Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Ideology Page 1 of 2

Revisiting Original Sin and Identity Politics In the Age of Woke Backlash

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On October 14, 2025

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If you’re anything like me every time you hear the word woke used you wince. Conservatives don’t know what it is and just use it as a hobgoblin, Liberals created it but pretend they didn’t and the left is forced to reluctantly defend basic principles like “everyone should be treated equally”, and “people should have control over their own bodies” after Liberals made doing so noxious.

All of this is based on two thing: cold hard economic math, and the ideology of identity politics as original sin. We’ll look at both, but let’s see some of the results first:

But it’s not just the Youngs:

Now some of this is straight up economic competition. Women get most of the college degrees, they dominate in multiple professions including law, and despite the wage gap, they’re bringing home the bacon. When I was at an elite all-male school in the 80s some of us mentioned to Mr. Skinner, the resident socialist history Prof, that we thought having girls around would be marvelous.

“If we had girls, half of you wouldn’t be here.” And he pointed some fingers.

Chilling.

The bottom line is that there are men who would be more successful if women were restricted to various pink collar ghettos like they were in the 50s and 60s. There’s no denying it and pretending otherwise is stupid and dishonest. So some of “get back in the kitchen” is pure self-interest, whether or not most men will admit it.

But part of it is the original sin of identity politics. I was first introduced in a big way in the early 90s, when I went back to university. As it was explained to me, repeatedly, since I was white, I was racist, and since I was male I was sexist and apparently being heterosexual was somehow dubious. I was willing to accept the first two: I grew up in a somewhat patriarchal (it wasn’t Republican Rome) white society, and sure, I’d taken in some of the values. (As for heterosexuality, well, women are wonderful and no, I’m not changing that preference.)

So, OK, if you’re male you’re probably sexist and if white probably racist (though they would have said 100% for sure.)

OK. I’m bad. It’s not my fault, really, I was raised that way. How do I fix it.

And this is where the problem came in. Apparently no matter what you did, or said, or however much you were re-educated, if male you’d always be sexist and if white you’d always be racist.

“Wait, so you’re saying I’m a bad person, and that I can never be a not bad person?”

“Yes.”

“Uh, I don’t think I want to be part of your movement.”

Here’s the thing, folks, if your religion (and ideology is religion without the appeal to the supernatural) insists people are bad, it has to give them a way out. Even Catholics, obsessed with the original sin, allow that it is possible for humans to become good and wind up in Heaven. Evanglicals, with their “born again” shtick, offer forgiveness for anything.

First you make people feel bad, then you offer a way for them to feel good about themselves. Many will jump thru quite a few flaming hoops to “not be a bad person” and “be a good person.”

Identity politics didn’t offer that. You were bad. You would always be bad. There was no salvation, no good deeds, thoughts or words cold ever truly cleanse of you of your sexism or racism or whatever. (-Isms expanded over the years, till everything had an -ism.)

Identity politics did have its victories, for sure, as with Catholic guilt, people will strive even against the impossible. “Can I be a male feminist, please?” “I’m an ally, right, not one of the bad ones?”

But it also alienated a lot of people with its message of “you’re bad and you’ll always be bad.” The explosion of -isms, of various disadvantaged groups which, as epistemological given, could never really understand each other created a flock of interest groups, some small, some medium sized and all of them undercutting the mass solidarity required to pursue shared interests. (Like not letting the rich impoverish us all.)

Mass political movements are about solidarity, shared interests and an agreement not to make separate peace. I’m 57 and male, but I still care passionately about abortion rights, even though it’s an issue which is unlikely to ever effect me personally. I’ve defended trans people, even though I’m not trans, because I feel they should have the right to bodily autonomy and that they’re being picked on because they’re weak and an easy wedge to use against the larger LGBTQ movement. I’m happy for China that they lifted a billion people out of poverty, even though I’m not Chinese and it’s probably going to fuck me over personally as a Canadian. (That’s mostly the fault of US and Canadian politicians, not Chinese, so I don’t blame the Chinese.)

Identity politics was political malpractice on an epic scale. “Don’t break solidarity” is the first and last rule of mass politics, especially any sort of real populism which seeks to make the weak strong by forming them into a mass capable of demanding their interests be met, or else.

