Progressives Are Doomed

The progressive movement, as a political and cultural force, is doomed. Not because conservatives are going to defeat it in any single election cycle. Conservatives may win or lose the next few cycles, and the cycle math is mostly noise. The doom is structural, demographic, and on a longer timescale than most political conversation acknowledges. The progressive movement is doomed for the same reason any movement is doomed when its adherents stop having children: the future is built by the people who show up to it, and the future is not going to have many secular progressives in it.

This isn’t a wish. It’s a calculation.

The total fertility rate at which a population replaces itself, in developed countries, is approximately 2.1 children per woman. Below that line, a population shrinks, generation over generation, by an amount you can compound on a spreadsheet. The United States is currently around 1.6 — below the line nationally — and the deficit is not evenly distributed. It is concentrated, and concentration matters enormously.

The Pew Research and General Social Survey data on this is consistent and unambiguous. American conservatives report roughly thirty percent more children, on average, than American liberals. Religious Americans report substantially more than non-religious Americans. The most religious quartile of the country averages around 2.5 children per woman. The least religious quartile averages around 1.3. The gap is large, persistent across decades, and widening, not narrowing.

Drill down by religious group and the picture sharpens further. The fertility rates demographers track currently look something like this:

• Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews: 6 to 7 children per woman.
• Latter-day Saints (Mormons): around 3.0.
• Evangelical Protestants: 2.3 to 2.5.
• Catholics: around 2.0 nationally, with immigrant Latino Catholics substantially higher.
• Mainline Protestants: 1.7 to 1.9.
• Religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) and secular: 1.3 to 1.5.
• Self-identified atheists and agnostics: often below 1.2.

The “nones” are the fastest-growing religious self-identification category in America. The “nones” are also the slowest-reproducing. Both facts at once. That is not a stable equilibrium. It is a transition state — and transition states resolve into something else.

The conversion math

Secularists answer the demographic argument by saying religion does not have to win biologically; it can lose people through conversion to no-religion in each generation, and that is what has been happening. They are correct that this has been happening. They are incorrect that it can continue forever.

The math is the constraint. To offset a 1.0-child gap in fertility between, say, religious conservatives at 2.5 and secular progressives at 1.3, the secular side has to convert away roughly half of every religious cohort’s children, every generation, just to break even. That rate of defection occurred during a specific window — the 1990s through the 2010s, when American religious affiliation collapsed unusually quickly — and it has never been sustained at that rate over multiple generations anywhere in the historical record. There is good reason to think it is already slowing. The “nones” are growing more slowly than a decade ago. The defection wave that fed the secular share is approaching its limit, because the people most predisposed to defect have already defected. The remaining religious populations are, increasingly, the ones whose religion is genuinely load-bearing in their lives — and load-bearing religion does not lose its adherents to atheism at scale.

When the defection rate slows and the fertility gap stays large, the demographic math takes over. It is not even close.

The boomer nihilism explosion

The current era is anomalous, and worth understanding as anomalous, because almost everyone living inside it treats it as the default state of human civilization. It is not.

What happened, roughly, is that the Baby Boom generation — the wealthiest, healthiest, most-educated, longest-lived cohort in human history — arrived into a world where the cultural infrastructure that produced their prosperity was already optional. Their parents built it. The Boomers received it. The Boomers, having received it, did not transmit it. They participated in a unique and unrepeatable cultural experiment in which religious affiliation, family formation, and traditional cultural transmission were all simultaneously loosened in favor of self-actualization, expressive identity, and consumer choice. The result was a temporary, gigantic surplus of personal freedom and a permanent collapse in the transmission of cultural form to the next generation. The Boomers ate the seed corn and called the eating liberation.

It was a one-generation nihilism explosion. Temporary by design, because nothing nihilistic reproduces itself by definition. A worldview whose terminal point is no children, no obligation, no transmission cannot, mathematically, be the worldview of the next century. The Boomers’ children inherited the cultural ruin and have been negotiating with it ever since. The negotiation is largely concluded. The younger cohorts are picking sides. Some are returning to religion. Some are doubling down on secularism. The fertility data tells you, without ambiguity, which side will be standing in 2050 and which side will not.

What is happening is regression to the mean. The civilizational mean, across thousands of years and hundreds of cultures, is religious, familial, and traditional. The post-1960s secular-progressive era is the deviation from the mean, not the new equilibrium. We are watching the deviation correct itself in slow motion.

America in 2050

Run the spreadsheet forward thirty years, with current fertility differentials and reasonable conversion assumptions, and the United States of 2050 looks substantially more religious and more politically conservative than the one we are standing in.

The Haredi population doubles or more, possibly triples. The LDS population grows steadily. Evangelical Protestantism is stable or slightly growing as a share. The Catholic population is sustained by Latino immigration and high-fertility Latino families. Mainline Protestantism continues its long, slow decline. The “nones” peak somewhere in the late 2020s or early 2030s and then begin to fall, because the secular share is no longer being fed by new defectors faster than it is losing people to mortality and below-replacement reproduction.

