders White Nationalist Anxieties Julie Hollar ([link removed])


Ross Douthat confesses ([link removed]) to having an obsession with the so-called "baby bust." The New York Times columnist has brought up the supposed perils of low birthrates in countless columns (e.g., 12/14/22 ([link removed]) , 3/27/21 ([link removed]) , 12/2/12 ([link removed]) ), and it played a prominent role in his 2020 book The Decadent Society.
NYT: How Does a Baby Bust End?

In Ross Douthat's imagining (New York Times, 3/27/21 ([link removed]) ) of different ways "the developed world" can "stop growing ever-older," the words "immigration" and "immigrants" never appears.

Many would argue that a declining birthrate is a good thing. It follows when childhood mortality rates decrease, and economic security and women's rights increase. And fewer people on the planet—particularly in fossil fuel-guzzling countries like ours—means less pressure on the Earth's natural resources.

But in his most recent return to the subject, Douthat (1/21/23 ([link removed]) ) argues that such folks have it all backwards:

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe the defining challenge of the 21st century will be climate change, and those who know that it will be the birth dearth, the population bust, the old age of the world.

That's a boldly certain statement from someone without any particular expertise in either climate science or demography, and it flies in the face of repeated assertions of the urgency of the climate crisis from global ([link removed]) experts ([link removed]) .

But Douthat explains—citing Roger Pielske, Jr., who's been called the "single most disputed and debunked person in the science blogosphere" (Climate Progress, 3/3/14 ([link removed]) )—that "some of the worst-case scenarios for climate change have become less likely ([link removed]) than before." Meanwhile, Covid pushed birth rates down faster; therefore, the baby bust takes the crown in this competition you didn't know was being waged.

To support his claim, Douthat names the threats to "rich and many middle-income nations": "general sclerosis, a loss of dynamism and innovation, and a zero-sum struggle between a swollen retired population and the overburdened young." In other words, a population decline in these countries would be bad for the economy, and bad for the quality of life of either the old or the young.

Frankly, that sounds like a lot less of a "defining challenge" than current scientific concerns that "even less-than-extreme increases in global temperatures will intensify heat and storms, irreversibly destabilize natural systems and overwhelm even highly developed societies" (Washington Post, 1/6/23 ([link removed]) ).

And, of course, poorer countries will fare even worse from climate disruption. That Douthat believes—sorry, "knows"—that economic stagnation in middle- and upper-income countries is a more dire threat than destabilized natural systems that could overwhelm all societies, but disproportionately impact poor ones (not to mention nonhuman species), offers your first clue that behind Douthat's birthrate obsession lurks something much more tied to right-wing nativism than he will ever openly admit.


** 'Rules' for an 'aging world'
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First, it's highly debatable that a population bust is even an economic problem—and it's certainly not an unsolvable one. As economist Dean Baker (CEPR.net, 1/17/23 ([link removed]) ) points out, Japan's population has been decreasing for more than 10 years, yet its standard of living continues to grow. Baker argues that increasing productivity can offset demographic changes, and that governments have many other economic policy tools to deal with such changes successfully, just like Japan has done.

Meanwhile, the costs of climate change already total an estimated $2 trillion since 1980 in the United States alone, and are estimated ([link removed]) to reach upwards of $23 trillion globally by 2050. Small island nations face the steepest challenges: The IMF estimates ([link removed]) that they will endure costs of up to 20% of their GDP for the next 10 years. And developed nations consistently fail to meet the targets scientists say are necessary to stave off the worst outcomes. So, really, which is the more certain crisis?
NYT: Five Rules for an Aging World

Douthat's "rules for an aging world" (New York Times, 1/21/23 ([link removed]) ) read like a right-wing wish list.

But assuming the primacy of a population decline "crisis" conveniently offers Douthat a springboard to ignore urgent climate policies and instead promote several policies from the conservative wish list. In his recent Times column ([link removed]) , he offered some of these in the form of "rules" for this "aging world." Too many old people? Trim their entitlements. Not enough innovation? Clear away pesky regulatory hurdles.

Douthat's third rule—"Ground warfare will run up against population limits"—is exactly what you fear it sounds like: "Vladimir Putin’s mobilization efforts aren’t what they presumably would be if his empire had more young people." That's right, one of the problems with the so-called population bust is that there won't be enough bodies to sacrifice to hawkish governments' military adventures.

Rule Four is where it starts to get even more interesting. That rule, according to Douthat, is that countries with higher birthrates will have "a long-term edge" over the others. (Notice he's concerned with birthrates specifically here, not just population growth rates. I'll come back to that in just a minute.)

This takes us to Rule Five: "The African Diaspora will reshape the world." Here Douthat offers up a curious fact: "Africa’s population is still on track to reach 2.5 billion in 2050, and reach 4 billion by 2100." But wait! If the population of Africa, which currently stands at about 1.4 billion ([link removed]) , could nearly triple by the end of the century, do we really have a population bust on our hands?


** No global 'birth dearth'
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You wouldn't know it from Douthat's incessant hand-wringing, but the human population isn't projected ([link removed]) to start shrinking for another 54 years. Before then, it's expected to grow from just over 8 billion today to nearly 10-and-a-half billion, due to continued growth in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

In other words, there is no global "birth dearth," the planet is not in an "age of demographic decline," and we are not experiencing "the old age of the world"—all phrases he uses in this column—unless you erase a large chunk of that world, which just so happens to be a predominantly Black and brown one.

The global population continues to swell, which means that even if we believed the argument that a country with a declining population will suffer economically, there's a straightforward solution to that problem (assuming you're not interested in forcing women to bear more children—which, notably, Douthat is ([link removed]) ) that would immediately kick the can down the road a good 50 years, something no serious person believes can be done with climate change. That solution is to welcome more of the many migrants seeking entry to such countries, who are instead largely demonized, criminalized and denied their basic human rights.

