Donald Trump says Argentina is fighting for her life and thinks that without his help could well succumb to her largely self-inflicted injuries, but it so happens that she is by no means the only country that could soon shuffle off this mortal coil. Almost all, including the United States, face life-threatening dangers. Of these, the hardest to confront because nobody seems to know what can be done about it, is the one posed by a plunging birth rate: unless their demographic trends change abruptly in the very near future, many other countries will precede Argentina on the path into the unknown.
Leading the doleful procession towards the burial grounds where failed national projects feed the worms are South Korea, Japan and China; every generation is half the size of the previous one. To put it another way, for every grandchild there will be four grandparents. This is a detail that those who assume that China will soon rule the world so they had better learn Mandarin tend to overlook.
Following closely in the footsteps of the East Asians are most European nations, with others elsewhere, among them Argentina, lagging only slightly behind. About the only advanced country that continues to take seriously the biblical injunction to go forth and multiply is Israel, where the birth rate remains well above the replacement level. This bodes well for the future of the beleaguered Jewish State which is already by a considerable margin the most powerful in the Middle East and enjoys a standard of living that is higher than that of most of Europe. To the chagrin of the pro-Hamas mobs plaguing London, Paris and other cities, Israel – bolstered by an influx of vigorous immigrants fleeing anti-Semitism – will be among the last left standing.
Until fairly recently, demography was widely considered to be an unhealthy obsession among “right-wingers” who wanted their countries to have bigger armies, but nowadays even left-ish governments have taken to warning people that, unless they have more children, their collective future will be very bleak. For starters, pension schemes that were devised when breeding was still in fashion are certain to go broke and leave them penniless, but efforts to do what is necessary to make them viable always meet fierce resistance even from young people. In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to reform his country’s generous pension arrangements before it is too late risks bringing his term in office to a premature end.
For many years, Europeans took it for granted that they could overcome the problems caused by their own reluctance to have children by importing large numbers of philoprogenitive men and women from backward parts of the world. It was comfortably assumed that almost all would quickly adapt to their host country’s way of life and would be suitably grateful for the opportunities they received. For a while, many did behave in that way but, as some predicted many years ago when the doors were flung open, large numbers refused to blend in. Instead, they huddled together in their own communities which, as time went by, became openly hostile towards the natives surrounding them. In the United Kingdom, France and even Sweden, there are many who think civil war is fast approaching as a result. They could be right; egged on by Trump, who says Europeans would be well advised to copy him and “send home” unwelcome newcomers, words like “remigration” have ceased being taboo among relative moderates who have come to the conclusion that the present situation is unsustainable.
Lurking in the background is the widespread fear that this time Western civilisation really has shot its bolt and that, at best, the governments of developed countries will have to limit themselves to doing their best to ensure that its death throes turn out to be relatively painless. There is nothing particularly new about this extremely pessimistic outlook: Oswald Spengler’s extraordinarily influential opus, The Decline of the West, was first published over 100 years ago, well before Westerners and others affected by “modernity” decided that having children was not for them.
As Spengler would have understood, collective sterility is a telling symptom of the malaise our civilisation is suffering from. Societies that have little interest in their own future and, and as is now almost universal in the English-speaking countries, are told by influential members of the academic and cultural elite that they should despise their past because their forebears were a disgusting lot, cannot expect to prosper for long.
The proliferation of new political movements, like the ones which have clustered around Trump and Javier Milei, that are habitually called “right-wing” or “ultra-right,” can be attributed to the feeling that the old supposedly progressive order and those attracted by them want to demolish has failed miserably and that their part of the world at least had better go back to basics as they were before the rot set in. Such movements are explicitly reactionary. They see salvation in a return to the days when it was normal for people to take pride in their national identity, sexual roles were thought to be clearly defined, with none of that nonsense about multiple genders, and universities had yet to become notorious for specialising in indoctrinating students in the left-wing vérités du jour.
The way things are going, many such movements will soon reach power in Europe, as Trump’s MAGA one already has done in the United States, but the cures they propose are unlikely to prove as effective as some imagine. Much of what is wrong with contemporary civilisation can be blamed on technological progress, which, among other negative things, continues to eliminate routine jobs and by so doing favours a shrinking minority whose members are gifted, wealthy or lucky enough to be in a position to take full advantage of the changes that are taking place. What is more, it is widely assumed that the advent of Artificial Intelligence will turbocharge the transformation that is underway, sorting people out more systematically than is still the case and condemning the many who fail to make the cut to a lifetime on social welfare, an outcome which the high-tech moguls who move billions of dollars believe would be better than any alternative they can think of.
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