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I've previously posted on the Motte about the Swedish state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and suggest solutions to the problem. The fourth report dropped a few weeks back, this time focusing on involuntary childlessness and infertility: “Involuntary childlessness: prevalence, causes, treatment and consequences” As before, here's a link in case you know Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-4-ofrivillig-barnloshet-forekomst-orsaker-behandling-och-konsekvenser/
In contrast to the other three reports previously released, this one actually got some major government attention, and shorly after it was made public an extra investment into fertility treatments was announced. That's all well and good, and I'm sure it will help suffering couples – but I am also increasingly worried that the committee is losing the thread. These last two reports (the previous of which focused on economic differences between different family formations) have deftly dodged all the bigger questions at play in this crisis. Biologically-related infertility is obviously an exceedingly small cause of declining fertility, and in any serious discussion it must be pretty far down the list of priorities. I get the feeling this particular issue is getting a whole report's worth of attention not because it's key to a solution, but because it's conveninent and doesn't involve questioning anyone's life choices by wrestling with difficult and dangerous questions.
One of the difficult and dangerous questions I've wrestled with recently is a particular form of dissonance. It might surprise a few of you, but Sweden actually has an extensive Total Defense Duty (yes, literal translation) technically applicable to all Swedish citizens between the age of 16 and 70. Everyone and their grandma really is expected to make significant sacrifices, perhaps even give their lives, in the event of war. In the information pamphlet the government regularly sends out to facilitate crisis-preparation there's a classic mantra (in the more literal Sanskrit meaning of that noun, man-tra, i.e. support or instrument for the mind) that I think has been included since centuries back – alla uppgifter om att motståndet ska upphöra är falska – all reports that resistance is to cease are false. Liberty or death. Noble stuff!
Yet the most central part of ensuring the continued existence of a sovereign Swedish state, i.e. the creation of a new generation of Swedes, is apparently not even a moral, let alone a legal, duty on the part of the citizen? Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo? That old Goldfinger-line pops into my head. "You expect me to have children?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" Really, what is the point of this gung-ho never-surrender sentiment, and for that matter all the increases in defence spending in Europe, if we're just going to allow death to conquer us all from within? There are ideas here which should be connected, yet they seem to lie strewn all about in disorder in a way that's both frustrating and disheartening to see.
Apart from that, I'm also not entirely sure unreservedly making it even easier to postpone getting children is truly the right way to approach this problem. Unpopular though it might be among certain cohorts to point out, the solution to declining fertility reasonably also should somehow involve convincing women to have children while they're still young; not enabling every pregnancy to be geriatric.
In short, the material focus in the debate is starting to worry me. I hope that the next reports will be a bit meatier and tackle the larger cultural and ideological questions at play.
You’re right up my wheelhouse here and there’s too many issues to pick from in Sweden’s case.
Swedish women don’t want many kids because they say it restricts their freedom. It’s taken for granted that children are born when it’s most convenient for one’s career. In the middle class that usually means between 30-35 (which is old for that kind of thing). But the political elite women’s interest are allied with politically elite men’s interest. Nobody there ever discusses the concept of national “duties,” in this way. You simply won’t see it. In Germany 30% of all women are childless. For those with university degrees it’s 40%. Similar attitudes you find in the west. Not many people remember when Macron in France said, “Show me a well educated woman who has decided to have 7, or 8 or 9 children.”
The only real way the TFR problem has been approached offers two solutions: immigration or the Hungary policy. Back in the 30’s and 40’s Gunnar and Alva Myrdal talked about the birth rate even then because it had sharply fallen off as a result of the Great Depression. That was the foundation of the “Folkhemmet,” where preferential loans, subsidized housing, free healthcare and meals, etc., came into play. When their ideas actually got implemented the birth rate went from 1.8 to 2.7 in 10 years.
In Hungary, they follow similar policies. Hungarian parents who have multiple children to become eligible to receive mortgages with no interest by having at least three. If you have four or more, you’re exempt from paying income tax for life. You can also get a grant of eight thousand euros to buy a car but only if it has more than seven seats. In total it’s resulted in something like a 25% increase in children being born. Still below 2.1, but a reversal of the current trend.
