Arthur C. Brooks argues that liberals don't crank out the brats fast enough, and so are ultimately doomed to ultimate political doom in a doomedly ultimate way:
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. If
you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a
"fertility gap" of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an
identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their
parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than
little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years
this gap has not been below 20%--explaining, to a large extent, the
current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.
Um. I assume that with our 204 children, my liberal feminist wife and I are something of an outlier here. But be that as it may. There are other reasons to look at this piece skeptically. Chief among them is the use of statistics to back up questionable assumptions.
The first thing that's annoying is the absence of any links to, well, anything. This occurs with op-eds all the time. But this is the new online world. Inserting hyperlinks isn't, uh, particularly expensive. Of course, it could be replied that Brooks does give us a reference, to the 2004 General Social Survey. The GSS is a well known, respected, sprawling survey of American attitudes towards politics, religion, current events, and all sorts of other stuff. It was first conducted in 1972; the last survey was in 2004. (See also here and go through the "About GSSDirs" links. You can find some more detailed information here, and if you're patient enough, which I am not, or into the math of it all, which I also am not, I'm sure you could do some sifting and check Brooks' numbers.)
I know that Opinion Journal doesn't do the link thing, usually, so this isn't Brooks' fault. But then Brooks does do some other irksome stuff, like this:
As
one liberal columnist in a major paper graphically put it, "Maybe the
scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our
culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the
ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and
pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a
whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of
overpopulation."
Ugh, I hate that "one liberal columnist" crap. Would it kill you to tell us his goddamn name? For the record, it was Mark Morford , and he was talking specifically about the astonishing Duggars -- a bit of context that makes Brooks's sentence right before the quote a bit squirrelly: "Some believe the gap reflects an authentic cultural difference between left and right in America today." Sheesh.
One should also not neglect to mention that Brooks is only talking about birthrates, and says nothing at all about immigration. That makes this observation rather curious: "A
state that is currently 55-45 in favor of liberals (like California)
will be 54-46 in favor of conservatives by 2020--and all for no other
reason than babies." One is free to extrapolate from current demographic trends in California and not mention immigration, and in that case I am free to not take you seriously.
But the main problem with the piece is that Brrooks has one claim to make, and thinks it's the silver bullet that explains everything. He wants to argue that a kind of herditary party affiliation determines the outcome of elections, and demographic trends spell bad news for the Democratic party. OK. But then, if that's the case, then shouldn't the party that right now has some numerical superiority in this regard have a natural advantage and be racking up one electoral victory after another? Sure, why not.
Well, uh, it seems as though there is a problem there, in that by the GSS's system, in 2004 there were more respondents identifying as "strong" or "not strong" Democrats than there were Republicans in the same category. (Indeed, what's interesting about these numbers is that it is the 41-55 year olds who are mucking stuff up for the Dems.) Given this, we have to look askance at Brooks' most daring assertions:
The trouble is, while most "get out the vote" campaigns targeting young
people are proxies for the Democratic Party, these efforts haven't
apparently done much to win elections for the Democrats. The
explanation we often hear from the left is that the new young Democrats
are more than counterbalanced by voters scared up by the Republicans on
"cultural issues" like abortion, gun rights and gay marriage.
But the data on young Americans tell a different story.
Those data do nothing to refute the "explanation we most often hear," in fact. First, it's awfully dodgy to use general demographic data to explain the results of a specific election. There are just too many other factors in play (like vote suppression, for instance). Second, by Brooks' own logic and sources, the Democratic Party should have won in 2004.
It just doesn't add up, sorry.