This is the reverse of the rule of the powerful. “Keep the masses divided and fighting themselves, so they can’t fight us.”

Anyone who destroys solidarity is working for the masters, not for the people, whatever they personally believe.

We’ve spent 50 years destroying the political basis of New Deal prosperity. It’s dead, Jim, with about a thousand stab wounds. Identity politics pressed a lot of those daggers home.

Let’s hope we can find something better, a way that unites us and takes care of all of us (well, except for the oligarchs). The world’s looking mighty dark in the West these days, and if we don’t pull together, most of us are assuredly going to hang separately

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Is Good Or Evil More Effective? The Case of America and China.

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On October 8, 2025

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It’s our annual fundraiser. We’ve raised a little over $5,570 from 41 people in the last nine days, out of our goal of $12,500. If you’re a regular reader and can afford to support our writing, please subscribe or donate. Everyone reads for free, but without those who give the site would not survive.

(Second in a series. Read the first: “Is it more fun to be evil than good?“)

As I’ve repeatedly noted, China is now the most powerful nation in the world. If the US was to go to war with China, it would be crushed. After the first two to three weeks it wouldn’t even be close. China has magnitudes more ability to manufacture weapons, and there’s reason to believe that their missiles, drones and fighters are superior to Western ones.

It’s over. China won, and the US lost.

Why?

Well, one reason, bear with me, is that the people who ran China from Deng onwards were a lot less evil than those running America. Or if you prefer, more good.

One of the things you notice if you read Chinese documents about successes of government policy is that they almost never express success in currency. No “the new industry made ten billion Yuan.” It’s always “2 million apartments were built” or “12 nuclear plants are now operational” or “we have reduced the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere by X many thousands of tons” or “we now produce 50,000 tons more of wheat” or “we’ve built 5,000 of the 10,000 parks we promised and will finish the rest in four years.”

There’s no question that China had a lot of corruption till Xi’s crackdowns, and still has a fair bit, but China’s policy makers are focused on improving the lot of ordinary people. You can get rich helping do so, but you have to deliver. The CPC increased how long Chinese lived, gave them more education, gave them better homes, made access to health care cheap, and turned China into the world’s technological leader and primary industrial power.

This is because they were trying to make Chinese better off. It’s almost a side effect. If you make people healthier and better educated and give them good jobs, well, that’s good for the economy. China’s leaders weren’t primarily focused on making a small group rich, they were focused on making all Chinese richer, and on making China strong. You got rich by helping, not by hindering.

To give a recent example,  after Chinese complained that they couldn’t afford homes or rent, Xi said “homes are for living, not for speculation.” The government deliberately crashed the real-estate market, reducing the prices of both homes and rent.

Rent as proportion in income

 

It is literally inconceivable that the American government would do this. Developers went bankrupt, major landlords lost billions. Rich people were hurt! Instead, despite having far more homes than homeless people, the US has a homeless crisis and the response to it isn’t China’s (they cleaned this up recently by giving homeless people jobs and a place to live) it’s to put spikes anywhere people might sleep and when they form a tent camp to have cops kick everyone out violently and destroy their possessions. Some homeless people were even honored by having California’s government, Gavin Newsom, personally help kick them out and destroy their possessions. American values.

Next notice the lack of war-making in the last four and a half decades. Even in the recent clashes with India, weapons were forbidden. How many countries has the US invaded or bombed since 1979?  All that “not making war” has allowed China’s efforts to concentrate on China and Chinese. They focused on butter, not guns. Even today, the entire military is 2 million strong, in the world’s strongest economy (yes, it is) out of a population of 1.4 billion people.

There’s a trope that evil always wins. It doesn’t. I make no claim the CPC is full of Saints or always does good, but among major countries I can’t think of any where the leaders are as focused on the broad good of their people more than China right now. And polling all shows that Chinese agree—they’re far happier with their leaders than any Western population is. Turns out it’s not so much “democracy” that matters (not that we have that, as the EU is going out of its way to demonstrate) as whether your leaders are evil or not, and if the only choices you are allowed to make is “chocolate evil or vanilla evil”, the choice means nothing.

