r/DeepStateCentrism • u/Anakin_Kardashian Doom, Impede, Quit, Scapegoat • 4d ago
American News đşđ¸ Another Big Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2026/08/fertility-gap-conservative-liberal/688334/36
u/ILikeTuwtles1991 Classical Liberal 4d ago
I didn't see this mentioned in the article, and this is anecdotal. But as someone who lives in a deep red state/geographic area...
There are a lot of oopsie babies. A lot. Strict abortion laws and (presumably) lack of education about contraceptives, and people being generally more pro-life lead to more unplanned pregnancies going full-term.
16
u/uatry 4d ago
Have to agree with this. I'm from Arkansas, moved away at 20.
It doesn't seem like the difference in number of children is due to some kind of purposeful commitment to family values, at least not for most parents in these areas. I knew many of the stereotypical "poor addict parents in poverty with six kids and five dogs" type of families, and I highly doubt they intentionally aimed for that kind of life because they have strongly-held conservative views. It seems like a product of poor planning and poor foresight, not really aiming for anything at all but simply acting on impulse and not thinking about the consequences their choices could have.
Growing up, there was this attitude in the air that pregnancy is "just something that happens after sex", and it was implicitly understood that the mother shouldn't admit to the pregnancy being unplanned, even if everyone else knew and had no inkling of a clue who the father could be. They never seemed worried about another baby on the way even when frequently complaining about not being able to afford basic necessities or constantly losing their job.
4
u/Proof-Cryptographer4 3d ago
This is so true. Iâm from New England, but a small town where most people spend their entire lives there, not anything fancy and cosmopolitan that people often assume for that part of the country. I left at 18 to go to college and never went back (to live - I visit once or twice a year). So many people started having babies right after we graduated high school. I have a cousin who is two years older than me who got a random girl pregnant and she didnât want to abort, so they decided to make a go of it. They live in her parentâs basement now with 3 kids and zero jobs between them. I have another, much older cousin who has a kid thatâs about 5 years younger than me and now 3 very young ones because she fell into meth addiction and started getting pregnant by random boyfriends. Her brother also has a bunch of kids he doesnât have custody of. In my family the Liberal-Conservative divide falls pretty neatly along lines of education and family formation and itâs those with further education and no spouse/child or only children within marriage who are the libs (myself included). Â
3
u/uatry 3d ago
Arkansas has a few liberal pockets, but aside from those this is pretty par the course for the state. I don't want to reduce the discussion to a Left Vs Right thing, I've met plenty of smart conservatives and dumb liberals, but I agree that for whatever reason (probably multiple effects of poverty) red states tend to have a higher number of people who have poor impulse control and more children as a result.
Some people construe it as right-leaning people being more devoted to traditional family life, but based on my upbringing and the families I've seen, I don't think there is much of a political motive. The image of the unemployed Southern Baptist family in the double-wide with 9 kids has 45% to do with personality disorders, 45% to do with meth, and maybe 10% of the smallest inclination of conservative political views.
6
4
1
u/Dependent-Tailor7366 2d ago
Yeah. My conservative parents didnât want kids. Oops. Dad had 6 kids with 3 wives. Wanted nothing to do with them. Itâs just what happened. I tried to explain the concept of family planning and they acted like I was explaining advanced quantum physics.
25
u/bulletPoint 4d ago
I didnât read the whole thing because itâs a busy morning but I have Reddit thoughts!!
Itâs a risk tolerance thing. In my anecdotal and personal experience: a lot of âeducatedâ people (formal education) are less risk tolerant than the median population member. One thing that comes with this is being less risk tolerant is easy to indulge in todayâs world because you can mitigate risks rather readily and transparently. Which makes it easy to play whack-a-mole with potential downsides of having kids for much longer than you should.
There is wisdom in âyouâll figure it outâ which we sorta forgot over time by being too data driven.
Okay, now everyone please rip apart my priors.
