{"id":27,"date":"2006-03-18T12:19:56","date_gmt":"2006-03-18T17:19:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=27"},"modified":"2017-03-17T09:24:15","modified_gmt":"2017-03-17T14:24:15","slug":"more-on-demographics-liberals-to-disappear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=27","title":{"rendered":"More on Demographics – Liberals to disappear"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was an interesting story on National Public Radio<\/a> today on the world’s population trends. A demographer pointed out that the highest birthrates tend to be in nations with the most conservative (read: family oriented) nations. The elevated birth rate is encouraged by the “be fruitful and multiply” ethos of fundementalist Jews, Christians and Muslims. For instance, Utah; a state of, for, and by, the\u00a0single-mindedly, family-oriented Mormans; has the highest birth rate in the nation.<\/p>\n

What will happen to all the family oriented people when the world can no longer sustain itself was not addressed. The fear of being swamped with mass procreating\u00a0aliens “yearning to breath free” is not new. The US was swept with fears about the “Yellow Peril” late in the 1800’s which led to the “Chinese Exclusion Act.” The fear of being overrun by\u00a0Eastern European\u00a0immigrants helped lead to the Eugenics movement of the early 1900’s. It also explains\u00a0much of the fear\u00a0about border crossings at\u00a0the\u00a0Mexican\/American border today. (Ironic Note: it is conservatives not liberals who seem to be the most excercised by illegel immigrants)<\/p>\n

The upshot of the NPR story was this: Liberals have small families and thus face a diminishing role in the politics of the future. Lest conservatives get too cocky they\u00a0should read what Jared Diamond says in his latest book Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>I just have one disc left to listen to in the book’s audio version. I read and loved his previous best seller Guns, Germs and Steel<\/em>. Diamond’s new book is a descendent of the much panned sixty’s oracle:\u00a0The Population Bomb<\/a><\/em>. That book’s predictions\u00a0of a starving future were postponed by the phenomenal success of Minnesota’s Nobel Laureate,\u00a0Norman Borlaug,\u00a0and his “Green Revolution<\/a>” which showed how we could harvest vastly more food per acre than with older agricultural techniques.<\/p>\n

A cynic could scold the apostles of the Green Revolution by pointing out that when no more food can be wrung\u00a0from the Earth it will just mean that there\u00a0will be more people to die of starvation. Its hard for the pragmatist in me\u00a0to deny\u00a0the truth that lays behind the cynic’s scolding. Diamond argues convincingly that the recent\u00a0genocide in Rwanda was much more the result of people fighting for enough land to feed themselves than it was a war between Hutu’s and Tutsi’s.<\/p>\n

I wonder if there are any liberals\u00a0left in Rwanda?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was an interesting story on National Public Radio today on the world’s population trends. A demographer pointed out that the highest birthrates tend…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,72,52],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21206,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions\/21206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}