America at Risk: Threats to Liberal Self-Government in an Age of Uncertainty

The Future of the Liberal Family

The Future of the Liberal Family Susan Shell Recent evidence of a “baby bust” across most advanced liberal societies raises warning signs of a potential crisis. A new “specter” is haunting Europe (and not it alone): a precipitous decline in birthrates. Even as liberal societies succeed beyond all previous economic measure, many of them, it seems, are failing to sustain themselves at the most basic level: maintenance of a constant, liberally acculturated population from one generation to another .While this failure is more pronounced in some countries than in others , and while the phenomenon of declining population is by no means limited to societies that can plausibly be deemed liberal, a markedly declining birthrate among societies that are generally held up as models for political and moral emulation is cause for re›ection and concern.1 To be sure, that material luxury should be accompanied by declining birthrates should not be altogether surprising. Moralists from the time of Caesar Augustus (who answered the alarm by instituting a “bachelor tax”) have noted that the corruptions bred by wealth are re›ected ‹rst and foremost in the family. Eighteenth-century thinkers such as Montesquieu gave new voice to the ancient worry that an urbanized aristocracy would not reproduce itself. Indeed, for Rousseau, the association between wealth, corruption , and declining birthrate seemed strong enough to make birthrate in itself a rough measure of civic health.2 But there is also good reason to believe that something new is going on. Today’s wealthy liberal societies are different by many measures from urban aristocracies of the past—and not least, in the sheer numbers sharing in the wealth. One might be tempted to attribute today’s low birthrates mainly to the“pill”and other such fruits of modern technology. But technology alone seems insuf‹cient to explain the phenomenon in question. If we have new means of preventing pregnancy and otherwise dissociating sexual activity from procreation, we also are far better at combating the diseases to which / 117 roughly half of all children once succumbed. It is not only that we live longer; almost all children can now count on living to advanced adulthood. Parents no longer need fear the tragic losses that made earlier generations of parents hostages to fortune (as Bacon put it). And now that adults typically live into their eighties and nineties in relatively good health, parenthood is no longer a lifelong occupation. If children are no longer the economic blessing they once were, they are arguably also less burdensome both temporally and emotionally (if not ‹nancially). It is true that here, as in much else, the United States is “exceptional,” maintaining something close to a replacement-level birthrate among native -born Americans, and rates slightly higher among ‹rst-generation immigrants . But these relatively cheerful statistics are leavened by a relatively high rate of poverty, fatherlessness, and infant mortality among U.S. children in comparison with other liberal societies. We may be having more children than our European and Canadian counterparts, but it is not clear that we are investing more in raising them. The women who are best equipped, by middle-class standards, to bring up children in America (i.e., the relatively well educated and af›uent) are less likely to do so than those whose life-chances are more marginal.3 Without doubt, some of the poor and less educated may be better parents than some of the rich and highly credentialed. Still, the large number of U.S. children raised without fathers and in poverty, and who also lack decent schools, a healthy diet, and adequate access to health care should give pause.4 The physical stature of Europeans is growing while that of Americans (even after discounting for natural variations among ethnic groups) is shrinking. There may be more children in America, but it is not clear that they will grow up to be as civic minded or as physically and mentally productive as generations of the past. Why then are most liberal societies failing to sustain themselves across generations (as seems currently to be the case)? And what, if anything, might or should be done about it? It is always dif‹cult to assess complex phenomena like this one, especially at a time in which old patterns seem to be breaking down and new ones have not yet fully established themselves. We do not know what the present child-bearing generation will ultimately choose with respect to child-rearing. And public discourse often bears...