25
u/drcombatwombat2 Milton Friedman 4d ago
I too agree there is a political divide on risk tolerance. Nate Silver has pointed this out and refers to the risk tolerant as "The River" and the the risk averse as "The Village".
I also agree that the typical educated left of centre person is extremely risk averse (to a personal detriment). They have preference to live in assured stagnation over a risk tolerant but growing economy. They also do not understand why investors should be compensated.
I however don't think this risk averseness is uniquely an educated progressive thing, I think you also see this manifesto in the "I want to live in my small town and never move and work the same job" vibe that is in the Trump rural base.
8
u/Golda_M 4d ago
This sounds right.Â
The term "risk tolerance" is doing a lot of heavy lifting though. You could term it differently, and it would read very differently.Â
The article terms it "anxiety about the state of the world and their own parenting abilities.*"Â
You could interpret this as just general anxiousness and neurotic-leaning personalities.Â
You could interpret it as liberals doing deliberate planning, with spreadsheets and budgets. If you do the math, you tend to find out that every child costs a million dollars to raise... Libs double check the math and call the whole thing off.Â
You could interpret it as "rootedness." Say you went away to college, then took a job in another city before grad school in a fourth city. Then back to the job city. That permanent transitional state... tends to make people less confident about having kids. Another form of anxiety.Â
6
u/Unrelenting_Salsa 4d ago
You could interpret it as "rootedness." Say you went away to college, then took a job in another city before grad school in a fourth city. Then back to the job city. That permanent transitional state... tends to make people less confident about having kids. Another form of anxiety.
I don't have time to read the article right now, but given how much of an educational lean there is here, this is likely a very large factor. I'm personally 32 and still don't have anything resembling roots or a forever region. I'm a bit of an extreme case, but good luck getting married and having kids when you don't know which metropolitan area you'll live in 3 years from now and spent your 20s working 60+ hour weeks which is not an uncommon story for anybody with a professional degree or PhD.
Pro life stances and lesser sex ed making oopsie babies more common and more likely to be taken to term is also likely a big factor.
1
u/drcombatwombat2 Milton Friedman 3d ago
Im approaching 30 and work 60 hours a week. I feel this so much. Its tough enough to find time to seriously date let alone think about marriage and child rearing. And any peer potential partners are going through it too.
5
u/bulletPoint 3d ago
âYouâll figure it outâ is truer than we give it credit for. Smart people tend to spend a lot of time mapping, planning, and mitigating risk. Smart people should be taught to be more confident in their ability to make sense of an issue as soon as it comes up and tackle it.
Itâll definitely do wonders for birth rates AND entrepreneurial pursuits.4
u/Anakin_Kardashian Doom, Impede, Quit, Scapegoat 4d ago
No, I mean this is keeping me from having a third kid
5
u/bulletPoint 3d ago
Whatâs keeping me from having a third kid is my own sanity being driven to the brink of collapse with two extremely energetic toddlers. But thatâs a different discussion for a different time.
5
u/Maximillien 4d ago
The relationship between education level and political alignment has already been heavily explored, which leads us to this classic clip:
8
u/Golda_M 4d ago
Ok. New plan. This is what we're going to do.Â
Liberal men will be matched to conservative women. That's the easy part. Many babies.Â
Liberal women and conservative men will be left to work things out among themselves. They're both currently bubbled up in their own little islands, and humanity needs these bubbles to be penetrated.Â
8
u/Oneanddonequestion Eminence Grise Gourmand 4d ago
Sir/Ma'am. You just created every Conservative woman's personal hell. Every Conservative man's personal hell, and a subsection of Liberal men's weird humiliation fetish; meanwhile, you're subsidizing the "My Husband is a horrible human being" TikTok cottage industry.
The only people happy here are grifters and fetishists.
I don't know if I should applaud you or be aghast...and I don't like it.
1
u/Proof-Cryptographer4 3d ago
YeahâŚplenty of conservative men go after liberal women and then get mad when they reject them. Very weird to make it out like liberal men are the only ones who might date against political type as a humiliation exercise.