You had members of the Swedish left-wing attacking Orban and calling his policies “offensive” and comparing it to Nazi Germany (predictably). You had Annika Strandhall (who’s the Swedish minister of social security) calling it right out of the 1930’s. But anyone of Orban’s stripe should be happy to accept the criticism. He’s a supporter of democracy as is most of his cohort. He’s not a supporter of ‘liberal’ democracy. Annika apparently doesn’t understand that in Hungary and Poland, their political leaders are appointed in general elections.
If I ever meet my relatives over there I want to ask them why in the hell they seem so desperate to emulate the worst aspects of American society? They’ve currently got a massive case of Shitlib Syndrome that’s only metastasizing.
Orban was a corrupt, out of touch wannabe autocrat who lost the election in a landslide despite having control over all the mainstream media. Don’t let the culture war stuff fool you, it was just a distraction so that he and his cronies could rob the country blind. He didn’t care about Hungary at all and was happy for the country to stagnate, suffer economically and to cause a brain drain due to his policies, so long as he was in power.
You are basically just describing the Harris campaign. Not that wild.
This is low effort culture warring. Don't do this.
If you are going to make this sort of comparison defend it or explain it.
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I don't think it's an accurate comparison though. Orban, with all his faults, was the leader of his campaign and his domain. Harris was an obvious (and quite ridiculous) figurehead to allow The Machine to operate in the same way it already operated under Biden, where nobody is responsible for anything and things just happen. I am not sure which one is worse - authoritarian rule by an energetic kleptocrat or a by an amorphous anonymous blob - but I don't think they are the same thing.
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Most Hungarians below ~50 or so, like in the rest of the (western) world, are now getting their news from social media, but certainly from online new portals as opposed to traditional mainstream media. Orbán took over a lot of the traditional media, like the county-level (online) newspapers, the public media obviously, but these mainly reach the old generation, pensioners. He did try to, and in some sense managed to, take over the most read news portal Index.hu, but basically when the transfer of ownership happened, the whole staff resigned and then promptly made a competitor Telex.hu, which is by now the second most popular behind Index.hu. And there are other online portals, many professional youtube channels who are against Orbán.
Orbán did try to manufacture social media influencers in a topdown way, this was called Megafon, where they basically received central messaging from the government, they were trained how to produce social media content etc, but it was very fake and weak. Then in the campaign they started the "Fight Club" which was about teaching Orbán-supporters to get into comment fights on Facebook to defend the government. Orbán made a WhatsApp group then a Facebook group for this, and he literally sent a list of topics to comment about, for some time every morning (to tens of thousands of group members, so it was not some super secret thing). Then they made the "Digital Civic Circles", which was basically "Fight Club"-light, basically thematic Facebook groups with some celebrities headlining them, but it was still about receiving a centrally crafted message and lists of Facebook post links that you were supposed to like and put comments on.
Orbán was basically begging people to just spend 10 minutes on this per day, even if this digital world is foreign to many supporters (they are mostly pensioners and rural people). Orbán himself still uses a dumbphone and works on printed paper with pen, and generally hates technology. So him pushing for this shows how much he noticed the problem.
All this to say, nowadays it's not so easy to control the media.
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I think you have a pretty unbalanced and prejudiced view of him in totality. I’ve paid pretty close attention to him from all sides.
In the end, how did Hungary fare under his rule, when compared with the regional countries, like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia? It doesn't seem that he had much of an effect in the direction you're saying. Those other similar, post-communist countries also didn't get flooded with migrants, I don't think there is much higher levels of wokeness in those other countries, however you'd measure it. Hungary has certainly no higher religiosity or churchgoing numbers, and no real tangible "conservatism" compared to those. The tangible effects are the highest food price inflation in the EU, the steepest rise of housing prices, very low economic growth numbers etc. both in comparison with regional and with overall EU countries. And as we saw, fertility is also back to baseline levels.