But Douthat doesn't see those Black and brown migrants as solutions. If "even a fraction of this population" migrates, he warns ominously,

the balance between successful assimilation on the one hand, and destabilization and backlash on the other, will help decide whether the age of demographic decline ends in revitalization or collapse.


** 'Fear of a Black continent'
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NYT: Fear of a Black Continent

Truth be told, Douthat himself (New York Times, 10/20/18 ([link removed]) ) seems plenty worried about African babies.

Lest you think that by including the possibility of "revitalization" in there, Douthat is somehow signaling an openness to such migration, a look back at other columns he's written about immigration will quickly dispel that notion.

In Europe, he argued (10/1/22 ([link removed]) ):

The preferred centrist solution to both economic stagnation and demographic diminishment, mass immigration, has contributed to Balkanization, crime and native backlash—even in a progressive bastion like Sweden.

He was even more blunt in a column (10/20/18 ([link removed]) ) headlined "Fear of a Black Continent"—subtitled "Why European elites are worrying about African babies." In it, Douthat warned of the dangers of increasing African migration to Europe, but said that attempts to slow the African birthrate would be "cruel"—so, instead,

anyone who hopes for something other than destabilization and disaster from the Eurafrican encounter should hope for a countervailing trend, in which Europeans themselves begin to have more children.

If that sounds eugenics-like, it's because it is. Concerns about differential birth rates were common ([link removed]) in the early 20th century anti-immigrant eugenics movement; Teddy Roosevelt famously blamed "American" women who chose not to have children for "race suicide ([link removed]) " in the context of record levels of immigration. Douthat never describes dark-skinned immigrants as inferior, but he does repeatedly paint them as a threat linked to crime, distrust, destabilization and disaster.

In a column (11/6/16 ([link removed]) ) crediting Donald Trump's rise to white families not having enough children (which he in turn blames on the "social revolutions of the 1970s"), Douthat suggested that "mass immigration…exacerbates intergenerational alienation, because it heightens anxieties about inheritance and loss." Read: Old white people who don't have at least 4.4 grandchildren worry they have no legacy in an increasingly diverse country.

While this is no doubt true to a certain extent, blaming the "ethno-racial anxiety" of white Republicans on immigration and women's rights gives a big fat get-out-of-jail-free card to misogynists and nativists like Trump who stoke those bigotries.


** White anxiety
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NYT: The Necessity of Stephen Miller

Making the right seem respectable is Douthat's main job at the New York Times (1/27/18 ([link removed]) )—and that means making white nationalists, who play such a large part in the modern right, respectable too.

In fact, in another eyebrow-raising column (1/27/18 ([link removed]) ), Douthat even urged Democrats to give a seat at the immigration policy table to Trump adviser Stephen Miller, architect of Trump's barbaric and unconstitutional family separation policy ([link removed]) . Douthat concluded that it's "reasonable" to want, like Miller, to reduce immigration, because "increased diversity and the distrust it sows have clearly put stresses on our politics."

Douthat tried to draw a distinction between immigration restrictionists who are "influenced by simple bigotry," and the "real restrictionists" like Miller (who presumably have nobler motivations, like opposing "increased diversity"). Comprehensive immigration reform has failed, according to Douthat, because immigration advocates have insisted on excluding people like Miller from the table, thinking

that restrictionists can eventually be steamrolled—that the same ethnic transformations that have made white anxiety acute will eventually bury white-identity politics with sheer multiethnic numbers.

Here's your friendly reminder that Miller is a white supremacist who sent hundreds of emails to Breitbart News (Southern Poverty Law Center, 11/12/19 ([link removed]) ) promoting

white nationalist websites, a "white genocide"–themed novel in which Indian men rape white women, xenophobic conspiracy theories and eugenics-era immigration laws that Adolf Hitler lauded in Mein Kampf.

Nationalist opposition to "mass immigration" doesn't have to be racist, Douthat (7/8/17 ([link removed]) ) argued elsewhere:

It can just be a species of conservatism, which prefers to conduct cultural exchange carefully and forge new societies slowly, lest stability suffer, memory fail and important things be lost.

What are those important things, exactly? Douthat made his ideal—and disappearing—society clear in a paean to WASP rule (12/5/18 ([link removed]) ) upon the death of George H.W. Bush. In that (also roundly ([link removed]) criticized ([link removed]) ) column, headlined "Why We Miss the WASPs," he wrote:

​​Americans miss Bush because we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

NYT: Why We Miss the WASPs

Douthat (New York Times, 12/5/18 ([link removed]) ) says "we" miss the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite because "a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is, and act accordingly."

No matter that they were also "bigoted and exclusive and often cruel"—after all,

for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists.

That column, notably, drew on the same concept of "trust" he routinely brings up in his arguments against immigration. Douthat argued that the ruling WASPs "inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today." It's not clear what kind of trust Douthat imagines this white ruling class, constructed on a foundation of slavery, inspired in Black and brown Americans. More likely, Douthat is incapable of imagining the experiences of such Americans. Bush ([link removed]) himself rode to victory on the infamously racist Willie Horton ad, and escalated the racist "war on drugs," damaging social cohesion in ways immigration can scarcely dream of.

Douthat seems to want to believe that racism and sexism were incidental to WASP power rather than fundamental to its rise and maintenance. That you can defend a white nationalist and advocate modern-day positive eugenics without bearing any responsibility for racist, xenophobic extremism. If we were to take Douthat's advice to ignore the climate crisis and pursue high birth rates in developed countries, we would increase the stress on the imperiled planet for no clear purpose—other than trying desperately to keep the world as white as possible.
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ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) (Twitter: @NYTimes ([link removed]) ). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
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