When the Bough Breaks

And more from this week...

Well it turns out that when your Friday edition of Understanding America arrives late in the evening, you are more likely to open it, more likely to read it, more likely to click on its links. I had figured you’d all be out at the club, but perhaps I don’t know my readership as well as I thought. Or… or!... maybe you don’t even hit the club until two or three in the morning and you’re looking for something to read while you get ready. I suspect that’s the case.

Regardless, your Friday U/A will now be an evening affair. So let’s get started with your one thing to read, this New York Times feature on “The Unspoken Grief of Never Becoming a Grandparent.”

The story is important for its direct sociological implications: “A little more than half of adults 50 and older had at least one grandchild in 2021, down from nearly 60 percent in 2014. Amid falling birthrates, more U.S. adults say they’re unlikely to ever have children for a variety of reasons, chief among them: They just don’t want to.” One might pair this with the recent observation by a nursing home operator (unverified, perhaps an outlier, but the sort of thing that makes you think about what we do and do not choose to track and pay attention to in our society…) that, “we care for 1,250 elderly people. Average age 84.5. Roughly 30% of them have not received a single visitor this year.”

But, I am most interested here in the meta-sociological question of how this story gets told, what the reporter and the experts assume, and what the subjects either truly believe or else believe they should and should not say:

“Like every parent interviewed for this article, Jill Perry, 69, said her two daughters — both in their 30s and child-free — should be able to make their own choices about parenthood, and they have her full support.”

“They understand at an intellectual level that their children do not ‘owe’ them a family legacy.”

“…particularly when a parent who has dreamed of grandchildren fails to separate any personal disappointment they feel from a sense of being disappointed in their children.”

The idea that each individual in each generation is born only with rights and privileges, free of any duties or obligations, is the apotheosis of decadent liberalism and it reaches its most perfected and dangerous form in the assertion that whether to raise another generation at all is itself merely a matter of personal preference and convenience. It’s one thing to see this view expressed in our politics. If both the progressive Left and libertarian Right want to have conniptions at the mention of family policy putting a public finger on the scale for encouraging or assisting those who are raising kids over those who are not, there’s at least a colorable “role of government” debate to be had. But this falls apart when the question is whether the culture, or families themselves, should express a point of view.

The counterpoint to the apparently universal “understand[ing] at an intellectual level that their children do not ‘owe’ them a family legacy,” to which the New York Times could find absolutely no one to say out loud, is one I tried to articulate in my First Things lecture earlier this year, first by quoting from A Story of Us, a wonderful book by Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson that traces the parallel cultural and genetic evolutions that have produced modern humanity. At one point, the authors say:

Over the course of human evolutionary history, there may have been some independent-minded women who thought things through and decided to avoid the pain and risks of motherhood. These women are not our ancestors. There may also have been families that decided to do away with the rules and customs that encouraged the raising of children. Our ancestors didn’t belong to families like this. Our ancestors were part of families that believed in the importance of children and worked hard to produce the next generation. That’s why we exist.

The lesson, in my own words, is this:

The narrative of personal autonomy that dominates both the progressive left and the libertarian right regards each individual as inherently free of obligations and constraints, beyond respect for everyone else’s autonomy. But that’s nonsense. Each of us owes his life to the long line of ancestors stretching back beyond the beginnings of recorded history, most of whom made sacrifices we can hardly imagine in order to bring forth a next generation, who in turn brought forth the next generation, and on and on to our own time. Most immediately, we have from conception through the early years of our lives made extraordinary demands on our own parents and on many others who willingly took responsibility for our upbringing, and without whose efforts we obviously could not exist nor survive, let alone thrive.

We begin our lives with an incalculable debt. That we did not choose this debt is of no moral import—it is inherent to our existence. And we have only one way of repaying it: to work equally hard to bring about the next generation.

It is hard to see how our civilization sustains itself if we lose this idea—or if, judging from the Times, it is good and lost—how we succeed without recovering it. The Times ends almost on a positive note, with a man who “reminisces about his grandfather, who immigrated from Sicily and was, in some ways, more of a father figure to Dr. Cox than his own dad was. ‘I think we both would have loved to pay that gift of unconditional love and guidance back in spades if we were grandparents,’ he said, speaking of himself and his wife.” Finally, someone grasping at the concept of mutual obligation and an intergenerational compact without which people cannot flourish. And then it concludes with his sigh of resigned powerlessness: “But, not to be.”

BONUS LINK: I must confess some skepticism at what The New Yorker would come up with for its in-depth feature on the New Right’s family focus, but Emma Green really does a nice job with “The New Pro-Life Playbook”:

Vance’s ideas are part of a tectonic shift that has been under way for a while in certain conservative circles—an intellectual vanguard that has variously been called the New Right, national conservatism, or the realignment. Players in this scene, such as Vance and the Missouri senator Josh Hawley, have advanced a vision for economic policy—raising tariffs, cracking down on overly powerful corporations—that puts them largely at odds with the G.O.P. establishment. Their underlying motivation, however, is deeply conservative: they believe that these policies serve the traditional family, and will make it easier for parents to afford a house, hold down a middle-class job, have lots of kids, go to church, and not get divorced. A former Trump Administration official called it “the family turn.”

