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Well with any luck I'd still be aware that as a middling Orban-esque character I'm almost infinitely better at maintaining my grip on power and installing my cronies throughout legacy institutions than at positive social engineering, and would have outsourced the task to someone smarter. I'd have weaved the problem into unimpeachable bipartisan causes (Oh no, The Health Crisis of older motherhood! A poor careerist woman had IVF implantation failure, how tragic! We need a round table, a National Infertility Strategy!) and created a think tank, building its backbone of pronatalist anticredentialist people like Bryan Caplan. We'd investigate prior art in a principled manner to account for costs and tail risks – from Ceausescu Romania to Kazakhstan to Iran to Israel to Japan-Korea-China, and from the national level to specific denominational sects, castes, villages and families.
But assuming we go with my current understanding that stops roughly here and here. My goal would be to set processes into motion that will be indifferent to my own removal; and I do not have any faith in doing that via the legal system. Unpopular laws will be overturned or worked around. Stealing the argument from the ML discussion, legal procedure is the smiley mask the shoggoth that is the society wears; when it assumes an alien enough shape, the mask will shatter anyway. Our goal should be changing the shoggoth.
I also do not buy the economic story at all. I hear it most commonly from upper-middle-class highly educated people who are the least stressed economically (consider the attached Moscow meme, no translation needed Edit themotte failed me with attaching it, here you go); and those few of them who have ideological commitments to large families (far-right Pagans, Old Believers, for example) easily afford as much. Others strive to imitate the lifestyle of those prestigious classes anyway and sacrifice fertility for that; but they wouldn't have if low fertility were coded low-class. Therefore I also do not expect great returns from redistribution of money or formal status (that can otherwise be bought, and will be goodhearted with more interventions). Generic amenities for secular families with children can be cribbed from France and Nordic states, they're sufficient. Stuff like defunding education, on the other hand, is not feasible. Housing stuff depends on local specifics. @wlxd and @f3zinker among others propose sensible programs.
I think this is almost entirely a cultural issue, and there are low-hanging fruit which are only left untouched because of their high political cost – the problem is not one of unfortunate unaligned incentives but one of malice, albeit emergent, and it must be fought with malice. When you say the Cathedral cannot be dismantled, you mean it'll restrict my moves to ridiculous boomer economic flailing that doesn't offend their sensibilities. Even your eugenic diploma scheme is hard to implement. Well, that's totally hopeless then, so let's discuss low-hanging cultural interventions, as if we could fund and recruit semi-talented people for making documentaries, running influence campaigns, dominating the local Fox News equivalent at least.
The crucial fact is that the society still quietly despises and looks down upon childless women over 30. There's some pity to it, but also condescension; it's a suppressed sentiment but an instinctive and thus easy one to rekindle, leaving aside the political animosity of those women and their allies – a formidable force, to be sure, but the TERF case shows it's not unbeatable on its own. Now your argument is that almost every woman eventually marries and has a child, and it's rather single-childlessness that's the problem, but bear with me. First, the later the first birth happens, the lower is the probability of children №2+. Second, this is but the beginning of the slippery slope.
The specific way to rekindle the sentiment is ideally a product of my think tank's research. Broadly it's easiest to initiate with conspicuous worry. The idea of a single woman should be subtly made problematic. Not strength but «resilience», not independence but «coping with adversity and loneliness», not healthy at every size but «fat women are women»; no pet parent but «emotional support animal user» (we can provide one from the shelter! Broken humans and animals can heal each other!). The whole feminist rhetoric and those nauseating stock images with grinning pantsuit ladies must be associated with indomitable will in the face of chronic illness and disability. Brightly smiling cancer and HIV survivors – speaking of which, maybe we should publish a tacky book about surviving rape and abuse, leaning into a superficially scientific idea that such degrading experiences in school explain a proportion of promiscuity and unwillingness to have a traditional family. Special Olympics champions, refugees; we should wear the spin doctor's hat and the skin suit of an ally. Women love to pity themselves, so with any luck they may be hooked before we start pounding on the off-putting aspects of the framework. They also love to shit on each other – so graduating from the support network into the group that can express condescension from above will be in high demand, if this works well.
The other part is similarly patologizing the whole host of modern liberal copes. The way natalism and familism are coded low-class is by emphasizing old age, backwardness, poverty, bigotry – and showing bright, sexy, nimble, educated urbanites who don't even have to douche for anal in contrast to them. This... isn't really an accurate portrayal of reality. We could do a devastating job just by cherry-picking some cases to burn archetypes of failure into the collective consciousness. One of the cruelest Russian movies I know is Dust; it's just a realistic (i.e. not poisoned by the feminine and political partisan narrative) portrayal of an incel with no future. We could do similarly here for people who are properly integrated into the atomized social framework that does not reward childhood, building on the foundation of imageboard memes and shorts by, say, MilleniaThinker (1, 2). There's plenty enough to mock, and to contrast with (partly imaginary) haughty multigenerational familial clans, with proud mothers who do not have to keep desperately putting on a teenager face to stay relevant at 45; the media is just constitutionally incapable of touching it.
A separate line would be anti-education propaganda, basically mockery of the extreme K-selected strategy that Asians excel at and everyone else is stupidly aping. Unfortunately saying that heredity is all-powerful and Caplan has it right is impossible, but showing the immiserating, nervous rat race nature of credentialism with something like DeBoer's argumentation, and happy families who've given up on that, is perhaps workable. Seeing as I'm a populist: a program of guaranteeing access to public schools with a focus on Law and Order rather than expenditure could be popular. It could be cheaper to just rebuild neighborhoods around a few such exemplary schools, and invite only people interested in the natalist project.
And again, populism... even more extreme would be to take a lesson from Israelsi and play up xenophobia. It seems that the sense of demographic competition, fear of replacement, increases fertility. But Western media is very intent on persuading people that the replacement doesn't happen and if it does that's a good thing. Challenging this directly would be hard. Maybe import some Pakistanis to dispassionately report on grooming gangs, show in HD how a vigorous, growing tribe takes control over a dying village, beats the local cops into submission, how their cackling children cast stones at some sentimental old-timey grandma, bent by age, whose only child has gone to the big city? Too mawkish, you might say, and sure it is, but it's not like normies understand nuance.
A more ambitious project would involve increasing the prestige of some state-friendly yet not utterly hollowed-out religious denomination. That's for the next generation, when germs of this strategy blossom, perhaps.
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