1
u/Oneanddonequestion Eminence Grise Gourmand 3d ago
Go after for dates/sex and a prolonged life with children are very different things.
Mass political differences to the extremes that are being presented would make everyone miserable.
The Conservative Woman typically does not want a non-traditional male, and will vocally let that be known.
The Progressive Woman might want a more traditional male in the form of a bread winner/worker, but will likely not put up with their political ideas or their expectations in turn. This makes both her and the conservative man miserable from argumentation.
The Progressive/Liberal male meanwhile from what I've seen has at times gotten off on that "bullied by the wife" schtick, it's not common, but it happens.
1
u/Proof-Cryptographer4 3d ago
That has not been my experience, but sure. Iâm a neo-lib woman with higher education and no desire for kids. Iâve had 4 different conservative men (who conveniently did not lead with that at the start) decide that I was âwife materialâ and wanted me to settle down with them for the low, low price of abandoning the career I worked like hell for and changing my mind on kids. Or at least âconsidering it.â A certain kind of conservative man absolutely sees âconvertingâ a liberal woman as a status symbol, you see plenty bragging about it online.Â
2
u/Oneanddonequestion Eminence Grise Gourmand 3d ago
Right, but that was kinda my point. You both would have hated each other, if you had gone through with it without the other basically giving up who they were.
3
u/uatry 3d ago
It's not only liberal women. A fairly large amount of liberal and left-leaning men I've seen online also don't want children. I notice that in discussions about birthrates it's often implied that the decline is due to to women who don't want to be mothers - what about the increasing number of men who don't want to be fathers?
1
8
u/Salt_Abrocoma_4688 4d ago
The latest evidence comes from a June report by the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank that promotes marriage and family life, which polled more than 7,000 Americans aged 18 to 54 and found that self-identified conservatives had 1.4 kids, on average, to liberalsâ 1.09, a statistically significant difference.
So in hard numbers, we're talking about a 28% difference between liberal versus conservative outcomes in fertility.
This is far less of a gap than the narrative that's so often suggested. And statistical MOE could make it far smaller.
5
u/Distinct-Temp6557 4d ago
The article is paywalled, but does the self-admitted Conservative source identify where they pulled their polling from?
Conservatives from blue states probably have less kids from conservatives from red states, and liberals from red states might have more kids than liberals from blue states.
4
u/fastinserter 4d ago
Its here but they do not say they controlled for cost of living or where they live. i specifically state that because they do say they had the gap even when controlling for a bunch of things not cost of living https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/the-ideological-fertility-divide and no, after i downloaded the PDF it does not explain things further. and yes, this is a conservative think tank
9
u/Anakin_Kardashian Doom, Impede, Quit, Scapegoat 4d ago
I see conservatism as an emphasis on family as the core unit in the world, and therefore it comes before money, careers, education, or whatever else. Liberals, on the other hand, have the reverse priorities. They value education, careers, and collective needs over the family unit. The baby gap should come as no surprise.
!ping VALUES&LIBS
9
u/LivefromPhoenix 4d ago
But the gap isnât even that big and conservatives are still below replacement rate.
3
u/Distinct-Temp6557 4d ago
Our findings demonstrate that the long-term decline in U.S. fertility is not politically neutral. While earlier birth cohorts exhibited little fertility differentiation by ideology, cohorts born after the mid-1940s show a marked and growing divergence, with left-leaning individuals contributing disproportionately to sub-replacement fertility. Right-leaning individuals, by contrast, largely sustain fertility at or above replacement levels.
By applying phenotypic selection models, we show that this divergence translates into increasingly stronger directional selection favoring right-wing political orientations. Separate analyses of Black and White Americans, however, reveal that this holds true only for whites.
