Progressives Are Headed for Self-Imposed Extinction

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a curious new religious group began spreading throughout the fledgling United States. Their official name was the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing – known colloquially as “Shakers” for their tendency to fall into ecstatic trances and literally shake or tremble during worship.

The Shakers are most famous today for their belief in strict celibacy – even within the confines of marriage. All members, whether single or married before joining, had to agree to remain chaste for their entire lives. Because of this, their communities had no biological offspring. They only added new members through attracting converts (a rather difficult sell) and occasionally adopting children.

While the Shakers’ numbers initially blossomed to more than 4,000 scattered across a dozen or so communities, eventually they ran into a rather predictable problem: it’s nearly impossible to keep an ideological movement alive without its members creating more new members.

Having children is the lifeblood of any culture, ideology, or religious movement, ensuring that beliefs, traditions, and values are passed down to the next generation. Without family and procreation, even the most passionate faith or cause withers away, relying on the uncertainty of converts rather than the stability of raising one’s own successors.

That’s why the global fertility crisis now gripping every region of the world outside Africa and the Middle East is so alarming – but the data shows that the number of births per woman is not distributed equally along the political spectrum.

According to survey results from the U.S. General Social Survey and the World Values Survey which the Financial Times recently reported on, fertility rates are falling much faster among people who identify as left-wing compared to those who identify as right-wing. The trend holds true in the United States and throughout the developed world.

As this chart shows, in the United States, fertility rates among the most right-wing individuals have remained virtually unchanged since the 1970s, hovering between 2.5 and 2.7 births per woman – above the replacement rate of 2.1. For the most left-wing individuals, however, the fertility rate has plummeted from 2.8 in the 1970s to just above 1.8 from 2010–2024. Across the entire developed world, we see the same thing: the more right-wing a woman is, the higher her expected number of offspring will be.

This matters because children are extremely likely to adopt the same or similar political views as their parents. Even among kids from conservative households who go off to college and get a full dose of progressive indoctrination, the data shows they end up voting in patterns remarkably similar to their parents.

According to Pew polling in 2023, 81 percent of teenagers whose parents are conservative identify as conservative, while 89 percent of teens whose parents are liberal identify as liberal. The family remains a far stronger transmitter of ideology than even the most determined professor or activist.

From a political perspective, that means liberal-progressives could soon be facing an ideological extinction of their own making. Like the Shakers of early America, they simply aren’t producing enough new liberals to maintain their population. That means Democrats could soon find themselves with a lack of new voters to replace older liberals who never had children.

Looking at progressive beliefs, it’s no surprise that the left has found itself in this predicament – particularly when it comes to its message to women and girls.

For decades, the left has told women that motherhood is a burden and that raising children is less fulfilling than climbing the corporate ladder. Liberal elites have snickered at family life while telling young girls that they should sacrifice their unborn babies on the abortion altar for the sake of their careers or personal comfort. (Is it any wonder that liberal women are, as a group, the most unhappy and loneliest people in America?)

Conservatives, meanwhile, could be headed for a period of cultural dominance in the long term – and may even reverse the looming population cliff that the developed world is now barreling toward.

If the current trends continue and conservatives reproduce above replacement rate while liberals continue their fertility rate collapse, at some point the vast majority of kids born will be born to conservative parents, who will pass their values on to their offspring. The U.S. population may continue to decline, but at some point, so long as conservatives remain above replacement rate and keep passing their values onto their children, the population will bottom out and then tick back up.

In other words, being conservative may in the long run prove to be an evolutionary advantage.

Skeptics will counter that progressivism doesn’t need high fertility to survive because its ideas spread through institutions – schools, universities, the media, and now major corporations. And that’s true to a point. Institutions can manufacture converts. But history shows that no institution is more powerful than the family.

Extrapolated out over the course of many generations in the United States, the demographic math is stark. The left’s refusal to embrace family life and childbearing means it is planting the seeds of its own decline. Meanwhile, conservatives who continue to embrace children, marriage, and family could not only inherit the future politically, but also be the only demographic capable of reversing America’s population decline.

The refusal of the Shakers to have children guaranteed that their ideas would die with them. Progressives today are making the same mistake on a much larger scale. At its current pace, the Democrat Party may eventually be defeated not by Republicans at the ballot box, but by the inevitable consequences of their anti-child, anti-human ideology.

Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.