by Daniel Greenfield
The pandemic made us an even lonelier nation.
There is both bad news and good news for Planned Parenthood these
days. Even while abortion made a brief stop once again at the Supreme
Court, its numbers are dropping.
A few years ago, abortion hit its lowest rate since it was
legalized. The drop in abortion rates parallels the fall in birth rates.
Both stem from a decline in pregnancies.
America isn’t becoming more moral, only more lonely.
A recent New York Times headline declared, “The Married
Will Soon Be the Minority”. But it’s not just the married, but anyone in
a relationship or who is connected to other people.
Marriage rates hit an all-time low around the same time, with the
single population rising sharply. But the singles weren’t just
postponing marriage in favor of extended relationships, because there
was also a sharp drop in the rates of physical intimacy between men and
women.
Americans were becoming more lonely even before the pandemic. The
arrival of the pandemic divided families, cut off grandparents from
grandchildren, parents from adult children, children from other
children, and made the country an even more lonely and isolated place.
Over the pandemic year, the nation’s population grew by only 0.1%. According to the Census Bureau, that was “the lowest rate since the nation’s founding.” Its estimate also showed that for the first time "net international migration... has exceeded natural increase for a given year."
America’s population has been declining for a while, but the
pandemic was particularly catastrophic with international migration
easily topping excess births at 244,622 to 148,043.
The demographic snapshot of a society coming apart, the familial,
civic, and cultural bonds between Americans dissolving even as growth
comes from mass migration is a familiar story from Europe. Internally
and externally, we are becoming a society in name only, linked by the
legal technicalities of a vast bureaucracy and a disposable
multinational consumer culture.
To understand the wave of wokeness and other political cults
consuming our civic culture, we need only observe that a third of
Americans now have no religion: a number that has doubled in under 15
years. Growing numbers have no family, no children, and little more than
their jobs.
And that is why we have open borders. Someone has to fill all those
jobs. Generations of Republican leaders defined America as a place where
people came to work. Every illegal alien at the border was evidence
that our way of life worked at least insofar as economics went. Likewise
it appeared that our culture worked because it was so popular around
the world.
Cold War logic reduced America to a marketplace. If the country
passed the rigorous test of the market, then the rest was bound to fall
into place. But after the Cold War came and went, mass migration and
mass culture continued to hollow out the country. Free enterprise is
vital to a free society, but it isn’t, for most people, the thing that
gives them meaning and purpose.
A nation cannot exist as nothing more than a series of workplaces
and stores in which tokens earned at the former are then spent at the
latter. Mistaking the economic machinery for a nation is the fallacy of
assuming that man is nothing more than the sum of his biological
systems.
What happens to a society whose people have no reason to go on
beyond their set routines interspersed with bouts of hedonism? What
happens to a nation that loses its soul?
Europe had answered that question a generation or two before we did.
Unfortunately we did not pay attention to the answer. America lasted
longer because we retained our convictions of exceptionalism, our faith
and our family ties longer than Europe did. But with every passing year
the cities of the New World with their hipster elites and multicultural
labor forces, and subsidized dying rural areas, resemble the decadence
of the Old World that their ancestors once escaped.
The restrictions of the pandemic made sense to those elites in
exactly the way that it infuriated the rural and working classes.
Lockdowns, remote meetings, and masks allowed the elites to retreat
further behind a digital iron curtain, serviced by unobtrusive servants,
real and virtual, AI and gig workers, freed from having to even leave
their apartments to enjoy the pleasures of life.
It never occurred to them, and still doesn’t, that most people don’t want to live that way.
Beyond the now famous population crash in New York and California,
and the population rise in Texas and Florida, is the fact that the highest
percentage population growth took place in Idaho, followed by Utah and
Montana, while the largest percentage losses were suffered by Washington
D.C., New York, and Illinois. Some of those numbers can be explained by
people from the latter places making their way to the former. But that
does not explain all of it.
Americans are experiencing an internal migration and
counter-migration, traveling to city-states like New York City and Los
Angeles County for economic purposes, and leaving them in pursuit of
meaningful connections and a different way of life. It’s why one of the
underreported stories in the nation’s demographics has been the black
population leaving New York City for the South.
Behind the statistics, the columns of black numbers on white paper,
is a spiritual crisis that is much more difficult to fit between the
narrow lines of government statistical forms.
A nation needs vertical and horizontal connections, people to other
people, and to something above them, a sense of awe and destiny, and
without them it withers and dies. The pandemic reaffirmed to many elites
their conviction that there are no meaningful connections, that other
people are threats and irritants, and that man is just an intelligent
ape existing on the random sufferance of a cruel universe that can blot
all of us out in a single instant.
It is not at all irrational for anyone living with the conviction of
fragility and meaninglessness to panic at the pandemic, global warming,
or the threat of nuclear war. If the only order in the universe comes
from the arrangement of its underlying forces, then doom is only a
matter of time. And the only way to contain the catastrophe is by
imposing a totalitarian order.
There is little room in this gloomy universe for the future. That’s
why the hipster elites, in between Uber trips to bars and eateries,
avoid human connections, escape into digital carpe diems, and reject the
idea of having children because they don’t expect mankind to survive
global warming, or of whatever crisis comes next to justify their lack
of faith in the future.
Their needs, for clean floors, for customer service, or takeout, can
be met by a disposable labor force in America or in China. Natural
population growth just hastens the apocalypse anyway.
Against this tide of elite despair which permeates the culture that
they produce and that has been all but written into law, some cultural
resistance continues. Every child born is itself a form of resistance to
this elite vision of a cold universe and its even colder technocratic
counterparts on this world which would raise children in digital wombs
to grow up to be the last of their kind.
In this generation, for the first time in our nation’s history, most
Americans have abandoned hope that the future will be better. The low
birth rates, the lack of relationships, and the social collapse are all
the fruits of the same poisoned tree. Defeating that defeatism will not
be easy and our leaders have offered little more than shopworn cliches
as the nation’s culture declined.
But despair is not inevitable. It’s the vacuum that forms when there is nothing left to believe in.
Globalization atomizes us. It breaks us up into discrete and
isolated groups in the name of diversity, in the name of progress, and
in the name of making us more manageable. Fragmented people have less to
aspire to beyond their creature comforts. They are easier to soothe
with an expansion of the welfare state, a new hate object and smartphone
model.
The alternative is to rebuild those connections that make life
meaningful, national and familial, and without which nations turn
childless and are easily swamped by mass migration.
The Left didn’t just open up the borders around the body of our
nation, it hollowed out its soul. A lonely nation of isolates wrapped in
their digital cocoons is easy prey for technocratic globalism.
These latest numbers are a warning sign that America is much closer
to becoming Europe than we thought. To defeat the threat of demographic
replacement and illegal migration, we have to build walls not only
around our borders, but around our culture, our communities and our
families. We have to not only fight against what we don’t want, but to
fight for what we do.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an
investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and
Islamic terrorism.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/immigration-tops-us-births-first-time-daniel-greenfield/
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