"Curiously enough, these two views, positivity towards high fertility and positivity towards immigration, rarely coincide...
since 2010, population growth has been strikingly low. In 2016, it was below the lowest forecast range from forecasts made as recently as 2013. That’s genuinely alarming. You should be hearing demography-sirens in your head and looking around for population growth sources...
because the academy is dominated by a certain ideological subset, conservatives see the gatekeepers to the middle class seeking to actively undermine the intergenerational transmission of love, longing, purpose, and place. We want education for our kids because we want them to be prosperous, productive members of society; and in turn the gatekeeper says, “Fine, but your child must also abandon the things you think are actually most important in life.” So we become hostile to universities. We come to view academics as “elites”...
the “elites” “destroying” “our culture” seem to have a vision of a new culture to replace the lost one: the culture of other countries. Nordic socialism with a Hispanic population, evidently. “Somebody else’s babies.”...
We need a growing population by both means to ensure that the tree of liberty is constantly renewed by those bred and raised up never knowing the bitterness of tyranny, knowing only the full flower of freedom — and also those who can remind natives why freedom matters, why our prosperity is so valuable, why our institutions are worth fighting for."
There were a lot of ideas in here thst I'd never encountered, or never heard described in thst certain way. I feel like it's irrelevant whether or not I "agree" with it, I learned a lot by spending time in a slightly different perspective and having my eyes opened to a set of deeply held concerns that I was unfamiliar with.
I realize that there are a lot of conservative policies that I can better understand with this lens. The thing I hate the most is when I look at someone's behavior and find myself saying "Why??" because I can find no reasonable explanation. And an irrational person is not someone you can really communicate with, if their behavior is causing problems for you.
This further reminds me that the /liberal/ mindset, and the set of problems that we are aware of and concerned with, must also be very opaque from the outside. We tend to assume that big problems, and our motivation to fix them, are obvious and universal but they really, really aren't.
FB: This was an eminently useful read, revealing a set of fears and concerns that really, really help me understand the intent of a lot of conservative policies. The quote I pulled definitely doesn't do this essay justice "the production of America requires Americans. The first arrivals on this continent were not prepared for modern American democracy... American-ness requires immigrants for our culture of vibrant advancement to continue, but it also requires the native population to keep up a steady pace as well. The native and immigrant populations are like two runners training together, pacing each other, challenging each other, pushing each others’ limits."
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