Blood and Crabgrass

Why the "good" conservatives went Trump so fast

One of my low-key bêtes noires has been Joel Kotkin, the rightwingers’ favorite “urbanist,” mainly because he seems to hate cities and the liberals who live in them and keeps shaking his fist and predicting their doom. Here’s a round-up of my writing on Kotkin; I notice I haven’t looked in on him for over a year, not since the month before the inauguration, when he predicted Trump and his incoming HUD Secretary Ben Carson would be great for the nation’s cities. (I suppose you could say they’ve been good for our exercise, anyway.)

Well, I found this new Kotkin joint today (co-written with Wendell Cox), “America’s Future Depends on the Bedroom, Not the Border,” and he seems to have gone full Trumpkin in a way that even I, cynical as I am, wouldn’t have expected, but probably should have.

Kotkin and Cox start by saying U.S. wages are rising because Trump’s keeping out foreigners — a dicey proposition — but we still need more workers. This is weird: If so, then why not let the immigrants we’re currently trying to scare away with torture and violence back into the country?

Kotkin and Cox aren’t clear about why not, maybe because to be clear about it would be too offensive for a mainstream publication; they instead talk about population shortfalls in other countries, and in doing so use a phrase I haven’t seen before: “historically Judeo-Christian and Buddhist countries.” This is in relation to Japan not meeting replacement levels along with the, you know, white countries. Later they mention “Muslim countries including Iran, where the fertility rate has fallen below that of the U.S.; Turkey, and Bangladesh also now have at-or-below-replacement-rate fertility” — but I bet you won’t hear them talking about “Judeo-Christian and Muslim countries” anytime soon. (And as for the countries that are not losing population, you get one guess as to why they’re not mentioning them.)

And probably for the same reason, they quote a sociologist on childless Japan’s '“high quality, low energy, low growth existence” — because, like “Judeo-Christian,” “low energy” is a signifier their audience will understand.

And here’s something else that audience will understand:

Indeed, many greens view procreation as an abomination. If the medieval mentality attacked sex — and as much as 15 percent of the population was permanently celibate — to “save souls,” some greens see childlessness as a way to slow an impending climate change holocaust.

The “some greens” reference is linked to a PJ Media story about the BirthStrike movement of childbirth abstainers, which is not exactly mainstream on the left, but which Kotkin and Cox as well as PJ Media explicitly tie to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal — not because it makes any sense, but because, as when feminists are portrayed as man-haters and environmentalists as eco-terrorists, it helps their readers make sense of the world.

Eventually they get to a money shot that pays off on that bizarre title:

The most direct path to a potent economy doesn’t run through the border, however, but into the bedroom, with critical steps, particularly on housing, that could lift sagging domestic birthrates...

One key factor is the growing involvement of women in the workforce. In Singapore, where women traditionally took a back seat in the workforce and focused on child raising, the labor force participation rate for women is approaching 60 percent. The women who work, notes demographer Wolfgang Lutz, average a 53-hour work week:” Of course, they are not going to have children. They don’t have the time"...

Things are by no means hopeless. Today, 16 million millennials have had children, up from barely six million a decade ago. Many mothers may have kids in their forties. The potential for a demographic rebound remains...

If you get a whiff of Dr. Strangelove and the boys talking about the ratio of men to women in the post-apocalyptic world, you ain’t the only one.

Cox I don’t know (Wikipedia says he’s “known as a leading proponent of the use of the private car over rail projects,” LOL) but I have to say that while I always thought Kotkin was awful, I hadn’t made him for a straight-up nativist. Yet here he is basically making a Blood and Soil — well, I guess in his case it would be a Blood and Crabgrass — pitch to make American women quit their jobs and push out children so that we may grow our economy without resort to dark outsiders.

He’s been tending that way recently, it appears — here’s something Kotkin wrote in February:

Densification is also seen by some progressives as a way to assure a permanent majority, since apartments appeal largely to their base of mostly childless lifetime renters. After all, most apartments being built are either studios or one-bedroom units, so-called “vasectomy zoning” with ever-fewer family-friendly residences.

Again, maybe I’ve been missing it, but assuming I haven’t and this is a new frontier for Kotkin I think I know why he’s gotten this way: Trump. Writers and thinkers, even bad ones (maybe especially bad ones) are influenced by the key figures in their movement, especially when those key figures drum up business, and though Kotkin’s traditional contempt for city folk is consonant with Trump conservatism it’s still usually expressed in a way that for true believers might be too suspiciously intellectual — but add some nativist-natalist whiten-up palaver, and it’s right down the old pipe. It’s almost like a dare: You say you’re a conservative, but are you real enough to do a little Kinder, Küche, Kirche? The man who wants to keep his place bad enough says hell yes and comes up.

That’s why you see other wingnuts heretofore imagined to have some dignity similarly demeaning themselves: For example, lofty wingnut classicist Victor Davis Hanson, formerly disgusted by the vulgarity of Barack Obama, but now a sort of court jester who considers Trump “a hero out of Greek myth.” Or pretty much the whole staff of National Review, who were once NeverTrump but are now mainly JustTheTipTrump.

It’s not like the HUAC blacklist of the 1950s, where imperfect but decent people succumbed to pressure and named names; no, these people were always shit, and didn’t need any more pressure than a nudge to bend over for their new boss.

Good weekend, folks, see you Monday.