The Wall Street Journal today discusses a trend that should be
troubling for liberals:
Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children.
The piece rests on some rather shaky assumptions:
- Having children does nothing to affect a parent's ideology
- Children of parents with a particular ideology will adopt that ideology later in life
In fact, neither of these assumptions need be true, now or into the future. But the baby gap does charge liberals to think about the problem of parenting. For the liberal movement to grow, it's necessary to either reverse the baby gap; make liberalism a more readily inherited ideology than conservatism; make the parenting process itself a liberalizing life change; or some combination of these three changes.
It's not hard to imagine solutions that will address some of these goals. For example, a liberal cultural movement to help parents with the day to day challenges of raising children would help attract new parents to the liberal movement. Such a movement might take the shape of a liberal alternative to Focus on the Family, a network of day care centers which espouse liberal values, or some other form.
Arguably, the liberal movement has already succeeded in making liberalism a more readily inherited ideology: young people today are considerably more liberal than their parents. This ideological shift must be watched closely and expanded, however, through continuing investments and outreach in youth culture, as well as development and mentorship of young leaders. Of course, in order to maintain this shift in a way that will offset today's baby gap, such efforts must be extended for several decades into the future.
Update: Via kos,
Echidne questions the validity and impartiality of the professor who wrote the Wall Street Journal piece. Good eye, but at least some of the data is based on the 2004 General Social Survey, so I'm going to assume that a decent part of the data is valid. The baby gap appears to be 19%, not 41%, when we correct for factors like age, race, gender, etc. That's a huge difference, but 19% is nothing to sneeze at when you're talking about hundreds of millions of people.
Echidne makes excellent points also about factors like the Latino migration, but even there we can't rest on our laurels. Latinos vote 2-to-1 for Democrats, which isn't half bad, but it's very much a demographic in play. Moreover, however much Latino immigration benefits liberals, there's no guarantee that it will continue for decades. Changes in our laws or in the economic conditions in Latin America could easily reverse that tide.
Consequently, I still think that it's very important for our movement to take some of the steps I outline above - making parenting a liberalizing process and making liberalism more inheritable than conservatism.