Orbán is just a great salesman and managed to sell this idea of the big antiwoke fighter to the MAGA people. In the net effect it's showbusiness, marketing, billboard propaganda etc. He's also a master of moving the party strategically in the political coordinate system. From the 90s onwards he has strategically shifted the party position several times. The latest one since around 2014 was aimed at pushing out the 20% strong extreme right Jobbik by shifting towards the far right. Jobbik seriously felt the danger, as their traditional topics were suddenly "stolen" from them and used by the government. So Jobbik shifted into the center, and eventually teamed up with the liberals. This move led to a break in Jobbik, and the radicals went on to found Our Homeland, which is still in parliament at about 5-6% support level. You can read plenty of critiques about Orbán's governing by Our Homeland party, they are quite dissatisfied with him, despite being also right-wing (though Our Homeland also had to find a new niche, and they've been focusing on globalist conspiracies, WEF, BlackRock, antivax etc).
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How is it inaccurate to call him a corrupt kleptocrat? He didn’t lose the election over culture war issues, he was exposed by a conservative politician. How do you think him and his associates got so rich?
Now if you’re saying that the corruption was worth it, that’s a different argument. I suppose that’s how Americans currently defend the Trump circle’s insider trading, market manipulation and cronyism?
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The online right likes to repeat this, but it was a temporary effect and by 2025 Hungary's TFR dropped back to 1.31, which is lower than Sweden's 1.43.
Around 1991, it was around 1.87, then sharply fell to 1.28 in the economic turmoil of the system change, floating around 1.3, reaching a new low in 2011 with 1.23. Then as the economy started to recover and also with the measures you mention, it went up gradually to 1.61 in 2021, from which it sharply declined with the aftermath of the covid recession and then the Ukraine war's economic effects. Another possible reason is that people brought their plans forward, and simply had children earlier to get the money, leading to a frontloading of the numbers that would have been coming a few years later, leading to this sharp drop.
Regarding marriage rates, there was a sharp decline after the system change also. The number of marriages per nonmarried men was 47 in 1990 (36 for women), and it steadily dropped to a low of 17.0 / 13.7 by 2012, when Orbán's policies and the recovering economy managed to reverse the trend, reaching 33.4 / 28.1 in 2021, but the economic downturn also affected this and now it's back at 21.6 / 18.6, which matches both 2006 and 2015, but it's still only about half of 1990.
So the communists apparently did a much better job of this. And that wasn't though nationalist race-conscious rhetoric nor a stay at home tradwife lifestyle advocacy. Women had jobs, this was no 1950s Americana. But people saw things as more stable, homes were much more affordable, there was less anxiety around jobs and the basic life pattern was laid out and clear, while alternatives to it were not really promoted or thought about.
The issue is that today, if a country is held back based on economic problems, the economic improvements wouldn't lead to a steady reversal either, because then not only does having children become easier but it also becomes easier and more affordable and available to do other, more immediately fun things, like traveling, living an entertaining leasure life of going to concerts, nice bars and restaurants.
Now that Orban is ousted, it is to be seen what direction those policies take, since the winning Tisza party is a conglomerate of many ideologies. The liberals will push for what they see as non-discrimination of the childless, and they emphasize how these conditions limit women's autonomy, e.g. if you divorce, you have to pay back those credits, same as if you don't end up having the children you "promised" in order to access those funds (unless you get a doctor's paper about infertility - adoption is also accepted), you can always find some sympathetic stories about this. The center-right part of Tisza is probably satisfied with the programs. The less-talked-about undercurrent of the debate is how to target functioning families instead of mostly Roma people who will have many children for the welfare money and then live in terrible conditions. Orbán did it by framing most of the programs as tax cuts or as credit where you had to prove employment, no criminal record etc. as conditions, as opposed to simple welfare for the number of kids. The left typically criticises this as discriminatory against the poor and the Roma, and as helping only the already relatively well-to-do middle class.
