After Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael lectured:
I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.
Kael’s Conundrum has muddled much of the Western coverage of the current turmoil in Egypt and Turkey, where urban protestors are denouncing democratically elected Islamists. Few of the educated urbanites in Cairo and Istanbul who Tweet in English for the edification of Western journalists voted for Islamist election-winners such as Egypt’s recently deposed Mohamed Morsi or Turkey’s still reigning Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
One reason that democracy in Egypt and Turkey led to the election of Islamists is because pious Muslims in the sticks and the slums have long had higher average birthrates than secular sophisticates in the metropolises. (The fertility rate in Istanbul, for instance, is lower than in 44 American states.)
This is a general factor in the long-term decline of the old modernizing military-based ruling parties, such as Turkey’s Kemalists and Egypt’s Nasserites. Their Islamist rivals simply had more kids.
In the 30 years between 1981 and 2011, the population of Egypt grew from 46 million to 84 million. The most recent UN projections forecast Egypt’s population to be 130 million in 2050, although that seems unlikely to happen.
It’s hardly a new observation that Westernized Egyptians have been losing the war of the cradle with downscale Muslims. It’s a running theme in the informative 1988 book The Arabs by David Lamb, the Cairo bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. A generation ago, Lamb’s bourgeois Egyptian friends were already lamenting the long lost good old days when Cairo was something of a Mediterranean city with a skilled film industry and other glamorous amenities. (As far back as 1871, the Khedive of Egypt had famously commissioned Giuseppe Verdi to compose Aida, which premiered in the new Cairo Opera House.)
But by the 1980s, Lamb observed:
The capital is sinking under the weight of people, people, and more people.…Cairo is being transformed into a vast slum of rural peasants.
Today the population of Cairo’s metropolitan area is over 19 million. The city may be the world capital of noise pollution. A 2008 New York Times article, “A City Where You Can’t Hear Yourself Scream” recounted an audio engineer’s report on Cairo:
…the average noise from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. is 85 decibels, a bit louder than a freight train 15 feet away.…At other locations, it is far worse, he said. In Tahrir Square, or Ramsis Square, or the road leading to the pyramids, the noise often reaches 95 decibels, he said, which is only slightly quieter than standing next to a jackhammer.
Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the most famous urban planner from Cairo, Mohamed Atta, blew up the World Trade Center on 9/11.
In the mid-1990s, Hosni Mubarak’s military dictatorship finally got around to promoting contraception and the ideal of a two-child family. But when Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood (which was just deposed in a military coup) came to power, the new leadership stopped talking about the need for population restraint. Although the government kept quietly funding family-planning programs, the number of births quickly spiked.
Note that the Islamist government didn’t overtly promote a larger Egyptian population. They merely stopped publicly obsessing over keeping growth down. When asked, one Islamist politician explained:
The real problem is with us, as an administration. The population in China is over a billion, but there is good management and good utilization of resources. The population is a blessing if we use it well, and a curse if we mismanage the crisis.
Regarding population policy, Morsi and the other Egyptian Islamists are moderates compared to the current American establishment, which demands a massive increase in immigration to solve the presumed problem that the US population has only grown from 281 million to 316 million in this century.
For example, Republican 2016 contender Jeb Bush announced last month that we should back the Schumer-Rubio bill because “Immigrants are more fertile,” which will help rebuild the “demographic pyramid.”
Having babies is evidently one of those jobs Americans just won’t do. So rather than fix the problems that discourage prudent American citizens from starting families, the elites have decided that importing more non-Americans will boost toilet-paper sales and thus be Good for the Economy.
In the elite mindset, while a larger population is an unarguable good, any concern over the quality of the bigger population is an unquestionable ill. Airing doubts can get you Richwined.
Thus, a big scandal this week is the revelation that a couple of prison doctors in California talked 150 pregnant female convicts into getting sterilized after they delivered their latest bundles of joy. The Atlantic recounted with horror the assertion of one inmate:
As soon as [the doctor] found out that I had five kids, he suggested that I look into getting it done. The closer I got to my due date, the more he talked about it,” said Christina Cordero, 34, who spent two years in prison for auto theft. “He made me feel like a bad mother if I didn’t do it.”
Yet the US has long had a policy of discouraging teen motherhood on the grounds that teenagers aren’t ready to be good mothers yet. For example, the federal Center for Disease Control’s Teen Pregnancy webpage forthrightly states:
The Importance of Prevention: … Teen pregnancy and childbearing bring substantial social and economic costs through immediate and long-term impacts on teen parents and their children.
This seems to be working, as the teen fertility rate has been falling.
On the other hand, the notion of anybody with any authority in America attempting to discourage through similar moral and empirical suasion felon fertility, illegal immigrant reproduction, welfare motherhood, or births out of wedlock would be simply beyond the pale.
Since my job is to speak the reasonable ideas that are presently thought unspeakable, here’s a suggestion. President Obama is a big fan of basketball, and the NBA has a famous “One and Done” rule mandating that young stars spend at least one year in college before jumping to the pros.
Obama should thus promote the phrase “One and Done” as a simple mnemonic advice for women who are in jail, on welfare, unwed, or illegal: Unless you get your life together, you shouldn’t have more than one child.
Of course, those extra children will be the future base of the Democratic Party, so that would never happen.
Instead, I guess the Republicans will have to try Jeb Bush’s pyramid scheme.
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