Brooks: The New Red-Diaper Babies (Puke column of the year?)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/opinion/07brooks.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

There is a little-known movement sweeping across the United States. The movement is "natalism."

All across the industrialized world, birthrates are falling - in Western Europe, in Canada and in many regions of the United States. People are marrying later and having fewer kids. But spread around this country, and concentrated in certain areas, the natalists defy these trends.

They are having three, four or more kids. Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling.

In a world that often makes it hard to raise large families, many are willing to move to find places that are congenial to natalist values. The fastest-growing regions of the country tend to have the highest concentrations of children. Young families move away from what they perceive as disorder, vulgarity and danger and move to places like Douglas County in Colorado (which is the fastest-growing county in the country and has one of the highest concentrations of kids). Some people see these exurbs as sprawling, materialistic wastelands, but many natalists see them as clean, orderly and affordable places where they can nurture children.

If you wanted a one-sentence explanation for the explosive growth of far-flung suburbs, it would be that when people get money, one of the first things they do is use it to try to protect their children from bad influences.

[Eric J in MN]

1. David Brooks concludes by saying

"People who have enough kids for a basketball team are too busy to fight a culture war."

but that guy who made his daughter cry at a Kerry rally with a fake torn up Bush banner in her hands has a big family.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. People who have kids in litters are selfish, small-minded and ignorant.

The planet can hardly sustain the population that it contains right now. These morons, who care nothing about sustaining the environment or conserving what we have, add to the imminent death of the planet by overburdening it even more by blindly overpopulating it as well. AND to addinsult to injury, they overpopulate it with more idiots like themselves who also care nothing about preserving, conserving or nurturing the planet.
In effect,they are murderers.

[LeftyMom]

6. Generalize much?

Most of the large families I know are not materialistic (because they can't afford to be on a single income or because thier pririties lie elsewhere) so they really don't use many more resources than smaller families. Some of them adopted some or all of their kids, some are blended families or have large families for religious reasons, some just haven't had the best luck with birth control.

If the liberals and the anti-materialists and the generally pissed-off aren't breeding we're fucking up the future as much as Sally Suburbia and her SUV full of kids- someone's gonna have to set those kids straight, lead them or stand up to them someday. If our kids don't do it there will be plenty of fundiespawn willing to take on the job.

[Stuckinthebush]

11. Perhaps some of us are trying to make more Democrats

Don't we need more liberals in this country?

Just a thought.

[rockymountaindem]

3. Yep, they're all moving to Douglas county allright.

Although I thought they lost their "fastest growing" claim a few years back to Clark County, Nevada (home of that peaceful little town of Las Vegas). Maybe they've reclaimed it.

[starroute]

4. Suburbs *are* bad influences

No, I don't have any statistics to back it up, but when I was an adolescent in the 60's, all of us whose families still lived in the city knew that our cousins out in the surburbs were drinking more, doing stronger drugs, having sex more randomly, and generally aping the disconnected, soulless, materialistic lifestyle of their parents.

And when the countercultural thing happened at the end of the 60's, it was the kids from the suburbs who were most alienated, most likely to reject their parents entirely, most determined to go to hell in a handbasket as a sign of anger against everything they'd been forced to endure growing up.

I don't imagine things are any different today.

I wouldn't have dreamed of raising my kids in a suburb. I can't think of anything worse for their psychological stability.

[DBoon]

5. Same thing with punks in the early 1980's

The nastiest vilest sort of anti-social types came out of whitebread suburbs to try to outdo each other at punk

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. That's right

When I taught college, it was the suburban kids who either went way off the deep end with rebellion or were so caught up in the whole TV-shopping-sports-fashion-pop music-business major-SUV-megachurch subculture that they literally did not know that their way of life is unusual. ("Japanese people can't drive till their 18? Japan's only 1% Christian? But they're a modern country!" etc. etc.)

I much preferred the genuine small town kids or the urbanites. The small town kids may have started out naive, but at least many of them had intellectual curiosity and flourished in the college atmosphere.

[No Mandate Here.]

7. My LTTE about this ridiculous column...

To the Editor,

It is a very bizarre coincidence that David Brooks cites the statistics about birth rates in red and blue states, and then proceeds to tell us that there really aren't any reasons for him to cite this - just interesting, that's all.