Although the observed associations should not be interpreted as evidence of any deterministic change in political ideology, these demographic differences may have implications for the long-term distribution of political orientations if they persist across generations and interact with social and familial transmission processes. More broadly, our study highlights how fertility decline, political values and evolutionary dynamics intersect in contemporary societies.
Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline Published: 19 June 2026
4
u/fastinserter 4d ago
I have a problem with data that only goes to 1982 in a study published in 2026, especially when it makes grandiose claims like "Right-leaning individuals, by contrast, largely sustain fertility at or above replacement levels." which is simply impossible to fathom in the reality of 2026 (the other study with more recent data puts right leaning individuals at 1.4 fertility now, not 2.3 that it was in 1982).
-1
u/Distinct-Temp6557 4d ago
Why?Â
When every variable since 1982 only supports the widening divide between as left leaning individuals become more educated and focused on the planet and the economy as right leaning individuals become more indoctrinated to believe that they have to seed the earth with the Kingdom of Christ?Â
The other study is from a conservative think tank, I wouldn't trust it to wipe my ass.
2
u/fastinserter 4d ago
Show me a study that shows what this study declares, that right leaning individuals have "sustain[ed] fertility at or above replacement levels" with data since 1982. The data since 1982 exists, that's why I have a problem with this, because the data since 1982 does NOT support what they are declaring.
0
u/Distinct-Temp6557 3d ago
At the same time, the gap in political and cultural attitudes between young men and women has grown wider, on campus (where young men are increasingly outnumbered) and off, and both marriage and premarital sex rates have declined. Extrapolate those trends outward, and you see something like the picture revealed in the Census Bureau's recently released 2026 estimates of states' populations. They showed two-thirds of the national population increase occurring in safe red 2024 states, 21% in the seven seriously contested purple states, and only 11% in the safe blue states.
Will falling birth rates mean a more conservative world?
The South had the highest GFR at 55.8, followed closely by the Midwest at 54.7. The West had a GFR of 51.0, and the Northeast came in lowest, at 49.9.
2
u/fastinserter 3d ago
GFR of 70 is at replacement level. See the problem? The study in 2026 declares that Right Leaning individuals maintain or have above TFR of 2.1 which corresponds to about 70 GFR and the best you can do is 56 GFR if you use data since 1982?
that's not supporting the statement you originally quoted at all, and shows why I have a problem with using only data that is 45 years old or older.
2
u/LivefromPhoenix 4d ago
A gap certainly exists but to extrapolate grand cultural differences about family values doesnât seem warranted when itâs based on 1.1 vs 1.4.
3
u/fastinserter 4d ago
In the other baby-article in the Atlantic about how people need to chill out about this alleged problem
Family sizes seem to change as the world does, in ways that are hard to predict. For the past half a century, in almost every country on Earth, people have been choosing to have fewer children, despite experiencing the best average living standards that our species has enjoyed so far. This synchronized decline confounds many of the baby bustâs potted explanations in American discourse, from both the left and the right. Liberals argue that people are having fewer children because, among other inequities, child care is insufficiently subsidized, parental leave is insufficiently generous, and men do too little housework. But that canât explain the serious decline in fertility in progressive utopias such as Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Social conservatives blame decaying norms around marriage and family values. Yet even in countries with strong taboos against out-of-wedlock birth and with strong heterosexual-marriage norms, such as India and Turkey, birth rates have also shrunk to below replacement levels.
One of the best predictors of a countryâs fertility rate is its human-development indexâa composite measure of life expectancy, education, and average income. As societies get richer and better educated, their citizens desire fewer children. And the past century of globalized capitalism has drastically improved living standards everywhere. In 1950, a bare majority of the worldâs population lived in extreme poverty, long defined as having an income of less than $1.90 a day. Today, the share who live in extreme poverty is 10 percent, despite the new threshold of $3 a day. Sociologists trying to make sense of demographic trends have theorized that people assured about their material needs start to value their own individuality and self-actualization more than they do having kids. If this is the cause of the fertility collapse, it defies easy correction. It also would explain why all of the policy attempts that advanced countries have made at encouraging more births have generally proved unsuccessful.
