In Yuri Bezmenov’s 1983 lecture on psychological warfare and control over Western society (which is compulsory listening for my readers), he uttered an adage which goes back to Sun Tzu’s treatise The Art of War: “The highest art of conflict is not to fight at all.” Rather, it is to subvert. This piece is one in a series I’m writing about subversion, or the ideological brainwashing of the West. A cunning enemy of a state – an enemy which may well come from within – defeats its target not by gunfire but by changing the population’s core beliefs and behaviors to eventually undermine patriotism, educational and economic excellence, healthy cultural traditions, and fertility rates. This requires capturing powerful institutions like universities and subverting their greatness to the detriment of the targeted civilization. I firmly believe that the greatness of the West depends on the moral and legal tenets which proceed from its foundational Christian heritage. Our defining tenets include freedom of conscience and speech, personal duty, and, perhaps most importantly, a sanctifying respect for the nuclear family. We have known since Aristotle that the family institution is a great society’s most essential unit: What better target is there for an enemy of the West to subvert?
Who exactly is continuing this subversive task is a difficult matter – one we will explore in further posts. Suffice it to say: What the Soviets sowed proved very able to survive their institutional collapse. Ideas, like viruses, can survive the death of their hosts. Sometimes they even benefit from it.
To the point at hand: The strength of the nuclear family determines children’s prospects and, to a lesser degree, fertility rates. Statistics robustly show that the educational and psychological outcomes of children in single parent households suffer by comparison to their two-parent counterparts. Data also suggests that no-fault divorce laws have a negative effect on fertility rates. When women can initiate divorce easily, the window of time in which a couple has children is shortened, so married couples have fewer children. This means that marital fertility declines on a large scale. Research shows that even extra-marital fertility declines in response to no-fault divorce laws coming into effect.
Marriage, for many, is still an ideal condition for having children, as it should be. It is no surprise, then, that no-fault divorce laws and the loss of pressure to ever marry in the first place together deplete family life of its social value and institutional authority. Where there are high rates of children being born out of wedlock, women overwhelmingly suffer the burden of single parenthood. All the evidence we have tells us that the nuclear family is good for children and for mothers.
What’s happening to the nuclear family?
This question deserves a twelve-volume book series. For now, I will briefly describe the constellation of trends which contribute to the weakening of the American family.
Since the sexual revolution, attitudes towards the nuclear family have been transformed in the West. Sacrificing career progression for children is increasingly deemed an unattractive prospect (even if that career is soullessly administrative or bureaucratic) and more women than ever use the contraceptive pill to avoid pregnancy, often until after they have exited their peak fertility window. Besides this, a fifth of Americans now think polygamy is acceptable and extramarital sex and child-rearing are overwhelmingly socially accepted. Despite this last cultural shift – which erases the most powerful constraint on women having children out of wedlock – the national birth rate has fallen since 1950 and is projected to stagnate. This is consistent across the developed world and considerably worse in most of Europe and the far East. Birth Gauge on Twitter tracks this alarming decline, recently revealing that Italy is nearing its all-time lowest recorded fertility rate. Its aging population structure forewarns economic collapse in the near future.
These shifting norms have been caused by several things, all related to the ballooning force of Feminism (a term so diffuse it’s unpleasant to use). First and foremost, sex was sundered from its telos – reproduction – by the sexual revolution and the subsequent widespread use of hormonal contraception. Promiscuity is celebrated in popular culture, while absent fatherhood is lamented, but never properly addressed – or attributed to this celebration of promiscuity. Institutional capture is near-ubiquitous: Big businesses pay DEI czars inflated salaries to enforce quotas for women, while their policies punish women for having children (only 12 protected weeks of unpaid leave are granted to mothers, while new fathers take only 10 days off on average). A culture of “girlboss” careerism corresponds to marriage dissatisfaction and divorce rates. Women initiate roughly 70% of divorces and observably have a negative view of personal sacrifice if it impinges on their corporate careers. This leads to loneliness and unhappiness down the line, with only 10% of unmarried and childless women post-55 reporting that they are very happy. Undeniably, secularization lurks in the background of all of these trends: Fertility has declined much more among secular Americans than their religious counterparts.