Good is very often stronger than evil. Evil consumes itself, as our elites have consumed their own countries power and real wealth in order to enrich themselves.

Good is bounty, it makes all those under its sway stronger and better.

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Should You Kill or Mourn Nazis and Commies? (Charlie Kirk Edition)

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On September 11, 2025

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My favorite Charlie Kirk quote is:

I can’t stand the word empathy, actually, I think it’s a made up new age term, and it does a lot of damage.

But Charlie wasn’t just a one-note ideological thinker.

I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

Kirk was, needless to say, all for the Gaza genocide, but he was for it by lying about it. Most famously, he denied starvation in Gaza.

Anyway, Kirk was an evil, pro-genocide douchebag, who was shot, which he said was an acceptable price to pay for the second amendment. I’m not going to waste crocodile tears on someone who actively worked for the mass murder of civilians and who died in a way he thought was an acceptable sacrifice.

But we need to unpack this properly. One thing commenters on the right have been saying is that Charlie may have died, in full of in part, because of neo-liberals and the left calling him and people like him Nazi or fascist.

Now I don’t know the motives of who killed him, but in our society many people do genuinely believe that killing Nazis was justified and the right way to deal with them. There’s a version that swings left, of course. “The only good Commie, is a dead Commie.” The Black Book of Communism and the constant reminders of deaths under Mao and Stalin are meant to justify this sort of hatred, as reminders of the Holocaust and German war crimes are to justify killing Nazis.

So the right isn’t wrong. If you call someone a Nazi there’s a certain subtext where “and killing him would be justified” is implied. Fascist is weaker, but same general idea.

But the reverse version is Communist/Marxist/Socialist. The right calls their enemies this all the time and it has the same implication. “Cultural Marxist” was the battle cry used by people like Kirk to justify purges of the university system of left wing professors.

I don’t want to imply these are mirror phenomena. The fact is that since the early 20th century being Communist, Marxist or Socialist has been much more likely get one fired, jailed, deported, beaten or killed than being a fascist. Indeed, there was a huge taboo against calling anyone a Nazi, so much so that doing so was considered “losing the argument.”

It took a lot of boundary pushing in the right for that taboo to be partially broken.

Back in 2016, during Trump’s first run for the Presidency, I wrote that constantly calling him a fascist or Nazi, and branding resistance ANTIFA would naturally lead to violence, because if someone is a Nazi, violence isn’t just justified to stop them, it’s a moral imperative to use any means necessary including violence to oppose them.

But in America, the same is true of stopping Communism or socialism or Marxism. And the same is true of calling Abortion a holocaust.

So what’s happened here is that the shoe is now on both feet. The right had their Commies and their abortion Holocaust to justify their actions. Now the center has Nazis and the left has Nazis and the Gaza genocide to justify their violence.

By their lights, all three sides are justified in violence. If Commies and Nazis and Genocide are true evil, and if all sides have committed genocides and are Nazis (right) and Commies (left/center) then, indeed, it is ethically required to use any means necessary to stop them.

What we’re seeing right now is a cry from all the “responsible people” of “don’t resort of political violence! It’s never justified!” (This in a country formed by violent revolution, who’s almost always mass murdering people for political reasons.)

But the issue is that the right and, actually, the center, are acting like fascists, at the least, and really like Nazis. (That whole inconvenient genocide thing.)

The right’s case is weaker, unless you do view abortion as a Holocaust, in which case, yes, you are hard pressed not to find yourself wondering why you aren’t murdering the abortionists. Neoliberals aren’t left wing, socialists or communist and there are no socialists or communists anywhere near power in the US. The right calls neoliberals the left and pretends “cultural Marxism” is Marxism, so they’re really Stalinists, which is ludicrous to anyone who knows the politically correct crew that the right calls “cultural Marxists.”

If you want avoid domestic political violence over these issues (though it’s all really a proxy for the impoverishment of the majority of the population) you either have to decide that being a Nazi (pro genocide, pro gestapo/ICE thugs) is OK, or stop being a Nazi. On the other side, you have to give up abortion or decide that it isn’t a Holocaust. And since “cultural Marxism” is really proxy for a series of policies meant to help women and various racial and sexual minorities, you have to decide whether prejudice, including legal prejudice against them is OK (Issue one) and whether or not they deserve any sort of helping hand (a separate issue. You could keep them legally equal and let them keep their rights like gay marriage and the female vote but get rid of affirmative action and so on.)

In other words, to avoid political violence over ideology, you need to have the vast majority of the population agree on what is acceptable. Is genocide is OK? Abortion? Affirmative Action. Women having the vote? (Peter Thiel, who bankrolled Vance, has suggested women shouldn’t have the right to vote.) Gays marrying. People being able to choose their own gender. Police raids by badgeless masked men without warrants from unmarked vans.

If people don’t agree on what is right and the red lines being crossed are of “this is a holocaust” or “this is completely destroying millions of people’s lives” then of course it’s going to break out into political violence. Expecting otherwise and hand waving that “we should kill over difference in opinion about whether it’s OK to commit genocide” are ludicrous and pathetic and foolish.

There’s political violence because Americans disagree over life and death issues as large as, but not limited to “should we commit genocides?” Well, again, that and general immiseration, which lowers the ignition point.

If you don’t want political violence, don’t wag your finger and say “political violence is bad, ‘kay”, either agree as a society to be a bunch of Nazis with an immiserated population, or decide not to be Nazis and make sure that almost everyone has a good life.

As for Kirk, I’m glad he got a death in line with his beliefs: making the ultimate sacrifice for the right of Americans to bear arms. It was “worth it” and I will assume he meant that, and if he still exists he’s at peace, having died for what he truly believed.

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Does Zohran Mamdani Matter?

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On June 26, 2025

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So, Democratic Socialist (ie. has politics a 70s liberal would have agreed with, but is less racist) Zohran Mamdani has won the nomination as the Democratic candidate for New York City Mayor.

The best analysis I’ve read of this is definitely from Matt Stoller. He says this win helps define this as a “system-defining election,” that is, an attempt to not just to change who runs a system, but how that system is run. Read the article.

I’ll point out here that there have been a few such attempts. Stoller writes about Lamont’s challenge to Lieberman, in which Lamont won the primary, then Lieberman won the election. It’s similar to what will be tried here: The oligarchical part of the Democratic party will align behind another candidate, possibly even the Republican one. Those who don’t will try to co-opt Mamdani, and turn him into a centrist left-winger.

Mamdani is more radical than Sanders; he isn’t a Zionist, for example. But he’s basically suggesting policies than no Democrat during the 50s, 60s, and even into the 70s would have found extraordinary.

What Stoller calls system-defining elections, I call sub-ideological revolutions. FDR changed the form of capitalism practiced in the US, so did Carter and Reagan. Mamdani, for all the screams from rich operatives like Larry Summers and various oligarchs, isn’t a radical — any more than FDR was. He doesn’t want to switch to economic Communism (i.e., worker ownership of the means of production or Soviet-style central control), say, or a single-party state. He wants real changes in how capitalism is practiced, and some changes to who has power in Democracy.

Sanders’ runs in 2016 and 2020 were an attempt at a sub-ideological revolution, or, system-defining elections. This is why Obama intervened and lined everyone up behind Biden, a nearly unprecedented step.

Likewise, Corbyn represented such an attempt, except Corybn got further, winning the Labour leadership. It’s not an accident that (and we have receipts, so don’t argue) Labour operatives actually sabotaged him in two elections to ensure a Conservative win. They wanted the old ideology/system to keep running more than they wanted their party to win. And once Corbyn was removed, his successor, Starmer, purged the party of the democratic socialist left. Once in power, Starmer doubled down on austerity and politics no different in substance, but actually more punitive, than those followed by the Conservative party.

The Reform Party in the UK is now coming on hard.

Be clear that sub-ideological transitions/system changes can be bad. Neoliberalism was a bad change. In the UK, if Reform sets the new system/ideological norm, it will be awful.

This is one reason why I said that Corbyn was the UK’s last chance: If the left failed, the right would then get its shot, and what the right wants to do is beyond awful.

It’s why Germany is beyond hosed: Doubling down on military Keynesianism (which won’t work in a corrupt, neoliberal system), while cutting social welfare will simply lead to the new-right getting into power. Their policies will make most people worse off, not better.

As for Mamdani, he’s a good sign. The fact that men, as well as the youngs, went for him is also excellent, because it shows that men and youngsters aren’t really “right-wing” in any way that matters. Yet. What they want is change. If they are offered good change, they’ll take it. However, they’re so desperate that if all that’s on the menu is shitty change, or the status quo, they’ll take shitty change.

This was obviously going to happen. I wrote years ago that we wouldn’t see real change until the mid-2020s, at the earliest, because it required generational change as well.

Mamdani tells us that what sort of change will finally win in the US is not yet decided. It doesn’t have to be MAGA stupidity and meanness.

So if you want something better in the US, if you want a chance at a New New Deal, get behind Mamdani and people like him — hard.

There still remains a question of whether Mamdani can deliver, even if he is elected. Will he be be co-opted? Will he run into opposition from enemies so powerful he either can’t overcome them? Or will he use them as a rallying call? Is he competent enough to create and run a new system like the one he’s suggesting?

This is a chance because, if Mamdani wins and then improves New Yorker’s lives, he’ll be copied. And if you’re in a position to do something to improve the chance of this happening and then working, I suggest you do so.

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Us vs. Them / Our Government vs. the Government

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On May 30, 2025

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I think it’s clear that democracy and capitalism don’t work together. Capitalists always wind up buying the government, and the only solution is a Great Depression-sized catastrophe to help reset capitalist wealth. But then, over time, they will capture the government again.

This isn’t to say much good may not be done at various times. Usually, after things get bad enough, a generation winds up in power who is determined to make government work “for the people” because they’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t. War, revolution, poverty, depression, and so on. The second generation staggers on. They don’t really understand in their bones that government must be made to work for the people, and they compromise, but they keep it going, more or less. Then the third generation says, “Hey! If we ran the government for us and the people who can afford to pay us the most, well, we could live very, very well. Who cares about the “people?”

Often, the third generation needs to lie to themselves. They believe some intellectual charlatans: Milton, Friedman, Laffer…and later on, Fukuyama (of “We’ve won, it’s all over, it’s the end of history!” fame). The fourth generation doesn’t even pretend. It’s their government, and you peons can suck it up. (Everyone from Bush Jr. to Bush Sr. thought that neoliberalism was garbage, even as he implemented some of it. Billy Clinton appears to have been a true believer and made it work on sheer brilliance and micromanagement.)

But there’s another problem with representative government: Much like with the police, most people who want the power of government are the sort of people who shouldn’t have it.

What happens, one way or the other, is that government is run by people who run it for themselves, not for the people. It’s “the government,” not “our government.”

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I’ve come down on the side of sortition. Just pick leaders based on a lottery. Then run some medical tests on the ones chosen, to make sure they aren’t chronically sick or mentally disabled. Give them ten-year terms so they are in office long enough to have some institutional knowledge and have elections every two years for one-fifth of the number.

Anyone who serves gets a full pension of three times median income for the rest of their lives, and is disallowed from any other income. If you aren’t willing to do that, you can decline office.

I’m quite positive that random people who know that they’re going back to being almost regular citizens whose income is dependent on how society performs in the future will do a better job than normal politicians.

Oh, there are plenty of details to sort out, to be sure, but this is far more likely to produce “our government” than the current regime.

The next article on this subject will be on the next important change: How we do taxation? How do people contribute to “our government” and “society?” Spoiler: Taxing money is not the right way.

 

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UR-Values Of The Right, Center and Left

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On May 2, 2025

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The left looks at people who are hurting and immediately asks “how can we help them?”

The center looks at hurting people and says “can insiders profit from this?”

The right looks at people who are hurting and says “how can we hurt them more?”

There’s some overlaps between the right and center on this, but the right’s ur-Value is cruelty to the weak and outsiders. If they can make money hurting people, that’s great. The center just wants money. Lots of it. That’s their ur-value. If making money helps or hurts someone, OK.

The left’s ur-value is kindness. They see someone hurting, and they want to help.

The center has a modicum of shame. Being around people who are hurting, like homeless people, bothers their conscience a little bit, so they want them removed from their sight.

The right wants suffering people removed because they see them as losers who deserve what’s happening to them, and weak people deserve to suffer. Hell, make them suffer more till they get their act together.

This is the political spectrum in the West right now. There was a time when the center wanted to help people, from about FDR 76 or so, but those centrists no longer have any significant power. But the center pretends they want to help, and because they at least pretend, they feel entitled to support and votes from the left, even though most of their policies hurt people.

In some ways, the right, with their lack of pretense, is more admirable. They’re monsters and they don’t pretend otherwise, except when it comes to unborn children, whom they immediately abandon once born.

Given that the left has no significant power in most Western states, everything has gotten worse for everyone but the rich and the enforcer class for about three generations now. Until centrists either become humane again, probably out of self-interest, or the left takes power, the downward trend will continue.

 

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The UR Rule Of Civilizations Worth Living In

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On December 16, 2024

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I saw this rather revealing tweet recently:

Andreessen, if you don’t know, made his money during the dot-com boom, at Mozilla. He then formed a venture capital firm, Andreessen-Horowitz.

Now what’s interesting about this tweet is the word “guilt.”

Andreessen doesn’t want to feel guilt. He doesn’t like the idea that one should run society to try and do the most good for the most people.

Understandable, venture capital in the 21st century has mostly created firms which profit from using as few workers as possible and San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley, has gone to Hell. Andreessen’s filthy rich, and he has to see homeless people every day. If he felt guilt about being having way more money than he’ll ever need while other people go hungry and live without heat, cooling and a dry place to sleep, he’d feel guilty pretty damn often or would have to spend a lot of his two billion to feel good.

But that’s not the point I want to make.

It is fashionable to go on and on about taking care of family and friends, and that’s a good thing up to a point.

But only up to a point. Societies work best when members care about people they’ll never meet. If we all look out only for those close to us, the actions we take to do so often hurt those who aren’t near us. Private equity buys firms, loads them down with debts and they go bankrupt, destroying the lives of workers. Bankers create asset bubbles which burst. They get bailed out and if they don’t are still worth millions from bonuses based on fraud, but ordinary people lose jobs, homes and healthcare. Insurance companies and pharma overprice their services, deny care and get rich. Ordinary people aren’t blameless either, we NIMBY and care about schools in our neighbourhoods but not in slums, and complain about the homeless and tell the cops to move them out but don’t want to pay for their housing. We look after and we vote for truly evil people and a majority, it seems, would never vote for someone actually good. We want low taxes and cheap goods and segregated housing prices that never go down.

This is… stupid. Society is other people. If other people are sick, we’re more likely to get sick. If other people are poor, they can’t pay for whatever products or services we produce. If people are homeless we find that distasteful and unpleasant to be around. Unhappy people, of course, are not as fun to be around as happy people.

And so on.

The better off everyone is in society, the better it is for you and me, unless we’re rich enough to live in a bubble, rarely seeing anyone but servants and our fellow rich. But even a billionaire will sometimes see a poor person, if only from their limo or looking down from a chopter, and they might feel some guilt. (If Andreessen does feel guilt, well, that’s mildly impressive in a pathetic sort of way. I doubt most billionaires do. But he’s repressing hard.)

And then one day someone flips out and kills a CEO, and others start talking about how wonderful CEO killing is. Perhaps making other people poor and miserable and killing their relatives might be a bad idea even for the masters of the universe. Might just be a good idea to care about people Andreessen doesn’t know, because one of them might get past his security one day.

Or, I guess, we could have assassinations, bombings, riots and civilization collapse.

It really is one or the other. If oil company execs had cared about people they don’t know they wouldn’t have buried climate change and financed denialism. If insurance and pharma and hospital execs cared about people they don’t know, there’d have been no assassination because they’d be trying to make sure as many people as possible got the care they need instead of optimizing to make more money.

It might just be that only looking out after people you know and care about and not giving a damn about anyone else is not just morally right, but pragmatically right.

Or you can bet on your bodyguards and the security of your gated communities, I guess. That’s a good bet, till it isn’t.

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How Much Does Having More Babies Matter For Domestic Politics?

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On November 18, 2024

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The right is strongly pro-natal. Some of it is for religious reasons, some of it is because they want to control (no, don’t even, the constant talk of male leadership leaves this unquestionable), but a lot of it is that they figure if they out-breed their opponents they’ll win.

Now if you’re talking ethnicity or “race” this is indisputable. Want more whites, or latinos, or whatever, if you breed less than others, that’s going to tell.

But when you’re talking ideology and culture, it isn’t.

The anti-abortion right thinks that out-breeding will work for them, but out-breeding only works if the kids you’re popping up keep your beliefs.

Now this all very nice, and the numbers don’t look too bad, but there’s more to it than nominal membership. If you call yourself Christian but believe in abortion rights and contraception and women’s equality, you aren’t what the Christian “right” is looking for, are you?

So here’s over time:

Basically flat. What about by age?

Huh. Doesn’t look so good, does it? If you raise ’em and they don’t stay with you and you can’t convert non-members very well…

Whatever the deeper causes, religious disaffiliation in the U.S. is being fueled by switching patterns that started “snowballing” from generation to generation in the 1990s. The core population of “nones” has an increasingly “sticky” identity as it rolls forward, and it is gaining a lot more people than it is shedding, in a dynamic that has a kind of demographic momentum.

Christians have experienced the opposite pattern. With each generation, progressively fewer adults retain the Christian identity they were raised with, which in turn means fewer parents are raising their children in Christian households.

Now America’s still a very religious society. Far more so than Europe or most of the rest of the developed world.

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But replacement rates aren’t just about popping up babies and raising them with your beliefs. You have to be able to keep them once they’re adults. And seculars have been very, very good at converstion. Even back when everyone still said they were Christian, notice that abortion became legal, women got legal rights, contraception spread and so on. People said they were Christian, but if the Pope or their pastor said “no condoms, no pill” they ignored them.

Most people enjoy having sex. Most people, at least at some points in their lives, want to have a lot of sex, and want to do it without worrying about suddenly having to raise kids or having to go thru pregnancy.

(I often suspect that the most vehement anti-contraception and anti-abortion activists are people who are closet or in denial gays, or essentially asexual. “Sex is a duty, if we only have to have it to make babies, I won’t have to have it so often.”)

But the larger point here is that replacement rate for anything but biology is determined by ideological reproduction rates. If you can’t keep the people you raise in your ideology, then popping out more kids isn’t the solution.

Early Christians out-produced pagans, but if they hadn’t been able to keep their kids Christian: if pagans had been good at converting them, well, they would never have won.

What Christianity offers, in the US, is the church community. Church groups are one of the few social support groups left. If you need help, the church will often step up. And that makes it odd that the stickiness rate started declining in the 90s, just as government support also started a serious decline and as good jobs became harder and harder to get.

But there are other factors. One is that seculars, starting in the 70s, offered a better deal to women: a lot better deal. You could have your own bank account when married, you had no fault divorce, you could get that abortion and you didn’t have to always do what your husband said, nor did you have to marry just to get support.

Part of the secular offer became a lot better for half the population.

At the same time Christian ideology became less and less appealing. It was around the late 80s and early 90s that the hard-core Christians really began to win internal battles and made being anti-abortion the litmus test, moved towards hardcore natalism and heavy parental authoritarianism with plenty of beating of children. Oh, and when all the “male leadership” stuff cropped up.

This is a better deal for some men (the one’s who like keeping their kids and wife under their thumbs with force) but it isn’t a better deal for a lot of women and kids. And when the kids grow up, well, all that heavy handed authoritarianism, justified by religion doesn’t make them think fondly of religion.

The community support deal within Christianity is a good one, but if the price is domestic violence, corporal punishment, an inferior position for women and less sex, plus more pregnancies whether you want them or not, plus more dangerous pregancies, well maybe the cost of that social support is too high?

Reproduction of groups and ideologies over time isn’t just about who bears more kids, it’s about who keeps them. If “give me the child and I’ll give you the adult works” you’re golden, but if it’s breaking down, well, you may just be producing the next generation of your ideological enemies.

Breeding isn’t enough. The life you offer has to seem better than what your opponents offer.

Churches should be cleaning up. As the last solid community support structure the offer something that almost no one else does. But at the same time as this became true they decided to be anti-sex, pro-hitting children, and for women to be subordinate to men.

Weird that more and more people don’t want that life.

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