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American Conservatism and Fertility Cult-ure

anarchonomicon.substack.com

A theory im playing around with that the apparent Vulgarity and crudeness of American country/redneck/Conservative culture is actually an adaptive mode of Counter signaling akin to Orthodox Jewish or Amish cultural adaptations to maintain high birth rates and internal cultural coherence in the face of the homogenizing anti-natalist effects of Mainstream Global-liberal-urban monoculture...

American redneck/conservative culture, and Orthodox Jews especially are unique in being the only wealthy cultures to maintain high birth rates beyond the global middle-income, and that both adapted and are defined by their hostile largely hostile relationship with the the most advanced strains of the global mono-culture found in Urban America and the Urbanized anglo-world.

Nations as far afield as Hungary, China, and Iran are trying to save themselves from declining birthrates... Should they try to import American Country culture?

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I think kulak you’re overlooking a hugely relevant variable- people have kids when they expect to enjoy raising them.

The lowest fertility rates in the world are in East Asian countries where childhoods are by all accounts horribly unpleasant for all involved and middle income trapped postsoviet crapholes where grinding poverty combines with anti-natal memes to make raising children suck.

American red tribers love raising kids, being ‘fun/cool aunts/uncles’, babysitting, being youth mentors, etc. Yes, including the women- being a mom is high status and redneck girls’ instagram is basically Morgan Wallen and mom-influencers posting their kids being cute. Charities to connect at risk youth with mentorship advertise on the fishing channel for a reason, too.

I have no direct experience with Israel or much with conservative Jewish culture, I do not speak Yiddish or Hebrew, but it’s worth noting that Israel has the highest alloparenting rate in the world- parents report getting more help from friends and family. This seems like it gestures towards something similar.

The lowest fertility rates in the world are in East Asian countries where childhoods are by all accounts horribly unpleasant for all involved and middle income trapped postsoviet crapholes where grinding poverty combines with anti-natal memes to make raising children suck.

One of the lowest native tfr countries is Austria. Austria is a wealthy Western (in the iron curtain sense) European country with extremely generous welfare. Day care and kindergarten are provided by the state. There are generous incentives to have multiple children, including huge tax deductions that not only scale per-child but actually increase by more with each additional child up to four. What’s more, Austrians receive extensive vacation time of 36 days per year, work an average of 35 hours per week and have comparatively cheap housing and transport costs, with high quality, highly-subsidized housing in major cities like Vienna.

Objectively, Austria is a great place to raise children and a good place for children to grow up. They still have rock bottom birth rates that have only been boosted in recent years by migrants.

But do Austrians culturally look forwards to being parents? Because rednecks do, male and female both.

Yes and the fact that red tribe people living in middle America are in a sense a residual population once the high-neuroticism portion moved to big cities to find themselves or chase careers. Controlling for everything else, I'd expect people who have a low propensity to worry to be among the best adapted to modern fertility and parenting.