By Joseph A. D'Agostino
PRI Weekly Briefing
23 June 2006
Vol. 8 / No. 24
For some time now, liberal politicians and writers have been wringing
their hands over the lack of attractive progressive ideas. Even prominent
Democrats complain that their party cannot come up with a program with
which to beat weakened Republicans in this year's elections. So-called
progressives are actually reactionary and perceived as such by most of the
public, which notes progressives' attachment to ideas and policies with a
40-year record of failure. Now, the first issue of an interesting new
left-leaning magazine features an article on how demographics is affecting
geopolitics in a seemingly fresh take on this underestimated problem-but
actually advocating the same four-decade-old population control strategies
for the Third World.
Just as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) helped mold the ideas and
policies that, combined with his winning personality, made Bill Clinton
President, new centers for progressive thinking have arisen to provide
intellectual direction for the floundering liberal movement. The DLC has
become notorious among American leftists for moderating Democratic Party
stances too much for their tastes, so new ways of injecting the appearance
of sense into liberal policy-wonking must be found. Moderate liberal
David S. Broder, op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, on June 22
praised the first of issue of Democracy: A Journal of New Ideas for its
articles exploring thought outside the box. He singled out the lead
article, called "The New Biopolitics," for its innovative proposals, and,
in fact, the article does contain some intriguing new ideas. But, most
saliently, the article essentially calls for neo-imperialist Western
efforts to remake Asian societies into the same narcissist and feminist
(the latter is a subset of the former) image that is, quite literally,
exterminating the Western world.
"The lead article, by Jedediah Purdy of Duke Law School, explores the
demographic trends around the world. It discusses the implications of
population decline in Europe and Japan and how the abortion-influenced
gender imbalances in China, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan result in a
'surplus' of millions of single men in those fragile democracies or
authoritarian states," wrote Broder. "Purdy ends by suggesting a
long-term bargain between Europe and Asia, or maybe between the United
States and India, in which the advanced nations pump development money in
now, in return for future help in financing their retirees' pensions."
This sounds like an innovative way for the West to help both itself and
friendly developing nations: Make massive investments now in poor,
labor-rich countries such as India and Indonesia to set their
infrastructures on a solid footing, then in 20 years use the payouts from
these investments to maintain the solvency of social security and health
care systems in graying Europe and America. The idea has the added
advantage of working toward the stability of these poor countries and
tying them closer to the West, hopefully drawing them away from
alternatives such as China or Islamism.
Yet Purdy proposes societal transformations for these developing nations
that would destroy what makes them attractive investments: Their
relatively high birthrates yielding plentiful labor. If he had his way,
these Third World nations, which are already on the path to rapid
population aging due to falling birthrates, would hit a Western-style
worker-to-retiree ratio problem about when the West would most need its
return on its infrastructure investments. These countries could well
decide they couldn't afford to meet their obligations to us-and would have
developed to the point where they didn't need us anymore, anyway.
Purdy rightly decries the massive and growing imbalance between the number
of men and women in China, India, and other Asian nations resulting from
sex-selective abortion. "What do people in modernizing cultures do when
they take reproduction out of the realm of luck and nature and put it
under self-conscious control?" Purdy asks. "In much of Asia, the answer
has turned out to be that they have sons. For those conditioned by U.S.
abortion politics to think of reproductive choice as always and entirely
pro-woman, this is a disconcerting irony. Even more troubling is that
millions of individual reproductive choices produce a massive demographic
distortion--scores of millions of men with no one to court, love, or
marry." Huge numbers of couples, Westernized enough to desire only one or
two children but not Westernized enough to be sex-neutral, in these Asian
nations abort their daughters in the womb in order to have sons. One
expert has estimated that up to 200 million women are missing from the
world because of the kill-the-girls phenomenon, leaving about 200 million
men and boys unable to marry over the next 20 years-and growing.
Of course, Purdy does not suggest any of the genuine, time-tested remedies
for this socially destabilizing problem. He does not suggest a cultural
return to the celebration of large families, nor does he advocate reducing
the massive taxes that have prompted so many people worldwide to limit
their family sizes. He doesn't even suggest the abolition of China's
coercive one-child-per-family population quota.
And never, never would it occur to the progressive mind to suggest
encouragement for, and government policies to enable, more women to be
homemakers, who tend to have more children than working mothers. Instead,
he proposes the opposite: A massive feministization campaign.
A new deal between East and West "could also fit into a strategy for
women's empowerment: properly targeted, the public investments in the
first stage could do a lot for women's literacy, access to family
planning, job training, and other aspects of sexually egalitarian
development," Purdy wrote. "Such investments would help women in
developing countries push back against their increasingly male-dominated
societies: skills and employment give women control of resources and an
exit option from the family. Literacy also brings women into contact with
a broad world of aspirations and ideas about what they might do and who
they might be. Globalization that equalizes power in economic, social,
and intimate life is less likely to produce perverse results like the
problem of missing women."
"Access to family planning," "job training," "an exit option from the
family": All these will export to Asia the suicidal birthrates plaguing
Europeans and native-born Americans. In fact, anti-family careerist
attitudes are already taking hold. Even India's fertility rate has been
falling fast and will be under replacement rate, and thus into suicidal
territory, within 20 years or so, according to the United Nations. Such
feministization, where the feminine norm is extirpated by the masculine
careerist one (why isn't feminism called masculism?), might indeed solve
the destructive sex-selective abortion imbalance. But at what cost?
Purdy's proposal is disguised population control and the acceleration of
suicidal impulses in mankind. "Liberal modernity is all about expanding
human freedom," Purdy says. But what if this freedom produces the death
of the society in which it is practiced? What if, once extended
universally, it threatens the continued existence of the human race? Is
freedom so important, or is there something else more important?
Problems With the New Biopolitics