So far this is in the program of the new governing party:
This doesn't seem very effective. The 200k Hungarians working in Western Europe won't turn things around in a country of 9.5m for sure. Increasing life expectancy will make the pensions system even more strained. Healthcare and education aren't really the things holding back people from having kids. And as we see in Scandinavia, more women's equality, even if good for other reasons, certainly isn't a measure that contributes to increased fertility, so it doesn't make sense to list in this section.
My prediction is that Hungary will inevitably converge and keep with Western Europe in these macro trends, because it's no longer isolated like under communism. Hungarians are tapped into the same memes, cultural products like movies and music and messaging as the rest of Europe. It's the same social media trends, young people know English, travel more often, take exchange semesters abroad etc. You can't have your little oasis that would work on an entirely different basis.
Yeah, I had a feeling someone was going to bring this up. I’m aware of most of what you’ve said here. My point more generally is that the push in this direction helps to keep things on the right track; but by itself it still proves to be inadequate when you project it out to where it should be. I’ve written on TM elsewhere why the approach the communists took proved to be more effective, but nobody should want to return the draconian type of policy regime that brought them that solution. The approach Tisza is taking is the wrong path and won’t go far enough, but at least Fidesz was on the right track.
Monetary incentives can bring up TFR a bit but not enough to get to replacement. Ultimately, raising 3+ children (without the children becoming criminals or prostitutes) needs to take center focus as a great achievement and honored by everyone is society. Local government officials should be hosting award ceremonies for elderly women who raised functioning children into adulthood. Something equivalent to medals in the military, like limited edition rings and other jewelry. Recognition of women's reproductive achievements is somehow nonexistent, at least in the US.
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Let me know how it goes, but I doubt you'll get more than a bewildered look. European libs see themselves as entirely opposed to American culture, even as they make their way to a BLM march in a > 99% white country.
BLM in Continental Europe was a single-digit number of people per country until it became an excuse for ignoring COVID lockdowns in summer 2020. After lockdowns were relaxed, it went back to being a single-digit number of people per country. BLM in the UK was less pathetic, but not by much. BLM in Australia was an Aboriginal-rights movement that was only nominally connected to BLM in the US.
Grassroots movements adapt themselves to local conditions - on both sides of the political fence. The culture war in Western Europe has Muslim immigrants as the n*****s, not black people.
And how is it, pray tell, that this particular protest, and not any other homegrown cause, if European liberals aren't adopting the worst parts of American culture?
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A single digit number of people or a single digit percentage? Because a single digit percentage is a huge amount, but on the other hand having the number of people be 9 or less seems excessively small.
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They're entirely opposed to "Red Tribe, called America".
In practice yes, but they don't think there's a good kind of American, that they're imitating, even though they clearly are. That's the contradiction.
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But BLM itself kind of sees itself as going against "that kind of" America. When European libs are opposed to "America" they are against the bald-headed-eagle, flag waving, monster truck and pickup truck riding gun obsessed fat rednecks who eat cheap burgers all the time and shop at walmart in a mobility scooter. BLM in Europe is seen as a revolt against that racist America. There is no contradiction.
There isn't really a good kind of American to European libs, and BLM and all forms of wokeness was originally seen as weird and alien. There was even a common "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses"-esque cope, that wokeness is just an American thing, and will never be relevant in Europe.
If they did believe that there's good Americans as well as bad, than the question would make some sense. They would recognize the parts of culture he's talking about as American, and as being imported, and they could justify it, but I'm pretty sure they ,think it's homegrown by now.
Nope, the criticism was also applied to European cultures, often in ways that make absolutely no sense. For example they apply anti-collonialist critique to Ireland, or try to claim that the descendants of Eastern European peasants, who just barely got out of communism, somehow inherited "white privilege".
To a considerable extent, it is homegrown. BLM was run by people claiming to be "trained marxists". Social Justice draws heavily on the theory of Continental Philosophers, and the "Internationalist" faction in American politics has always looked up to Europe for inspiration and social proof of their ideological project. And sure, it goes both ways, to the point that Europeans pick up American memes that on a first analysis make no sense in their context.
