A woke culture and a rigged economy are choking the American family
It’s been right chilly of late here in the Shenandoah Valley, so the other day I trashed the planet and fired up the wood stove. Global warming will arrive come spring. Then out of the blue, my auroral languor was rudely interrupted by a ping on my device. I decided to take a look.
What popped up was an intriguing essay in Aporia Magazine, “The Baby Boom: Causes, consequences and implications.” It is a thought-provoking page-turner under the byline Arctotherium, which I learned is a large bear that roamed about in the Pleistocene, a bit before my time.
Before we delve further: Aporia means a contradiction or impasse, e.g. “To be or not to be.” Aporia claims to be “the world’s only sociobiology magazine.” Sociobiology is about how biology influences social behaviour. That can be a contentious topic, but lest we forget, science and controversy have been joined at the hip for ages.
Contrarian view
Right off the bat the author debunks the conventional wisdom that falling fertility “appears to be the inevitable price of modernity.” The mid 20th century Baby Boom happened in the most advanced and affluent societies on the planet. So rising prosperity alone does not account for falling fertility. Something more is afoot.
You can have a rich, rapidly growing, technologically sophisticated, personally free and individualist, urban, long-lived and fertile society. There’s no need to choose between slow extinction and preindustrial poverty. [Emphasis added]
Bravo! Finally, somebody besides Elon is spreading the word.
The author continues: “[W]e can effectively reduce the Baby Boom to a marriage boom: more people getting and staying married at younger ages.”
So what caused this marriage boom? The answer appears to be a rise in young men’s status compared to young women’s. The marriage boom can be explained almost entirely by a combination of female labor force participation (down). young male wages (up), and male unemployment (down). [Emphasis original]
Kudos for the courage to let it slip that the well-being of men has anything to do with anything. Strike a blow for testosterone! Male Lives Matter!
Second wave feminism
But Arctotherium is just getting started. He strays even further from the “mainstream,” explaining why the Baby Boom ended:
In three words: second wave feminism. By this I mean the suite of changes referred to as the Sexual Revolution (no fault divorce, normalization of premarital sex, delegitimization of marriage as the normative form of the family), combined with a concerted political campaign to raise women’s relative economic and social status. Fertility in every Boom country, as well as in several countries that didn’t experience the Boom… cratered within a few years around 1970…
[S]econd wave feminism thoroughly redefined marriage. It shifted from a patriarchal institution in which husbands had social (and some legal, though this was mostly dismantled by first wave feminism) power over their wives to one in which wives had effective legal power over the husbands (through the mechanisms of feminist family courts, greatly expanded definitions of abuse, and the replacement of the marriage model of the family with the child support model), and from a lifelong contract to one dissolvable at will (though the institution of no-fault divorce). In JD Unwin’s terms, we shift from a regime of absolute monogamy to one of modified monogamy. This had obvious and immediate consequences on marriage rates.
That is way off the PC reservation. The chattering class continually bloviates about feminism. Oppression of women is a staple of public discourse. But rare it is when masculism makes the public square. That would be the mean old “patriarchy” talking. Little wonder the author dons a nom de guerre. ‘Tis best to avoid cancellation, doxing and public pillory. Speech police are everywhere these days.
In essence, Arctotherium concisely dissects the cultural metamorphosis from traditional values to wokeism (moral relativism, etc.). He understands the worrisome implications for humanity going forward. Dystopia beckons.
I agree. Changing values have had disastrous demographic consequences. I get it about second wave feminism, etc. But that is an incomplete diagnosis. Other factors also play into this transmutation of values. What are they? Revisit the comment that fertility “cratered within a few years around 1970.”
Monetary policy
In 1971 America abandoned the gold standard. That had tremendous demographic consequences. It took the American family to the cleaners.
How? In 1971 the dollar became a fiat currency. Economist Thorsten Polleit explains fiat money: The government (or its central bank) has the monopoly on production.
- It is created by way of bank credit expansion (i.e. out of thin air).
- It has no inherent value; it is simply brightly colored paper (or digital bytes) that can be produced whenever those in power deem it politically expedient.
The ability to print money out of thin air (quantitative easing) enables government to fund all manner of mischief and causes ruinous inflation. This has global repercussions because the US dollar is the world reserve currency. Note the half-century decline in American wages, beginning in 1971.
The last year the US had above-replacement fertility was in 1972. Fertility has declined more that 50 percent in the last 50 years. The declines of real (adjusted for inflation) wages and fertility are not unrelated. They’re part and parcel of a squeeze play on the middle class and a major reason why having children has become prohibitively expensive.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, fiat currency changed American family life. See “The US dollar has lost 87% its value since 1971.” Of course we’re not at the point where a wheelbarrow of currency is required to buy a loaf of bread, but that is the direction in which we are headed.
As the value of money declined, women could no longer afford to stay at home and care for children. Conveniently, along came feminism. Women’s “liberation,” or “empowerment,” as it was called, was a clever way to sugarcoat the new reality that the average household required two full-time incomes to make ends meet.
The establishment-sanctioned feminist movement distracted us from how millions of women were deftly manoeuvred into the workforce. Yes, this grew the economy. Women now had jobs – one within the home and at least one without. They may enjoy their work but work they must. Homes were reduced to dormitories. Divorce rates skyrocketed, breaking the proverbial glass ceiling and breaking up families.
To keep wages down, immigration laws were changed, bringing a tsunami of cheap labor. The cheap-labour regimen was peddled to the public as “diversity.” Ever wonder why Big Business funds diversity agitprop and pro-immigration candidates? “Celebrate Diversity” and “Diversity is our strength” sound much better than “Celebrate cheap labour.”
How to handle popular pushback? Marginalize the opposition to mass immigration and “diversity.” Call it “hate,” “bigotry,” “xenophobia,” etc. Get the academy on board. Build a surveillance state to safeguard the system. Sideline family issues by prioritizing class warfare.
Bottom line
Arctotherium is correct about the corrosive effect of second wave feminism. But there is more to the globalist assault on the family.
A rigged monetary system enables fiscal profligacy. Postmodernism (wokeism, moral relativism, etc.) poisons the culture. In tandem they’re a pincer movement choking the American family. This pernicious paradigm empowers globalist elites and fuels the empire. The family, the middle class and the Republic are dispensable in the pursuit of profit.
Always ask: Cui bono?
AUTHOR
LOUIS T. MARCH
Louis T. March has a background in government, business, and philanthropy. A former talk show host, author, and public speaker, he is a dedicated student of history and genealogy. Louis lives with his family in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
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EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
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