Seattle, my hometown, is arguably the most progressive city in the United States, so I see the “SWPL” (Stuff White People Like) culture pretty much every time I look out a window or step out the door. These people pride themselves on being smarter and morally superior to the seething, unwashed masses who inhabit the suburbs and exurbs of the US, but, truth be told, they seem pretty mediocre themselves to me. If anything, they are characterized by conformity and and an eagerness to please, and if one takes the cost of urban living and student loan debt into account, most aren’t really that wealthy, and barely qualify as middle class.
One of the things that is most striking about the progressive cities in the US is what they lack: children. San Francisco has the fewest children of all US cities, followed by Seattle, which has more dogs than children. If there are any more progressive, left-wing cities in the US, I haven’t heard of them. Given the cost of living, this is entirely understandable. People are at their most fertile while young, and most young families simply can’t afford to live in these cities without some assistance from either extended family or the government. As I know from personal experience, raising a couple small children in an expensive, progressive city with the meager pay most young folks earn is a struggle to say the least. You have to lower your lifestyle standards, and let’s be honest: not many young, urban American women – or men for that matter – are willing to make that sacrifice.
So, an odd trend has emerged in which women are pushing childbearing to the outer limits of their fertility. Typically, white women in these cities wait until they are over 30 before having children. Black women, for their part, still often have children while young, but they are having far fewer than they used to — there are many more childless black women than there were a generation ago. The only demographic that has children at the normal age is immigrants, mainly East Africans and Mexicans where I live.
So, while I was at a school event for my son last night, I found myself surrounded by other white people who were, in general, significantly older than I am, and I’m just about the average age for an American father. Some of the mothers were pushing 50, and more than a few fathers were already gray. I looked around and wondered how many of these couples had to see a fertility specialist to help things along. It was a little unsettling seeing these wrinkly women and gray-haired men with small children in tow.
If one buys into the dominant urban culture in the US, this outcome is to be expected. Having a respectable middle-class income and the trappings that come along with it generally takes until middle-age, and housing is so expensive that many urban residents are still paying off their houses well into old age. Then, of course, there are cultural expectations. Today, urban women are expected to earn and work as much as urban men, and motherhood simply doesn’t work in this context. Plenty of women want to be mothers, but they keep telling themselves “I’ll settle down next year” until it’s finally too late. There are countless little tragedies; examples of women who, when they are finally ready to have a child, simply no longer have the physical wherewithal. The feminist, progressive culture is consuming its own adherents.
It is hard to say what this means for the future. Some say that conservative, religious types will inevitably outbreed the infertile progressives, and that’s probably true, but there will likely be a strong incentive to flood the US with even more immigrants as employers and Republicans demand cheap labor and Democrats look for a new constituency to replace their aging, child-poor true believers. Does this mean the US will become somewhat like Brazil? Possibly, but I’m still convinced climate plays a role in national development, and I just don’t see African or Latin American immigrants running the country north of the frost line.
Ultimately, the long-term feasibility of the progressive white American culture will come into question at some point in the near future, and it will be discredited, probably during the next decade. Of all the demographic groups in the US, these people are probably the most expensive of all, considering their salaries at state-supported nonprofits or in the public sector, the damage they do with the institutions they run, the cost of their ideology and the burden they place on the rest of America.
Perhaps the tired old parents I was seeing at the elementary school were simply an indication that the radical equalitarian-hypocrite class is finally starting to pay the piper, and the cost they have levied on the rest of us is finally starting to consume them as well. The strain that was evident from their careworn, wrinkled faces and whitening hair certainly did not suggest a “vibrant” ascendant people or ideology.
