[LINK] "Demography is Still Not Destiny"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy considers the oft-voiced claim that conservatives of whatever breed--Red-Staters, Muslims, et cetera--will inevitably outbreed liberals. He's quite right to note that there's no reason that ideologies will be transmitted across generations, or that even if transmitted ideologies will remain the same. Certainly Philip Longman, the pop-demographer whose writings ultimately sparked this debate, hasn't taken account of the fact that there have always between fertility differentials between conservatives and liberals, at least in the past two centuries in the West, and that the West certainly hasn't become more conservative over this length of time.