For those who reside in a wealthy nation, all issues being equal, you usually tend to reside alone, extra prone to undergo from despair or anxiousness and fewer prone to have youngsters.
One motion that thinks it has the answer to those issues is nationwide conservatism. Its message is that politicians ought to champion the constitutional, cultural and non secular traditions of the nation in query.
Nationwide conservatives are proper about one factor: a lot of the issues that the wealthy world struggles with are issues of success. These vary from comparatively minor inconveniences similar to gridlock and overcrowded trains to existential threats similar to local weather change and synthetic intelligence.
However the problem for nationwide conservatism and different populist actions is that tackling these issues is difficult, partly as a result of they’re so sure up with issues we wish to maintain.
One instance is the rising price of healthcare within the wealthy world. Most high-income international locations have report numbers of individuals residing past 65, and their residents at the moment are a lot much less prone to die from coronary heart assaults or strokes. Inevitably, this implies greater healthcare prices, however nobody desires to return to an age when cardiovascular drugs was much less efficient.
Then there are social issues whose causes are additionally issues of success: despair, anxiousness and falling beginning charges. And right here the nationwide conservatives should not wholly incorrect. We have consistent evidence that spiritual attendance positively correlates with larger life satisfaction. However the proof additionally reveals that as education levels rise, so too does atheism.
Now I’m not saying there aren’t any extremely educated and economically profitable spiritual believers. Nor ought to we lazily equate atheism with larger ranges of liberalism and anti-populism. The UK’s main cities have been, for essentially the most half, dependable opponents of Brexit. However they’re additionally extra spiritual than rural areas or small cities.
Nonetheless, broadly talking, we should always assume that as individuals and locations change into higher educated and extra technologically superior, they’ll change into extra secular and obtain fewer of the social and psychological well being advantages of religiosity.
An analogous story might be seen in falling beginning charges. Most international locations within the wealthy world have beginning charges beneath alternative fee — that’s 2.1 youngsters per girl. Once more, this can be a drawback of success: girls have larger financial alternatives, divorce is less complicated, and other people have each higher entry and encounter fewer authorized obstacles to contraception, each earlier than and after conception. But it comes at a price: falling beginning charges imply shrinking populations and heighten the financial pressures of ageing societies.
For nationwide conservatives, whether or not the issue is the blues or beginning charges, the answer to the downsides of secularism is extra faith; and the antidote to falling beginning charges is greater subsidies for “conventional” households and stigmatisation of individuals whose existence fall exterior the two-parent norm.
There are numerous objections one could make to this type of politics. But it surely additionally doesn’t work by itself phrases. Hungary, one of many laboratories of nationwide conservatism, still has a birth rate below replacement rate, regardless of giving households grants to purchase new houses, in addition to different tax advantages.
Nonetheless, liberals ought to bear in mind the quantum of perception on the coronary heart of nationwide conservatism: poor psychological well being, loneliness, social isolation and declining populations are all actual issues.
One often mooted liberal response to declining populations is just to extend immigration, which works within the brief time period. However international locations, just like the UK, that do properly at integrating migrants quickly discover that the youngsters of immigrants expertise and battle with the identical drawback as those that’ve been within the nation for generations. Ethnic minority Brits are, on common, extra spiritual than white Britons: however the blended race youngsters of each are extra liberal and extra prone to be of “no faith” than another group within the UK.
Not worrying about falling beginning charges within the wealthy world in 2023 as a result of you may repair the issue by way of immigration is a bit like being relaxed about local weather change in 1970 as a result of nobody within the creating world goes to purchase a second gas-guzzling automotive. It’s true now, however it isn’t going to stay true for lengthy.
Ultimately, the wealthy world’s issues of success will change into common ones. Our difficulties in tackling local weather change and different earlier issues of success ought to make liberals extra centered on attempting to establish options to new issues earlier than they change into international challenges.