Harrison Butker, Harbinger?

Life during and after the coming Demographic Winter.

There are things you’re not supposed to say in 2024 America, and Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker said some of them.

Speaking to a graduation crowd at conservative Catholic Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, Butker took on Joe Biden’s performative faux-Catholicism, transgender ideology and – most shockingly – suggested to female graduates that they would find a better, more rewarding, and more productive life as wives and mothers than in corporate-style careers.

For this, he received a standing ovation from the crowd. (The full speech is here.)  The wider world, however, was not so appreciative.  Most notably, the city of Kansas City, Missouri tweeted out a repudiation and a pointed indication that he lived elsewhere, in a community the since-deleted tweet specifically named.  Facing complaints of “doxing,” the tweet was removed and Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas apologized.  I’m not sure that naming the general place where somebody lives truly qualifies as doxing, but I’m also unclear as to why a municipal government thinks it’s its place to weigh in on what a non-resident private citizen says in a speech delivered in another state about social issues.  There were also demands from assorted leftist activists that Butker be punished.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has weighed in, criticizing the city’s action, calling the mayor’s apology inadequate, and threatening to employ civil rights law:  “I will enforce the Missouri Human Rights Act to ensure Missourians are not targeted for their free exercise of religion.”

Well, this is a tempest in a teacup, really.  But I think it’s also a harbinger.

Over the past 50+ years, traditional ideas, like Butker’s, about marriage, child-rearing, and gender roles have been marginalized, in favor of those that put much less emphasis on, well, marriage, child-rearing, and traditional views about gender roles. 

And now we’re facing a global baby bust, or as some are calling it, a “demographic winter” due to plunging birth rates worldwide.  “Fertility rates have fallen way below replacement level throughout the entire industrialized world, and this is starting to cause major problems all over the globe.  Aging populations are counting on younger generations to take care of them as they get older, but younger generations are not nearly large enough to accomplish that task.  Meanwhile, there aren’t enough qualified young workers in many fields to replace the expertise of older workers that are now retiring.  Sadly, this is just the beginning.”

Back in the 1960s we started to worry about a “population explosion,” and Paul Ehrlich’s highly influential bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” set the tone:  Fewer people being born was better.  All sorts of policies were driven by this concern, on topics ranging from sex, birth-control, and abortion, to the desirability of smaller, two-earner families, all the way to China’s disastrous one-child policy.

But it turns out that Ehrlich was criminally wrong, and now the chickens are coming home to roost, as we face what Brink Lindsey calls a global fertility collapse.

Countries all over the world are trying, with limited success at best, to boost birth rates.   Subsidies are nice, but the costs of raising children – in terms of not just money, but time and emotional effort – are too high for almost any imaginable subsidy to overcome.

So what can change people’s behavior?  Well, it was changes in social mores more than anything else (outside of China) that encouraged people to have fewer children.  My mother reports that when she was young, you weren’t really considered an adult until you were married and had kids.  People who were still single past a certain (fairly low) age were considered unserious, cases of arrested development, or just losers. Married men were favored for promotion, on the presumption that they had families to support.  Unmarried women were seen as losers, and faced some degree of social isolation as they reached early middle age.

TV shows featured happy families with multiple children.  Commercials, etc., just assumed that most people lived in families with multiple children.  These attitudes had a strong influence on people’s actions.

Ehrlich’s book, and the accompanying social attitudes, changed that.  Big families were seen as a step toward that ‘70s dystopia, “Soylent Green.”  (Ehrlich even lobbied the FCC to pressure TV networks to ensure that large families were always portrayed negatively).

I would not be surprised to see governments doing the reverse of Ehrlich, and encouraging better treatment of large families.  (Which today probably count as families with three kids).   Though I doubt our U.S. government will be among them, unless things change.

In addition, of course, more traditional groups – see Butker, above – will gain influence simply because they’ll be a bigger proportion of the population.  As Mark Steyn says, the future belongs to those who show up, and traditional religious groups – trad Catholics, Evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, conservative Muslims and Hindus – are reproducing at a substantially higher level than, well, let’s say the groups that protested Butker’s speech.

Will this be good or bad?  I don’t know.  Mostly it will just be.  Demographic forces don’t care much whether we like them or not.

But it may happen faster than you think.  Plenty of women want careers, and that’s fine, and they should be able to have them.  But there are undoubtedly a lot of women who follow a career track because they think they’re supposed to.  All the feminist progress of the last 50 years, after all, has led to substantial declines in women’s happiness according to the General Social Survey.  (The General Social Survey also says that the happiest people are married mothers and fathers.) And I see women college students saying on social media that if they could choose it, they’d be stay-at-home moms in a single-earner family.  Right now, most of them are afraid to say it except on anonymous platforms, but as with many preference cascades, that could change.

(Of course, one reason for the shift to careers and away from the MRS degree in the 1970s was the wave of divorces, as no-fault divorce arrived and many women who thought they’d be stay-at-home moms in a single-earner family found themselves having to become full time earners themselves.  Most divorces today are initiated by women, but there was a wave of husbands “trading up for a newer model” as they left the wives who put them through medical school, etc., back then.  The insecurity that that created probably contributed both to careerism among women and to a reluctance to have too many kids.)

Unlike Harrison Butker, I’m not holding myself out as a role model here.  When I married Helen she was finishing her Ph.D., and I don’t think I ever had a single serious girlfriend who wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.  (And we only had one – terrific – kid, though we in fact wanted to, and tried to, have two or three, something that alas wasn’t in the cards.)

But what I want or favor isn’t the point here.  The point is that the population collapse that I was writing about nearly 20 years ago, and that Philip Longman was writing about in Foreign Affairs even before that, has now become obvious to everyone.  We’re headed for the biggest global population drop since the Black Death, and that’s going to produce dramatic social changes.  (As indeed did the Black Death.)

The future does belong to those who show up, and those who show up are likely to have the attitudes that caused them to do so.  So is Harrison Butker a harbinger?  Quite probably.

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