Is the WEF an American or a European project? I would argue that assigning it to either is a category error, but if forced, I would say European. In my view, the Enlightenment was from the start a European project, and Anglo-American participation is an outlier, albeit a significant one, but the distinction arguably elides more than it reveals. Organs like the WEF are part of a distinct, cohesive, long term socio-political construct, and that construct observably transcends national boundaries.
Ok, sure I was being a bit reductive, and the whole thing was a bit of back-and-forth. You can even go further and point out that the specific people who kicked off the Social Justice movement in the US were airlifted out of Europe after the war. OTOH, Europeans could point out that we kept them locked up in their ivory towers, and they never amounted to much while they were under our custody. America truly turned out to be the land of opportunity, in a very ironic way. By the time these ideas made their way back to Europe, even the old-school Marxists cried out in horror.
I agree, but even though there's overlap, the WEF is a different beast than the SocJus project. It's a totalitarian dictatorship wearing a smiley face mask, it doesn't get more European than that. SocJus is incidental to it, and they'll continue their project, even if it becomes completely discredited.
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Are you from the US? I think Americans often have a distorted view of how Europeans view them, especially if they base this mostly on online stuff like Reddit. The recent animus towards the US is to a large extent about Trump, and there is certainly some longer term undercurrent even during Obama etc that the US is a bit cheap, overly capitalistic, materialistic, everything for sale, everything measured in money, lot of displays of religion, whatnot, but Europeans still follow and consume American cultural products overwhelmingly, often more than domestic ones. European universities are eager to copy the American academic fads (coastal, blue tribe). They might grumble about some aspects, but those are pretty much the same aspects that American blue tribers grumble about.
Yes, but this is the "we're all living in America", fish in water thing. They just see this stuff being the current thing in Hollywood, Oscars, etc. You may underestimate how much Europeans live in an American-defined media environment.
Nope, European through and through.
I agree with this, I think this is the mechanism for what I'm describing, but in my experience Europeans don't tend to admit there are American cultural trends that are worth following. It just happens, precisely because of the "fish in water" thing.
Because of this, I believe that if Tretiak asked "why are you adopting the worst parts of American culture" he'd just be met with bewildered denial that any part of American culture is being adopted.
There are probably some who don't consume it directly, but through local intermediaries who make TikToks in their local language etc. It becomes a discussion topic and the third and fourth degree viewers are not aware of the origin (for BLM it's more concrete, but other woke topics it can seem blurry if it's organic European post-WW2 equality and justice development vs import from America). But even those that are, they just see it as global universal culture, not specifically American.
It's like asking European Taylor Swift fans why they are obsessing over an American celebrity. It's just a bewildering question. It's not like they predecided to obsess over an American. They just consume media, and they liked this celebrity and it's just very organic and obvious and just happens. Like the way in movies aliens always land near LA but certainly somewhere in the US. People are just used to international trendsetting happening in the US. I guess we are in agreement, I'm just elaborating. BLM was just put in front of people at a time when everyone was on their phones during covid. They didn't wake up one day saying "let's follow some American trends, I wonder what trends are going on there and which ones are worth following and which ones aren't". It's just shown to them and they have an emotional reaction to it that this is wrong and has to change and they can feel part of a movement of a morally right cause etc. American or not didn't factor into that chain of reasoning/emotion.
The other thing is that they may even deny there is a trend. It's not a trend. It's just being a decent human being. There is no such thing as woke, etc. etc.
I disagree with this part. It's perfectly normal to bring up a question like that, and it's likely to produce ponderous murmurs about how we should invest more in our own, and not rely on Americans so much. It's not even limited to pop culture, you do this with literally anything, including industry and online platforms.
And this as well. There was nothing organic about the spread of wokeness. Not in America, not in Europe. It relied on the suppression of opposing views on one hand, and it's own imposition through government institutions on the other, as well as entryism into critical private institutions.
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Which is kind of strange because the word is they don’t really see my aunts and uncles as “American” in that way, but fellow Scandinavians who live in the US. I sometimes wonder who’s going to fall first between Sweden and Germany.
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