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“I want more babies in the United States of America,” JD Vance has said. You go first, Mr Vice-President, voters are liable to reply.
Not even one American in 10 is “very worried” about declining fertility. Most, including most Republicans, think the federal government should have no role at all in encouraging procreation. This is not just an American or even a western thing. The birth rate in the greater part of the world is now below the population-stabilising mark of 2.1 children per woman. Almost no high-income nation “achieves” that level. It is plain that once societies are rich enough to choose, their choice is fewer children.
Against this, the best that natalists can say is that child-unfriendly policies have stymied an underlying human desire for big families. What, everywhere? In North Macedonia (birth rate 1.5)? In Singapore (0.9)? All these governments have adopted the wrong ideas at the same time, have they? Do explain what it is about the Solomon Islands (3.6) that we must emulate, then.
No, the low birth rate is “revealed preference” at work. People want more children but not as much as they want other things. If populists take natalism too far, the Democrats will have an electoral opening, just as the Supreme Court ruling against abortion rights helped them in the last midterm elections. Maga’s increasing concern with children just feeds my hunch that, after Donald Trump, the movement will — for lack of a better phrase — weird people out. The president has a unique feel for what not to be rightwing about: God and sex top the list. It’s strange that he hasn’t already disowned the Catholic converts and Palo Alto oddballs who would nag couples into the bedroom on a monthly cycle.
Baby mania is not the only example of unpopular populism. Without quite realising it, the right is amassing a set of attitudes that go against public opinion. Consider the Covid-19 lockdown, hatred of which has become almost the price of admission to Britain’s intellectual right. Their argument is sincere, well made — and of nil effect. The following shouldn’t still need saying, but here goes:
The lockdown was and remains awesomely popular. Almost all elements of it, including school closures, inspire large majorities of support in Britain and America to this day. Brits are likelier to describe the restrictions as not strict enough than as too strict. It is right to worry about such widespread enthusiasm for state coercion (I do) but some conservatives have entered an online dream world in which “of course” the country rues the lockdown.
If Sir Keir Starmer were canny, he would make more of the Covid-19 inquiry, which judged last month that Boris Johnson’s government did too little, too late in 2020. Or ask, “Would you support another lockdown?” to every passing Tory or Nigel Faragist. Whatever it takes to make clear that, for many on the right, Johnson’s crime was doing too much, too soon.
And even this, an issue of life and death, might not be the biggest electoral liability of the populist movement. So we might as well come to it.
One voter in three now believes that Brexit was a good idea. Every type of rapprochement with the EU, such as rejoining the customs union, or the single market, or the Union itself, is more popular than the status quo. At the same time, the Labour government has no clue how to increase economic growth. It is obvious where this all ends.
In late 2028, Starmer should announce that joining the single market will be the first act of a second-term Labour government. The Conservatives and Reform UK will claim “betrayal” of Brexit. Lots of voters will side with them. A further chunk, while believing Starmer to be right, won’t wish to pick at that huge scab. But on current evidence, and with a few more years of demographic churn, it is plausible that an electoral plurality will vote Labour on a rejoin basis.
Even if not, the current arrangement, in which Brits agree to avoid a certain subject to keep the peace, like a Christmas dinner with 69mn relatives, has a shelf life. The right can’t forever escape the fact that it is implicated in what voters have decided was a national mistake. This is part of a wider estrangement from mass opinion by people who once exalted the general will to a radical and at times sinister degree.
Of course, populists still poll well throughout the west, so perhaps issues are beside the point. But there must be a limit to how many unpopular ideas a movement can stockpile before suffering electorally. The share of British voters who identify as “pro-Russia” is 3 per cent. (You did not misread that number.) Yet which party leader is always having to bat off suspicions of Kremlin sympathy? Farage, the people’s tribune.
In the populist Year Zero of 2016, rightwingers, including some I thought I knew well, were intoxicated at having the crowd on their side. If this isn’t too Freudian, there was something in it of the school dweeb who befriends the tough kids. On the subject of immigration, the right still invokes public opinion as an argument in itself. Fair enough. In a democracy, even a representative one, it is. But on the subject of the lockdown? Or of Brexit, as the decennial approaches? Tense silence, much shuffling of feet, the occasional cough. Don’t be so bashful, old friends. Let us know what you think of The People now.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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