It's Still the Demography, Stupid

In 2006, Mark Steyn warned that whether it’s Europe or America, “It’s the Demography, Stupid:”

Since 1945, a multiplicity of government interventions – state pensions, subsidised higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything – has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that in Europe a child is now an optional lifestyle accessory. By 2050, Estonia’s population will have fallen by 52 per cent, Bulgaria’s by 36 per cent, Italy’s by 22 per cent. The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what’s the point of creating a secular utopia if it’s only for one generation?

In 2011’s After America, he added:

Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you’ll be living the American Nightmare, with large tracts of the country reduced to the favelas of Latin America, the rich fleeing for Bermuda or New Zealand or wherever on the planet they can buy a little time, and the rest trapped in the impoverished, violent, diseased ruins of utopian vanity.

Similarly, I recently interviewed the Weekly Standard’s Jonathan Last about his new book, What to Expect, When No’s Expecting.

At least for now, the supersized main course of doom that we can eventually expect to arrive is preceded by a tasty appetizer of medium-rare schadenfreude:  “Daily Beast writers Harry Siegel and Allison Yarrow get the vapors over the possibility that conservative religion…might be the only viable solution to America’s low birth rate problem. They get the vapors, they might be vapid, and Harry vapes.”

Read/watch the whole thing.