Had some trouble settling on a topic today. There’s the Michael Cohen testimony, which is depressing because Cohen is basically Sammy Gravano. No good guys in that story. And worse: Trump is obviously guilty. No one is even pretending he’s not. There’s the NYT poll, which is dark af. Yesterday A.B. and I talked about it on our show. You can’s just dismiss these numbers. Not great. I’m moving so deep into bear territory that later this week I’m going to write up a best-case scenario for what a second Trump term will look like. You guys are going to love that one. 🙄 And then there’s Ukraine. I want you to consider the following: If Donald Trump wins, then Vladimir Putin will have executed one of the greatest geostrategic coups of the last century. He will have pushed all of his chips into the center of the table and, through a combination of soft and hard power, defeated and broken NATO purely because he understood the character of the American voter better than anyone in the West. That won’t be a fun newsletter, either. So instead I settled on writing about demographics. This stuff is dark, too. But it’s like writing about the heat death of the universe: It’s sad and depressing, but also far enough removed that most people won’t have to worry about it themselves. Enjoy? 1. Children of MenHere’s the Wall Street Journal, yesterday:
This is an excellent piece but my one quibble is that none of this is “sudden.” Eleven years ago I wrote a book about demographics called What to Expect When No One’s Expecting. The subject was the decline in fertility rates across the world and the problems it would cause and even then I was plowing soil that others had been working since the 1970s. Let me give you the shortest of possible version of the fertility story:
None of this is new. Demographers have been studying declining fertility rates for half a century and academics and policy makers across the globe—from Sweden to Singapore, from Russia to Japan, from France to China—have been worried about it for two generations. The conclusion is as close to universal as it gets: declining fertility rates present a danger to stable societies. People get caught up in the absolute numbers. Every time I write about demographics, someone in the comments says some version of:
My answer is always the same: No, I do want global population to increase asymptotically. But it would be great if global population existed at a steady-state. Because declining population creates a number of challenges for society. Most of those challenges stem from the age structure of the population. Here’s what the age structure looks like for a rapid-growth population, a conventional growth population, a steady-state population, and a declining population:
Now let me show you the age structure of Japan, right now:
Tell me how that under-30 group is supposed to financially support an over-65 group that’s close to double its size? That’s the problem.¹ Industrialized nations have created social safety nets to provide for older citizen as they age out of the work force. Those social safety nets are not sustainable in a sub-replacement environment.² If fertility were only declining in a few wealthy countries, it would be okay. If it was just the United States, Japan, Sweden, and France, we’d muddle through. The impacted countries would increase taxes on workers and shave benefits for retirees. They’d bring in more immigrants to patch over the demographic hole. There’d be some hardship and some social strain, but mostly everything would be fine. What has freaked out demographers for 50 years is that the phenomenon of declining fertility is hitting more or less everywhere and at basically the same time. Which means that:
But the story gets worse. It is one thing for Japan and the United States to encounter a demographic crisis because they are wealthy, liberal societies. What happens when China hits its crisis? China is still a poor country and it is governed by an illiberal autocracy. Crises tend to destabilize societies and a destabilized China is not going to be a lot of fun for anyone. Not to mention the humanitarian aspect: In America we can raise taxes and means-test Social Security. We can form a blue ribbon commission to figure things out. In China, they might send 300 million old people into the countryside to die. That is a policy choice that will be available to the ruling regime. There’s one more problem: Throughout the whole of recorded history, we have seen many examples of governments succeeding in suppressing fertility. Both China and India did this within living memory. But no society has demonstrated the ability to intentionally raise fertility rates over the long term. Meaning: There may not be a policy fix for this problem. We’re in relatively good shape here in America. We’ve got robust immigration from Central and South America to make up for our fertility declines. (At least for the moment.) And we’re a rich country. It’s always better to be rich than poor. But we’re also the hegemon in a global economic order that relies on stability. And over the long term, stability ain’t in the cards. That’s why, all things being equal, it would be good if the American government pursued family-friend policies designed to help people achieve their fertility goals. But that ain’t in the cards, either: Right now we’re barely holding our democracy together.³ Hey: Do you like uplifting newsletters full of happy talk and optimism? Then get The Triad in your inbox every day! I’m kidding, mostly. But The Bulwark is supported by readers. If you sign up, you’ll get most of what we do for free. If you join Bulwark+, you’ll get a little bit of extra stuff, too. Come ride with us. You won’t be sorry. 2. It’s Always the Ones You Most ExpectTwo items from social media. First: We have a MAGA Trump-lover from Florida who discovered, to his horror, that he’s not actually a citizen and has been fraudulently voting for his entire life.
I’m not here to dunk on Mr. Klass. I have a lot of sympathy for him, actually. The bureaucracy is so massive and incomprehensible that it’s easy to see how a mixup like this could happen—especially from a time when records were kept on paper. The entire situation stinks and I hope the government can make it right. When I look at a guy like Jimmy Klass I think, “There but by the grace of God.” Second: Here’s Trump golden boy Johnny McEntee who made himself a video to entertain the internet. It’s about how he likes to keep a stack of fake money in his car so that whenever he encounters a homeless person, he can pawn the fake dollars off on them.
Ha ha. Isn’t that a riot? The rich guy did a funny by making the homeless people think they might have $5 to get a sandwich but the joke’s on them. It gets worse. McEntee then explains that it’s his hope that when the homeless people try to use the counterfeit money, they’ll get arrested. He explains that this is his way of “helping clean up the community.” This might be the most vile thing I’ve seen during the metastasis of Trumpism. The proper response to suffering is empathy. Whether you’re looking at a Palestinian child’s death, or a homeless man in Miami, or Trump supporter who suddenly finds out that he’s a man without a country, we should not be able to look at suffering without feeling empathy. Without a sense that there by the grace of God go all of us. You, me, Jimmy Klass, Johnny McEntee—we are all blessed to live in a country that is not an active warzone. And even so, we are all one diagnosis, or one bad day, away from catastrophe. You slip down the stairs. You fuck up at work. You feel a lump in your abdomen. You get in a car crash. After that? Maybe things work out. Or maybe they don’t and you’re the one on the side of the road asking for help. I don’t want to walk too far down this road but I’ll say this: One of the marks of fascism—real-deal, capital-F fascism—is the propensity to view the less fortunate not as fellow sufferers in the journey of life, but as untermenschen. Vermin to be removed. Or, as Johnny McEntee might put it, cleansed. This is what America is in the process of choosing. And we’re not being hoodwinked. None of this stuff is being hidden behind a façade of civility and normalcy. This cruelty is the selling point. I know I’m not saying anything we haven’t said a hundred times. But by God, it’s awful. One last thing: George Floyd encountered Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020 because someone gave him a fake $20 bill. I doubt this fact would make Johnny McEntee do anything but laugh. 3. Colleen HooverAnother great piece from Texas Monthly:
1 There are other problems—lots of them. Again, I wrote a whole book on this. But we’re going to focus on social safety nets today. 2 You might even say that the “problem” is that we have made big gains in fighting the death rate even as the birth rate declined. 3 If you wanted to get really dark you’d say that one silver lining in America moving toward illiberal democracy is that soft authoritarians often care quite a lot about raising fertility rates. And it’s true that lots of people in the Christian nationalist space are into demographics and natalism. But America is already so racially and ethnically diverse that any pro-natalist policies would necessarily benefit black and brown people, along with white Christians. And I suspect that a Trumpist regime would find that untenable. You’re a free subscriber to Bulwark+. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and ad-free and member-only podcasts, become a paying subscriber. Did you know? You can update your newsletter preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here.
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