BONUS BONUS LINK: A depressing look from Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens at relationship-destroying “technological innovation.” He tries to conclude on an encouraging note, envisioning “better tools for helping single people, especially men, find and cultivate romance. Imagine an A.I-based romance coach, a virtual reality church, or a dating app that strictly filters users and doesn’t operate under perverse financial incentives — these are the sorts of tools that could turn around the disheartening trendlines. All it takes is one visionary founder to reverse the troubling drift towards loneliness.” But really, this is a case study in a broken invisible hand, where the profit motive drives “growth” fundamentally misaligned with the common good.

THIS WEEK AT AMERICAN COMPASS

Stuck in Reverse: “There is no shortage of drivers, or passion, or hard work,” writes trucker and commentator Gord Magill. “As in so many areas of our economy, the shortage is of dignity and freedom, created by a short-sighted quest for efficiency that assigns good jobs a value of zero. Destroying what could be a great profession may be profitable in the short term, but it is not progress.”

Make Families Great Again: “American families deserve more than death for our children,” writes University of New Mexico law student Melba Aguilar. “We want the freedom to have children without catastrophic sacrifice, the freedom to choose to work or stay at home with them, to send them to schools where they are instructed and not indoctrinated, to send them to doctors who will treat them and not experiment on them.”

And, on the American Compass Podcast this week, I talk with the Ethics & Public Policy Center’s Henry Olsen about last week’s election result, each party’s trajectory going forward, and what the Trump administration and conservative movement will have to accomplish over the next few years to maintain their forward momentum.

WHAT ELSE SHOULD YOU BE READING

Re: Young Guns… The New York Times gets to the bottom of What Issue Did Your Vote Come Down to in the End?

I think the Times has done a really nice job with these focus groups generally, but this one conducted post-election with young undecided voters is a goldmine. One interesting theme:

I can’t believe it, but I did end up voting for Donald Trump. I made that decision when I saw JD Vance’s interview with The New York Times. He is the future of the Republican Party. I’m more voting for Vance than I am for Trump.

I voted for Donald Trump. Like Abigail, I was really impressed with JD Vance, especially during the V.P. debate.

I shocked myself and voted for Trump. No one tell my family. I was so impressed by JD Vance, the way he carried himself and how normal he appeared.

BONUS TRIVIA: Did you know that of the four candidates on the major tickets, only one had a positive favorability rating in the exit polls? Can you guess who?

Re: DOGE Days… Santi Ruiz in The Free Press lists The Five Things President Trump Should Do on Day One

How much change can a Trump administration actually effect in the federal bureaucracy? Ruiz has been running a fantastic interview series called Statecraft, where, as he puts it “I talk with civil servants to understand how the federal sausage actually gets made.” Here, he describes the plausible pathways to getting things done.

Re: Swords and Shields… the Wall Street Journal reports China Coped With Trump’s First Trade War. A Second One Will Be Tougher.

While the Journal’s opinion pages will forever be filled with writers issuing ideological denouncements of purportedly failing tariffs, its news coverage often does an excellent job keeping readers more closely connected to reality. Whose economy has chugged right along while imposing stiff tariffs on China? The United States. You know who is feeling real pain? China. “The last thing Xi Jinping needs right now is another showdown with Donald Trump over trade,” the Journal observed. “The kind of trade war that a second Trump presidency might unleash could leave Xi with little choice but to beef up domestic spending, as China runs out of other options for driving growth.”

BONUS LINK: Meanwhile, Paul Krugman, who has gotten trade more publicly and humiliatingly wrong than any other modern economist, reverses course on everything he once lectured on the issue and pushes straight on to lecturing anew. “Serious trade conflict is coming as China tries to export its policy failures,” he warns. “But America just elected perhaps the worst possible leader to manage that conflict.” If only we had listened to Krugman, we’d be… oh, that’s right, that’s exactly where we are.

Re: Time Bombs… the Financial Times notices Ivy League Endowments Struggle with Private Market Downturn

These figures are brutal: “Six of the eight Ivy League universities reported returns in the 12 months ended June that stood below the higher education average of 10.3%, according to Cambridge Associates, an investment consultancy. Yale and Princeton fared the worst by respectively yielding 5.7% and 3.9%. The underperformance follows an even weaker 2023 when no Ivy League school was able to match the 6.8% industry average. Yale gained 1.8% while Princeton lost 1.7% last year.” Of course, over the same period, a basic public market index is up about 40%. I wonder if the private equity firms still collect their fees? Kidding, I don’t wonder at all.

Enjoy the weekend!