Every now and then some genius on the Right will point to statistics showing that “conservatives” have more children than “liberals” and conclude that this is why liberals lose elections. Like this guy:
Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They’re not having enough of them, they haven’t for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That’s a “fertility gap” of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%–explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.
I pooh-poohed this in an earlier post, because most of the liberals I know have conservative (or at least less liberal) parents. I don’t have statistics, but after years of observation of our species I concluded that offspring are much more likely to move to the left of their parents than to move to the right of them. I figured that in the long run it will all balance out.
However, I have come to realize that righties may have found a way around the leftward-drifting generational factor. They aren’t just having more children; they are selectively breeding to produce stupid children.
That’s the only possible explanation for this post.
By producing children dumb enough to believe, for example, that George W. Bush is a great president, or that Bill O’Reilly is a journalist, rightie parents can make sure their offspring don’t fall too far from the ideological tree. However, in the long run I think this plan will backfire. In a generation or two your standard rightie will be too stupid to come in out of the rain. Literally. They will have high mortality rates, not just from pneumonia but from accidents. Conservative think tanks will close for lack of funding; their donors will have squandered their fortunes responding to emails from Nigeria. Come election time, they’ll be too dense to locate the correct polling place. (Some righties already have this problem.)
And when only liberals understand rocket science, peace will reign in the land.
See also: This guy.
Mark Noonan’s brilliant treatise on the end of the age of science is like totally awesome. An historical fact that lines up with his astute observations that the age of science ended in 1850 is that the last recorded burning at the stake for heresy occurred in Mexico in 1850. Although Mark didn’t reference the correlation in his body of work,that fact appears to buttress his contentions.
Oh, I hope and pray. But the rest of us will have to support all those children, stupid through no fault of their own.
Jesus christ, you really should put a big blinking warning sticker on the stupider of these links …read the article, read the first couple dozen comments, I’m pretty sure I’m now brain damaged. If I go to work tomorrow and can’t understand how to do my job, on your head be it…
-me
Hilarious!!! Thanks for saying what I have been thinking. It’s no wonder so many wingnuts hate education. They attack anything they don’t understand.
Awright Maha…
Get to reproducin’ Girl…
(And it would help if you ditch the shoes & get used to your kitchen)
D.R. — too late! The maternal clock stopped already. I have two grown up kids, though, so I’ve done my duty to the species.
They wouldn’t have developed home schoolong, christian schools, liberty universities,an entire right wing christian alternate media/school/entertainment universe unless they were trying to brainwash the children they have into carrying a certain mindset forward. They know if children are given enough info , a certain percentage will figure out that reality just doesn’t support all of their assumptions and fallacies.
And if righties can kill enough brain cells in the rest of us, the world is theirs. Hence the Fox network. I’m thinkin’ they’re behind the development of cell phones, too.
I think you have to account for geographic mobility in all of this, as those inclined and able to escape from rightie dominated areas migrate to more enlightened regions. Also, migration in the opposite direction is occuring, see the Christian Exodus, for example.
Those (blue) areas where Enlightenment values still predominate will continue to attract the best and brightest, and their economies and cultures will continue to flourish. Those (red) areas where people are in revolt against the Enlightenment, well, they may have more babies, but their economies are dependent on wealth generated by the blue states. The net flow of tax money is from the blue states to the red – wish I could provide you a link on this, it was an interesting observation that surfaced after the 2004 election.
The red areas will continue to sponge off the blue, as they do today, until the Enlightened areas decide they’ve had enough. Or, until the whole country is capsized by rightwing stupidity, and the urban elites are forced back into the country for survival.
BTW, I’ve read comments by some Enlightenment folk who were planning to send money to the Christian Exodus, to hasten their exodus.
Great post. I love the part about coming in out of the rain. “Literally.”
Keep up the good work!
-Steve (http://lazycomic.blogspot.com/)
You know, I tend to think that righties should just change their names to wrongies.When I think about the people who I grew up with I notice those who grew up in households where the parents were very conservative turned out to be very liberal.And the kids I knew who grew up in liberal households are about 70/30 liberal.
I also noticed then and now that the kids growing up in liberal households spent less time getting wasted then kids from rightie homes.And ,this is shocking,of all the kids(now adults) that I knew, the ones who are STILL “bushing up” came from “good” rightie households…what are the odds that not one liberal parent raised a kid who didn’t turn out ok in my small circle of a few hundred kids or so?, yet the so called “great” rightie parents have 40-50 year old kids who are in and out of jail, totally wasted anytime they get out, and it all stems back to their teen years when their home lives were so strict they just flipped out.
