America
is running out of Americans
A
scathing review of our culture: children were once understood as part of
adulthood rather than an interruption of it, but no longer.
George P. Brooks
| September 8, 2026 www.americanthinker.com
America
has developed an extraordinary talent for discussing symptoms while politely
avoiding diseases. We debate Social Security solvency, labor shortages, school
enrollment, housing, immigration, economic growth, loneliness, and the
deterioration of communities as though these phenomena occupy separate
universes. Beneath many of them sits an uncomfortable demographic reality:
Americans are having fewer children, having them later, or deciding not to have
them at all. Conservatives frequently respond with the predictable admonition
to marry and reproduce, while progressives often treat declining fertility as
either economically inevitable or environmentally beneficial. Both responses
strike me as inadequate because the interesting question is not simply why
Americans are having fewer children. The question is what happened to a
civilization in which creating the next generation increasingly feels
irrational?
Children
were once understood as part of adulthood rather than an interruption of it.
Marriage, family, work, faith, community, and responsibility formed a
reasonably coherent architecture through which people understood a meaningful
life. That architecture has fractured. Modern America increasingly presents
adulthood as an indefinite project of personal optimization: acquire
credentials, build a career, travel, accumulate experiences, establish
financial security, discover yourself, heal yourself, protect your peace, and
perhaps eventually consider another human being sufficiently compatible to
share the remaining decades. Children enter this worldview almost as an
inconvenient footnote because children are the antithesis of radical autonomy.
They require sacrifice, permanence, patience, money, sleep, compromise, and the
horrifying realization that the universe no longer revolves around you.
I
say that without romanticizing parenthood. Raising children is difficult,
expensive, exhausting, and occasionally terrifying. Conservatives lose
credibility when we reduce declining fertility to selfish millennials refusing
to grow up. Housing costs are real. Childcare is expensive. Healthcare can be
financially punishing. Young adults often begin their working lives carrying
substantial debt while confronting a housing market that makes previous
generations’ experiences seem almost mythological. Telling a 29-year-old couple
to “just have children” while they are calculating whether they can afford
another bedroom is not a family policy. It is a slogan.
Yet
economics cannot explain everything. Human beings throughout history produced
children under conditions considerably harsher than ours. Something cultural
has changed as well, and conservatives should be willing to say it. We have
spent decades dismantling institutions that once encouraged permanence while
constructing a culture that worships optionality. Marriage becomes one
lifestyle choice among many. Sex becomes recreation detached from reproduction.
Divorce becomes ordinary. Pornography industrializes fantasy. Dating
applications convert human beings into endlessly scrollable commodities,
creating the illusion that someone slightly better is always one swipe away.
Men and women increasingly discuss one another not as potential partners but as
opposing interest groups negotiating terms of surrender.
Then
we wonder why nobody wants to build a family.
The
deterioration of relations between men and women may be one of the least
seriously examined components of America’s demographic problem. Much of
contemporary discourse teaches women to view dependence upon men as dangerous
and men to view commitment to women as financially or emotionally hazardous.
Online cultures amplify every betrayal, divorce catastrophe, abusive relationship,
custody battle, infidelity, and miserable marriage until young people
understandably conclude that matrimony resembles an elaborate legal ambush. The
sexes retreat into mutually reinforcing camps, each possessing algorithms
dedicated to explaining why the other cannot be trusted.
Civilizations
cannot reproduce themselves through mutual contempt.
This
is where my conservatism becomes less partisan and more philosophical. A
healthy society must teach people that freedom is not merely the absence of
obligation. There is another freedom that emerges through obligation: the
freedom created by knowing who you are responsible for, where you belong, and
what deserves your sacrifice. Modern culture excels at liberation from things
and is considerably less articulate about devotion to things.
Christianity
offers a radically different anthropology. Human beings are not isolated
sovereign consumers whose highest purpose is maximizing personal satisfaction.
We exist in relationship—to God, family, community, generations past, and
generations yet unborn. Scripture repeatedly treats children not as lifestyle
accessories but as blessings and inheritance. That does not mean every person
must marry or every couple will have children, but it does mean a civilization
should understand generativity as something more profound than an economic
variable.
Conservatives
should therefore resist the temptation to make demographic decline another
excuse for government social engineering. Washington cannot manufacture loving
marriages through tax credits, and no federal agency can restore trust between
men and women. Government can, however, stop making family formation
unnecessarily difficult. Housing policy should encourage construction and
ownership rather than permanent scarcity. Tax policy should recognize the
enormous social contribution made by parents raising the next generation.
Education should stop treating marriage and parenthood as quaint historical
arrangements. Economic policy should remember that an economy exists to serve
human flourishing rather than requiring human beings to serve economic
abstractions.
Immigration
complicates this discussion because America has historically supplemented its
population through newcomers. Immigration can strengthen a nation when
newcomers enter an identifiable national culture and assimilate into it, but
immigration cannot permanently substitute for a civilization’s unwillingness to
reproduce itself. A country that requires perpetual population importation
because its own citizens have lost confidence in creating families has a deeper
problem than labor supply.
The
demographic question ultimately concerns confidence. People have children when
they believe tomorrow is worth investing in. Parenthood is perhaps the most
radical expression of optimism available to ordinary human beings because it
says, without words, that the future deserves someone we love more than
ourselves.
That
is why declining fertility should concern conservatives beyond economics. Something
has happened to our conception of adulthood, sacrifice, permanence, and hope.
We have become wealthier than most civilizations in human history while
increasingly convincing ourselves that the fundamental act through which
civilization continues is prohibitively burdensome.
America
does not merely need more babies for Social Security calculations or
labor-force projections. It needs a culture in which men and women can again
imagine building something larger than themselves together. We need homes rather
than mere housing, marriages rather than arrangements, communities rather than
networks, and children understood not as obstacles to the good life but as
participants in it.
A
civilization does not disappear only when somebody conquers it. Sometimes it simply
becomes too exhausted, distracted, frightened, or self-absorbed to replace
itself.
And
no civilization gets to vote itself exempt from arithmetic.