The political consequence is that the median American voter in 2050 is more religious, more rural-leaning, more familially-rooted, and more skeptical of the institutions the progressive movement currently runs — universities, legacy media, public schools, federal agencies — than the median voter of today. This is not because conservatives are converting anyone. This is because conservatives are having children, and the children grow up and vote.

The progressive movement is going to have a hard time persuading a population the progressive movement itself never produced.

Parents closing ranks

The political theater of this regression is the part most observers underweight. Across the developed world right now, the most consistent political realignment is the movement of parents away from progressive parties and progressive institutions. Not just religious parents. Not just conservative parents. Parents in general — including formerly progressive parents, including liberal parents in coastal cities.

The reason is straightforward. The progressive coalition, particularly in its educational and cultural institutions, has spent the last decade adopting positions that parents experience as direct attacks on their authority over their own children — curriculum content, gender ideology in elementary schools, medical interventions on minors, restrictions on parental notification, attempts to redefine the family unit as administratively secondary to the state-school relationship. A parent who is fundamentally on the political left will tolerate a lot of policy disagreement, but the moment a movement is reaching past them toward their kid, the coalition affiliation collapses. The signal is everywhere — school board flips, the rapid growth of homeschooling and microschooling, the surge in religious and classical school enrollment, the cross-political backlash against specific institutional behaviors that progressive leadership refuses to walk back.

Parents are pre-political. The species-level priority is the child. A movement that asks parents to choose between the movement and the child is going to lose the parent every single time. The progressive movement has, in pursuit of a series of specific cultural projects, asked exactly this question, and the parents have answered.

This is reinforcing the demographic gradient. The people forming families are, increasingly, the people not aligned with the progressive cultural agenda, and they are raising children who will not be aligned either.

Given the trajectory, the optimal move for an individual reading this is, in my view, to abandon secularism in any deep ideological sense and align with a tribe. Pick one. Pick a religious community if one is available to you that is not insane. Pick a cultural community if a religious one is not on offer. Pick a family network. Pick a regional identity. Pick a faith tradition you can practice with sincerity, or as close to sincerity as your nature allows. The specific tribe matters less than the fact of being inside one.

I’m not saying this because I’ve had a religious conversion. I’m saying it because the math is unambiguous and the cultural future will be built by people inside tribes. Atomized individualism is a recent and short-lived experiment that produced one or two generations of weird liberty and is now ending, because atomized individuals do not reproduce themselves, do not transmit culture, and do not generate the social infrastructure their children will live inside. People inside tribes do all of those things. The people inside tribes are going to inherit the country. You can be one of them, or you can be a footnote inside someone else’s family album.

If you are a parent, the calculation is even cleaner. Your children are going to grow up inside some culture. The only question is whether the culture is one you helped shape and that aligns with what you want for them, or whether it is one assembled by algorithms, schools, and peer effects you did not vet. Closing ranks is rational. Most parents who close ranks are not doing so because they have read a Pew Research report. They are doing so because they can feel the algorithm pulling at their kid and they are responding the way parents have responded to threats to children for the entire history of the species.

Clear about which tribe I’m inside, because the argument above can be misread as agnostic about which tradition to pick. I’m not agnostic. I am inside the Western cultural tradition — the one with property rights, free speech, religious tolerance, equality before the law, due process, and the entire post-Enlightenment package of personal freedoms that almost no other civilizational tradition has produced in stable form. I think the West, in its specific historical form, has been the most freedom-producing civilization in human history, and I do not intend to trade those freedoms for the false promise of any other tradition.

I also think the West, at its best, runs on a substrate that is more stoic than progressive. Endure what is given. Control what is yours to control. Accept what is not. Build, repair, persevere, raise the next generation or contribute to the one being raised next to you, leave the place better than you found it. These are not modern clichés. These are Marcus Aurelius. They have been the operating system of capable Western humans for two thousand years, and the people who are picking them back up now are the ones who will lead the population that emerges on the other side of the current correction.

So: the freedoms of the West, stoic in temperament, religiously or culturally tribed in practice, family-forming where the body allows it, durable, calm. That is the bet. That is the tribe I am inside, and the tribe I am suggesting to anyone reading this whose own affiliation is currently atomized, secular, and accidentally pointing the wrong way on the demographic compass.

The closing point isn’t triumphalist. The current progressive cohort is not stupid or evil. Many of them are kind, thoughtful, hardworking people who happened to inherit a cultural moment whose internal contradictions they did not author and cannot resolve from inside. The movement they are part of is going to fade because of arithmetic, not because of any moral defect in its members. The members can, if they choose, walk out of it. They can form families. They can pick traditions. They can teach their children to read, work, persevere, and pray. The door is open. It has always been open.

But the door does not stay open forever in any individual life, because biology has its own clock and demography has its own. The people reading this who are forty and undecided about whether to form a family are nearer to the deadline than the ones who are thirty. The people who are thirty are nearer than the ones who are twenty. Demographic destiny is built one decision at a time, and the decisions get harder to make as the years pile up.

Pick a tribe. Form a family if you can. Raise the next generation, or contribute to the one being raised next to you. Or don’t, and become part of the slow fade the data is already telling us about. The choice has always been individual. The aggregate of individual choices is, in this case, the entire civilizational trajectory. Choose accordingly.