Bush reminds me of those kids…mommie and daddy always bailed them out and blamed everyone else but their kids(I believe this line of thinking has bought us to the invention of the crowd that screams that we are the “blame America first crowd”.)..nothing is ever the fault of their little perfect do-no-wrong angel….it was the friends fault,or the polices fault, or the dumb laws fault….ANYTHING is to blame for the trouble but their kid….see? sounds just like bush.
Over all ,going to the home of a rightie kid and a liberal kid as a child was the difference between night and day and it came down to this: In the rightie house the child was being programmed.No other behavior was acceptable.In liberal households the children were being taught to think rather than being told WHAT to think.
If my small circle is any example Once most of the rightie kids got out and learned they could think rather than refer to their program(what liberal kids already knew) they did..and they turned out to be happy ,beautiful,hardworking ,liberal members of our society.
By the way when I said my friends who grew up in liberal homes turned out 70/30 , 70 is dem…but the 30 is mixed.There are green and ind. and a lib thrown in to make our parties fun.There is a handful of TRUE conservatives(who despise bush) and only a very few who have ever admitted to leaning neoCON or whatever this group of freaks at the white house claim to be…I am proud to say those raised in liberal homes are smart people who think for themselves, no matter what party they choose they arrived at their choices based on their own minds, not what someone programmed them to think.Liberal raise children,not indoctrinate them or program them…what a beautiful thing!!!!…anyhow thats what I think, but thats justme.
What really struck me about the red state, blue state comparison was that the blue states were the major economies of the nation and didn’t mind so much the higher taxes to pay for necessary public items like public schools, medicare and the like. It’s the economic backwaters that want to cut all of our taxes and dumb down our electorate. I say let them go, the wrong side won the Civil War. Let the South have their garbage economies and third world mentalities, those of us who want to live in a more enlightened ‘state’ should be allowed to do so without the red states pulling us down.
Except, Bucky Blue, there are millions of Blues living in those Red states. What do you propose to do with them? It is really a matter of urban vs. rural, in many cases.
Does anyone else think it’s kind of creepy that they are framing this whole “fertility gap” problem in terms of “breeding voters.” Do most people make conscious decisions about the political leanings of their offspring when deciding how many children they should have? Yikes.
Babies aren’t the problem anyway. If we just taught all the kids to think critically and be aware of the world around them, they’d be capable of making their own decisions instead of just adopting their parents’ platforms. Now, I have liberal parents, but I can also think for myself. How about that?
I mean, yeah, kids adopt their parents politics. This will betray my age, but I remember my third grade class filling out ballots in our classroom during the 1988 election. Pretty much everyone voted as they knew their parents planned to vote. (I recall Dukakis got maybe 3 votes in a classroom of 25 or so students. The only reason I remember this is because I voted for Dukakis and felt horrifically uncool for being in the minority.) But… that’s how third graders choose their presidential candidates. Is it naive to think that grown adults should be able to make decisions independent of their parents? It is to hear the rightie “Nanny nanny poo poo, the fertility gap works in our favor!” crowd talk about it. But if that’s true, it’s a failure of the education system, not the decision I guess more liberals are making to have fewer kids.
Also also, wouldn’t it be a while before we felt the impact of the fertility gap? Yeah, liberals have fewer kids now, but it’ll be a while before those kids are old enough to vote, and probably even longer before they actually do vote because a large number of college-aged people can’t be bothered to go to the polls.
Well Lynne, I expect the blue folks living in red states would do what ANYONE would do when a neighborhood goes to hell: MOVE OUT.Bucky is correct.The right is dragging this country down.They won’t be happy until this country is a third world shithole.Not letting the south go was a huge mistake, maybe the biggest error in our countries history.If I had my way, we would put the south on ebay and sell it to whom ever is dumb enough to buy and we would give texas back to Mexico.The south has voted against this countries best interests for as long as I can recall , they didn’t want to be a part of this country and they still don’t.They hate half the people in it, even though the people they hate so bad are paying the taxes that keep the country going..We forced them to be a part of something they wanted no part in and now we act suprised when they try, at every turn , to destroy it..the choices we are left with is dump the extra weight or sit in the ship while the weight takes it down(which is our current path.. and as dr.Phil says”Hows that workin for ya???”)…Terrorists WILL NOT take this country down, Americans will do it for them.It is time we admit we are in a bad marriage with this group of neocon fascist nut jobs and they can’t be fixed, staying together for the kids aint going so well…it is time to get out.