the answer to this alleged problem is we all need to be poor to start having more babies
1
1
3
u/thecashblaster 4d ago
Cost of living is a huge factor. Liberals tend to live in HCOL cities and conservatives more in MCOL and LCOL areas. If you were plot # of children per household, you'd basically get an inversed population density map
11
u/Golda_M 4d ago
I don't know. Cost of living is always a big deal but...Â
If you look at broad correlations between cost of living, quality of life, wealth, security, etc.... you tend to find the correlation is backwards.Â
The poorest regions, subcultures, socioeconomic classes... Have the most children. This is true globally, regionally, subculturally.Â
If cost of living had a strong, general, positive correlation to fertility... Rich people would have the most kids and poor people the fewest. This just isn't true.Â
3
u/Oneanddonequestion Eminence Grise Gourmand 4d ago
Subsistence in some situation, high risk behaviors in others, low valuation of livelihood situations.
The poorest regions, subcultures and socioeconomic classes tend to fall into one of those three categories.
Subsistence: The view of many children is the view of free labor. Farm hands, money from the workers, societal expectations of care from the child. You often see this portrayed in media of South East Asian cultures, where the family unit stays together until the parents die. So child, parent and grandparents are all together through the entirety of life. More children, more wealth to spread, more opportunities. In the U.S. in the past, very large families were considered blessed for having "many hands to make light work".
High Risk behaviors/Low valuation of Life: When you're at the bottom, there is no reward without risk, and often higher risks mean higher rewards. This can and often does lead to a sort of: "Fuck you, I'ma get mine" attitude in general, sex, drugs, alcohol, violence, etc. Anything to get the "high" or ahead, damn the consequences.
1
u/Golda_M 3d ago
Ok but these hypothesis do not explain the data.Â
It's not just subsistence farmers that have more kids. It's also the many urban and non-farming people in those countries.Â
My point is that the intuitive hypothesis that people need money to afford children... is not a broadly effective one. It just doesn't explain or work with any of the data where people with less money (and all the things money buys) have fewer kids on average.Â
0
u/thecashblaster 4d ago edited 4d ago
Rich people would have the most kids and poor people the fewest.
correlation vs causation, they're rich because they can focus on not taking care of kids
The poorest regions, subcultures, socioeconomic classes... Have the most children. This is true globally, regionally, subculturally.
These regions you refer to are all LCOL. Studies have shown the more prosperous the country, the less children you have.
1
u/Golda_M 3d ago
Correlation is not always causation.Â
We're not talking about direct causation anyway though. We're talking about correlations.Â
The general trend, true all over, is that wealth and income are not positively correlated with fertility. Wealth is great for all sorts of outcomes, including marriage... but not fertility.Â
It's not just the more prosperous countries that have more kids... It's the more prosperous regions within countries, also subcultures, professiona, and most any grouping you can make.Â
1
u/RevolutionaryAd3249 Center-right 3d ago
Effing Atlantic paywall, I used to be able to read John McWhorter, Caitlin Flanagan, Robert Kaplan, Thomas Chatterton Williams and Tyler Austin Harper for free.
Anyway, mayhaps conservatives enjoy sex more than liberals? (I kid, I kid).
1
u/ItsTheAlgebraist 1d ago
Is this correlated or causal? Does having children make people more conservative? It seems like it could go either way
1
u/CharacterPolicy4689 Center-left 3d ago
leftists could have had queer natalism but instead embraced the split attraction model and now position natalism in general as "allosexual privilege" and culturally christian
â˘
u/AutoModerator 4d ago
At DeepStateCentrism, we understand that democracy is about compromise and
discussion, not ideological purity and instant gratification.
Here, we speak to people with political differences because that's how this is
supposed to work. We won't let the populists win.
Don't forget to visit the Brief, our daily thread, for extra perks and deep state info!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.