Subversion, or an accident of “Progress?”
Subversion “forces a society into collapse” according to Bezmenov. Falling fertility rates and children raised in chaotic environments comprise a sure promise of that collapse. But is this the result of a nefarious family-abolitionist political force, or is it more subconscious than that? I believe the answer is both.
Anti-family rhetoric which accompanies the attitudes described above is a hallmark of the Democratic Party, whose embrace of post-sexual revolution mores is most starkly evident in their unquestioning alliance with Planned Parenthood. It is also arguable that the Party’s relative laxity on crime worsens black family breakdown by ensuring cycles of criminality and a depleted sense of personal responsibility among disillusioned black men. Cultural Marxists, influenced in multifarious ways by the cultural communist Antonio Gramsci, pervade the Democratic Party; what ideology is more openly hostile to the primacy of the family than Marxism? This is, after all, the ideology that gave us the Chinese one-child policy. All it takes is a loud minority of Gramsci’s apostles to instil guilt and self-loathing in moderate liberals for subversion to take effect. This has already happened on the question of race, as the excesses of the Black Lives Matter movement show.
To assess the success of cultural Marxist ideological subversion, listen to the platitudes which unassuming moderate liberals often repeat to one another, especially groups of young women. You often hear millennials saying they wouldn’t want to have children in a “climate crisis” or that raising children into a “white supremacist culture” would be immoral. These creeping, misanthropic beliefs are exacerbated by bad economic and social policy. This is seen most drastically in urban regions like NYC, which suffer from housing crises caused by immigration and poor planning. Many millennials don’t want to have children without owning a house first – a perfectly understandable desire! But financial qualms regarding marriage and children relate to a different but related social force: Besides the psychological hold of several radical cultural Marxist beliefs over an unassuming liberal population, secular materialism has a lot to answer for. Young Americans increasingly believe that to marry and start a family demands not just financial stability but wealth. Watch this space for my takedown of what I like to call the “lavish wedding industrial complex,” which frightens youngsters away from marriage more than it attracts them.
Where is the family flourishing?
So far, I have described a bleak situation. But there are pockets of hope. As shown in the AECF data I linked earlier, the state with the lowest rate of single-parenthood is Utah; its fertility rate has been historically high and remains so, despite falling recently. Mormonism is the most successful religion in the USA in terms of economic and family outcomes. With polygamy outlawed by the religion since 1890, its reverence for the nuclear family is central to its flourishing. The states with the highest fertility rates are also notably high in Christian religiosity, with above-average numbers of practicing Catholics, who hold the torch in championing the family with the woman at its center: South Dakota, North Dakota, and Nebraska. It is no surprise that American communities which resist the forces of secularization also live family-oriented lives.
My readers may be surprised that I have begun to advocate for Christian cultural norms, since my turn to atheism was brought about by my experience of the vicious oppression of women under Islam. But women enjoy a venerated and protected role as mothers in Christian communities in the West, unlike their typical orthodox Jewish and Muslim counterparts. They are not made to veil their beauty or occupy a different section of their church; they are not forced out of education. As the masterful art historian Kenneth Clark discussed in his essential series “Civilization,” the female principle lies at the heart of Christian civilization. Catholics in particular venerate Mary as the only person, besides her son, who was without sin; the first people to testify to the resurrection of Christ were two other Marys.
This is not to say that mothers are given all the praise they deserve: It’s rare that a dutiful mother is showered with the gratitude and praise she deserves, since her sacrifice leaves her children in her lifelong debt. But, as the need for healthy marriages and babies to sustain Western civilization grows ever more urgent, I have faith in the propensity of revived Christianity in the West to treat motherhood – and mothers – with the utmost respect.