Progressives Turning Away from Children
The progressive fertility fall, Harvard trending MAGA, and more in this week's digest
There will be no podcast next week in honor of the US Labor Day holiday. Also, next week I may have a lighter digest due to multiple speaking trips.
One of them is the Maven conference in the Dallas area on September 6. So if you live down that way you can check it out.
Harvard Gets MAGA-fied
Harvard magazine has an interesting article about how MAGA went mainstream there, particularly within the longstanding student conservative infrastructure there.
Koerner was raised in deep-blue Cambridge, Massachusetts, surrounded by liberal neighbors and peers. He began to wonder whether conservatism might hold the answers he hadn’t found growing up. So he started to attend meetings of the Harvard Republican Club and the John Adams Society, the University’s conservative debate society. In the classroom, he immersed himself in the Western canon—from Plato’s Republic to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the Catholic encyclical that critiques both socialism and unregulated capitalism. In the midst of his undergraduate studies, he converted to Catholicism.
Today, Koerner is the president of the Republican Club—notorious, lately, for its full-throated support of President Donald Trump, its shift to a populist brand of conservatism that might come from the mouth of Vice President J.D. Vance, and its increasingly prominent place on campus.
When Koerner was a freshman, he says, the club might have drawn 20 to 30 people to an event featuring a conservative speaker. Now, such events can attract over 100 students. In a 2024 Crimson op-ed, Michael Oved ’25, Koerner’s predecessor, declared that “it has never been a better time to be a Republican on campus” and wrote that the club’s mailing list had grown from 100 to over 800 during his tenure.
Click over to read the whole thing.
The Falling Progressive Birth Rate
John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has another really interesting column about the political gap in fertility. He notes, “From the US to Europe and beyond, people who identify as conservative are having almost as many children as they were decades ago. The decline is overwhelmingly among those on the progressive left, in effect nudging each successive generation’s politics further to the right than they would otherwise have been.”
Here’s the money chart.
Click over to read the whole thing.
Town-Gown Relationships
My latest column in Governing magazine looks at how colleges are trying to partner to improve the town where they are located. In a more competitive environment for students, they need their towns to be nice places that students want to live in. I highlight the example of the Christian college Taylor University here in Indiana.
Unlike many colleges, Taylor has actually been on a roll, with record freshman class enrollment. It’s closing in on hitting its growth target of 2,500 students. It’s in the middle of a $500 million fundraising campaign.
Upland has had a number of challenges, though. The town has fewer than 4,000 residents. Its location is too far for an easy commute to a larger metro area. Downtown Upland had seen significant disinvestment. And the anchor institution of the college is about a mile from the actual town.
But Taylor has addressed these challenges through its $100 million Main Street Mile initiative. The effort is backed by a $30 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, with the college, government and private sources contributing the rest.
…
Taylor’s president, Michael Lindsay, wants the Main Street Mile initiative to succeed as a development project, but he has bigger goals in mind as well. Lindsay believes that college contributions to their communities are central to reversing higher education’s plunging public credibility levels. He told a U.S. Senate committee that “it will only reclaim the public’s trust if it pairs academic excellence with moral formation and holistic student learning with community impact.”
Click over to read the whole thing.
Elevating the Stapler
I love to find affordable luxuries - smaller, high-quality, well-designed items that won’t break the bank. One of them that I picked up was this Klizia 97 “whale” stapler. It uses smaller gauge staples and is only rated for up to 16 pages. But it’s perfect for most home stapling tasks and you can get one for under $30. It comes in a variety of colors.
Note: Amazon affilate link
Do You Even Lift, Bro?
Zohran Mamdami, the socialist who is the leading candidate to be the next mayor of New York City, tried his hand at bench pressing and couldn’t even take one plate out of the rack.
I think this is a good example of the “vibe shift” around masculinity. Even the socialists are trying to prove their he-man bona fides. Honestly, this mostly comes off cringey when done by both liberals and conservatives. It’s typically inauthentic to the person, and thus obviously a PR move. And it embodies a very basic tier idea of masculinity.
For those who are legit into fitness or lifting, this probably makes sense. But for your average politician, is just seems like yet another example of the degrading pandering that candidates have to do.
Best of the Web
Gallup: U.S. Drinking Rate at New Low as Alcohol Concerns Surge
BBC: Are girls being left behind in school? Experts are sounding the alarm - Boys are actually the ones way behind, but naturally the big establishment institutions like the BBC still focus their worry on girls.
Financial Times: The ultimate status symbol? A big family
Wall Street Journal: Churches Are a Rare Construction Bright Spot - As attendance slips, congregations are adding coffee shops, child care and other amenities to draw new members
First Things: Iranian Christians Should Not Be Detained While Seeking Asylum
New Content and Media Mentions
I got a mention from the Antiplanner and by Sumantra Maitra.
New this week:
Institutionalizing Trumpism - Trump's long term legacy may be undermining the credibility of the United States as an international partner
My podcast this week was with economist Adam Ozimek on the hidden truths behind the housing crisis.
Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
I was a member of the New York Young Republican club in the oughts. It was very moderate, very neocon. I sat at the dais at a gala honoring Mike Bloomberg when he was the ostensibly Republican mayor.
Sometime (around 2016 I imagine), the club had a complete MAGA revolution and is now about the most passionate ultra-MAGA organization that can be imagined. What's interesting to me is that they are now known for fun, wild events. The 2023 gala was a black-tie event at Cipriani Wall Street attended by THE MAN himself and according to the New York Post was an epic blowout featuring the antics of characters like Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.
In other words, the NYYRC is about 1,000 times more stylish, wild and fun (and expensive) then it ever was during my time. The deep transgressiveness of being an NYC MAGA is exactly what's cool about it. There are far more social events these days and they're often invitation-only at undisclosed locations. The vibe shift in that organization was complete.
I wonder what is going to happen to all of these women who decide not to have children or get divorced from their husbands to find themselves when they get old? I think we are beginning to see the results as these Progressive protests are usually heavily populated by old grey haired women.