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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 is on to something with the idea that red tribism is a kind of adversarial culture. Its not just that the red tribe hates the blue tribe and its cultural signifiers like the trans flag, its that the red tribe lives that opposition to some extent with costly-to-fake counter-signalling via objectively poor behaviour. Red tribe whites are really fat and unhealthy ("those vegans are effeminate soyboys"), they have a culture of honour which comes with attendant crime and disagreeability (poorly adapted to modern workplaces), etc.

I think red tribism has adversarial cultural strains which preserve high fertility. The strains are religion, patriotism and ethno-nationalism and are really the same strain in different aspects. You can think of it as somewhat randomly assigned. Some adversarial cultures like lower class blacks, don't have these strains to the same degree. In other words, I don't think that this is in any way conscious, but its existence ensured that red tribism remained a vital cultural strain in America because the children of this worldview showed up for the future.

Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution has an anecdote that he once met a secular Israeli Jewish woman with a bunch of children and asked her why did Israelis have so many children even if they didn't feel the need to satisfy their creator's wishes. She (allegedly) said "because Israel is a cause". This is the crucial element which separates ultra-low fertility whites, who actively hate their own kind, from everyone else, especially from conservatives who view their people (i.e. ethnic group) as intrinsically good and worthy of propagation and on some level that they have a duty to that propagation. Right wingers see their civilization as a cause (perhaps a Lost Cause) and its continuance requires at minimum that subsequent generations exist for it.

I am increasingly of the view that ethnonationalism is a prerequisite for above-replacement fertility among ethnic majorities in the modern world. I'll leave what this implies for optimal immigration policy as an exercise for the reader.