Co-Opting Children

Wall Street Journal editor and erstwhile author of the paper's popular "Best of the Web Today" column James Taranto often spoken the "Roe Effect," an inference that the disparity in abortion belief between liberals and conservatives would, over time, produce more conservatives and therefore more restrictions on abortion.

That there is a marked disparity in birth rates between liberals and conservatives LINK offers support for the inference, though we might find other reasons (including religiosity) for the fact that Republicans have more kids than Democrats.

The reasons don't really matter as much as the fact itself, though. Long-term, if we presume that parents have primary influence on their kids' political beliefs, we should expect the nation to shift to the right over time.

There are two counterweights to this.

First, there is the Left's cultural dominance. Most popular entertainment is infused with progressivism, to the point where content producers actively ensure their offerings contain sufficient wokeness to avoid the wrath of the 2%.

Second, there is the perpetual effort to supplant parents as the prime influencer of maturing children. We see it in the public education monopoly, we see it in the curricula set forth by the teachers' organizations, we see it in the fourteen states that do not require parental notification or consent for a minor seeking an abortion, and we see it in the offering of "gender-affirming" chemicals (puberty blockers and hormones) without parental consent in thirty-five states. We see it in schools where teachers hide kids' pronouns from their parents.

This phenomenon isn't new. In fact, Comrade Lenin understood and taught it.

Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.

Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life and he will be mine forever.

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

Lenin quite possibly picked it up from Aristotle, or perhaps St. Ignatius Loyola:

Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.

And, of course, Hillary Clinton offered us:

It takes a village to raise a child.

Clinton didn't cough up that hairball on her own. It's attributed to several African cultures, and author Toni Morrison offered up this version in 1981:

I don’t think one parent can raise a child. I don’t think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.

Some religions, including Islam, Catholicism, some denominations of Protestantism, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , urge their adherents to procreate, and the data supports the assertion that the religious tend to have more kids.

Long-thinkers understand, and have understood throughout history, that people's ideas, beliefs, and proclivities are persistent, so getting the preferred ones into children's heads is necessary if one is to bend the path of cultural evolution in a particular direction.

This isn't a Good or a Bad thing in and of itself, it's just an acknowledgment of reality. Racism has been steadily fading from societies not because racists have learned the error of their way as much as they've simply died off. Later generations figured out that judging people by the color of their skin was unfair, unjust, and unfounded, and time did the rest to produce a good outcome (though CRT wants to reverse this trend). Socialistic thinking, on the other hand, persists despite its unfairness, unjustness, and proven record of death and dismalness because newer generations are being taught the same poisonous ideology.

The relevant question for a society is - whose kids are they?

Who has first say on how kids are raised and what they are taught? Parents or the government? A mother and father instilling the best values they can or an educational monopoly dictating a single 'correct' point of view and belief set for all?

Here's where the birth-rate disparity rears its head. A society where both liberal and conservative parents were making kids at the same rate would be a society that perpetuated the exchange of ideas and intermingling of viewpoints and had the best chance at a consensus evolution. Since, however, that's not the case, the Left needs to 'steal' kids away from the beliefs and values that right-leaning parents would teach in order to keep its ranks from diminishing and its voice from fading into permanent minority status.

Yes, my use of 'steal' tips my hand. Parents have primary responsibility for raising the children they bear, so they should have primary authority in what those kids are taught.

Socialists, big fans of authority without responsibility, want to pump kids' brains full of their ideas, but leave the rest to the parents. As in "you feed, clothe, and house them, but we will put our values into them."

While it is true that some kids will be taught values that may not be considered “good” from a broad perspective, such diversity in a society committed to free speech, free thought, and the marketplace of ideas is far more likely to produce positive cultural evolution (and better morality) than a cadre of Best-and-Brightest deciding which one size fits all. History is enough to affirm this.

The notion that teachers and government types are hiding things from kids' parents is rather frightening - but it seems to be part of some communal understanding. Steal the generation from the Right, because only the Right is spawning.

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