Well, courtesy of Dailykos.com (www.dailykos.com) and www.itaffectsyou.org, I offer another interesting set of statistics, which were published just yesterday... . This color coded chart shows that George Bush carried the 15 states with the highest female teen pregnancy rates, and 29 of the top 34. John Kerry won 14 of the 16 states with the lowest rates.

"Politicians will try to pander to this group. They should know this is a spiritual movement, not a political one.", says Mr. Brooks. I don't think so. While I am sure that a good percentage of these babies are going to be well loved and provided for, they will more likely be forgotten by politicians except in election times.

So, Mr. Brooks, perhaps your research could have been a bit more involved. Your statistics are pretty selective.

Oh, and one more thing. The throw off insertion of race into this op-Ed was very unfortunate. It assuredly was the single word that made your entire exercise any where near publishable. Without the word 'white' in the statistics about fertility rates, your entire argument is in the toilet. Shame on you.

Bill C
Somerset, PA

[Bridget Burke]

8. Where did "Red Diaper Babies" come into this?

I've misplaced my NYT login, so I can't read the whole thing. However, weren't the original Red Diaper Babies offspring of Thirties Leftists? Country Joe McDonald was one, I believe.

Any evidence that these "natalists" are in any way Left? They aren't moving into communes, but the bleaker of the brand-new suburbs. From which their offspring will flee, screaming, at the first opportunity.

[CatholicEdHead]

16. The only time I heard the term

was when Michael Weiner/Savage uses the term "Red Diaper Doper Babies" to attack Jewish Lawyers on his show (ironic considering he is Jewish himself(and a former leftie hippie)).

[blindpig]

9. natalists = environmental terrorist

forget ELF, this is the Real Thing. Persons who breed beyond replacement show contempt for Nature. Whether it be religious conviction or just plain hubris, anyone reasonably educated or informed who insist upon overpopulating this planet disses not only life on Earth but their childern and descendents.

We're supposed to be smarter than this, folks. Elsewise we'll be singing The Smithsonian Institute Blues.

[Igel]

18. Only three of the states have white birthrates < 2.1, replacement.

Alaska, Utah, and Idaho. It seems. All the rest are 2.06 kids/woman or below. This assumes that Brook's source in the (dark-side) American Conservative is itself correct.

All three of these have reasonably low population, so they don't pull the average birthrate up markedly. Without immigration and non-white birthrates, the US would be doing the Russian/German/French demographic implosion thing (just a generation or so later, I think).

One oft-protested UCLA professor (in physics, I think) claims that almost all the US growth-rate at this point is immigration and recent immigrants (which also have declining birthrates a generation or two after immigration).

(You want a demographic disaster, try Saudi Arabia. Yikes!)

[madison2000]

10. (ZPG) Zero Population Growth came to my high school

in the early seventies and it made a big impression on me. I was afraid they were going to end up enforcing it or something. The thing is, the weak economy is enough for most people to impose their own limits. My mother stayed at home while my father supported a family of five, but that isn't an option for most families.

I know so many professional couples who have limited themselves to one child because they wanted to make sure they could meet that childs needs. How on earth do these natalists expect to give their kids a decent start in life? Forget "Cosmo" at the checkout counter, how do you pay for college when you have a half dozen kids? Or do you just expect them to marry young and produce another poor family? Guess who ends up supporting them when they can't support themselves?!

[Blue_Tires]

12. quote of the year

"If you wanted a one-sentence explanation for the explosive growth of far-flung suburbs, it would be that when people get money, one of the first things they do is use it to try to protect their children from bad influences."

too bad those "influences" are usually people of other races that aren't as materialistic or weren't "blessed" enough to hit that major payday and move to the lifeless, cookie-cutter super suburbs...oh yeah, when gas prices skyrocket, and daddy can't afford to refuel the Hummer H2 for his 40-mile one-way commute downtown for work, where will he be then?? (and daddy has the nerve to complain about heavy traffic or BEG the city for a train stop in his neighborhood in the boonies!)

What's that? Little junior has stopped breathing and has turned blue in the middle of the night?? Drive him to the hospital!! (oh wait...we're living 35 miles from the nearest one, because we wanted our own slice of heaven in the super suburbs)....I sure hope that emergency helicopter trip won't trample our insurance too much...

10 years ago it was a rural community consisting of a country road, post office, and stop light...anyone would be insane to want to live there because it's in the middle of nowhere, and consequently, land could have been bought for pennies on the dollar...NOW you're telling me after some piece of crap developer has cleared the trees, put up a bunch of shoddy mcmansions, and gave it some generic, quasi-upscale name like "Oakwood Plantation", you can't fork over $650,000 fast enough to move there....which makes PERFECT sense, since you do ALL your business and spend most of your $$$$ downtown...work?-downtown (not to mention paying the $$$ for a parking space)...want to see the local sports teams?--downtown...Wifey wants to see a show in the arts district??--downtown...need to go shopping or see a movie?- even the nearest suburb mall is 15 miles away...getting on a jet plane for a trip? airport is 60 miles away...see where i'm going with this?

And sure, you have a relatively undiscovered enclave now, but what will you do when it become crowded?? more and more people are moving there all the time (some even nonwhite), and wasn't the #1 reason for moving out this far trying to get AWAY from people and practice your own suburban family 'values'?? The little local elementary/middle school starting to get WAY overcrowded??? seeing more congestion on those little country roads when you try to go somewhere?? is the water quality in the crapper because the system was never intended to handle this many people?? Wifey getting bored and finding other outlets for her energies? Kids getting bored and start dabbling in drugs, vandalism, or petty crime? Is the dream home starting to fall apart or sink in the soil, or is the driveway cracking up because the state government is in the pockets of the developers and there's NO controls or recourse on construction quality?? Did you just find out that the hayseed county council is going to add 7 percent to taxes to pay for upgraded schools, water system, roads, police, fire, etc (and a little extra just to squeeze you rich folks from the city)?? Seems like you could've saved $$$ and dealt with these same issues living in a neighborhood just a little closer to the city...What to do now?? Move 60 miles outside the city in a million-dollar home, like the boss has? yeah, right...

rant over, i guess....as you can tell, I've had a lot of experience with the mentality of these natalists in the super suburbs of Atlanta, Kansas City, and Washington D.C. (some are even my family members, i have to say)

[Clark Bayh 2008]

13. Red Diaperers need more Pampers, and so does Brooks

Brooks usually has reasonable things to say. This was shocking, moronic, naive, and insulting.

I wrote him back saying that every civilization since the dawn of time has shown that better educated, more intelligent people have fewer kids. The hallmark of every evolving society is improved literacy among young women leading to lower birth rates.

Brooks seems to think there is something holy about rednecks having 5 kids and walking them though the hallowed lines of Wal Mart and McDonald's every day. The reality is that his stereotypic broods are not the folks splitting the atom or discovering new cures for cancer. They have poorer health, smoke more, live worse, and contribute a whole lot less to society than educated people.

Poorly educated people respond to fear more intensely than anything else. Why did FDR's words remain famous to this day, where nothing Bush says makes much sense or will every be memorable, except for his pronunciation of "nuclear". Fear of war and terrorism was the deciding issue in this election. Period. We should have nominated Clark. We didn't. We lost. Let's not be stupid next time.

Tell Hillary not to run. Rally around Clark early. The Republicans did it with Ike in 1952. Dems need to do it early this time around.

[PATRICK]

14. Bizarro Brooks

as much as he has latched onto the perception of a dangerous trend in RW propaganda and 'seen the light" the typical criticism of his own brand of conservative punditry still holds.

vacuous generalizations. Tripe like the above would discredit anyone not already living strangely at odds with all worlds. One wonders WHY he has a job in the private sector media anymore. His spotting of middle class trends in particular is so nebulous that with maybe a little more thought
he might learn why trying to see order in the mess is a trap. We need not share that trivialization seriously. obvious and out of it and trivial all at once.

Maybe he has to earn his bread this way since Media Matters is a conscience soothing hobby, but most of his ruminations are really not worth taking seriously. So much the worse for evaluating his turn against RW extremists.

Then again SO many pundits and erstwhile heroes have their foot firmly in mouth. It must be the atmosphere engendered by cue from the King. "The land is the king and the king is the land." And it is all f-ing stupid.

[Proud2BAmurkin]

17. Pleasantville was based on pasty faced Brooks

.

[Cory Laf]

19. Look at India

15 kids to a family is normal over there :wtf: