Rich in Votes But Poor in Power

Red state weakness, paying people to have kids, and more in this week's digest.

Jan 31, 2025

My book Life in the Negative World was a finalist for the ISI conservative book of the year award. It was great to be on this list. Congratulations to winner Sean McMeekin.

And another reminder for those of you in Southern California that I’ll be speaking at the Maven conference on February 22.

Red States Are Rich in Votes But Poor in Power

My latest column for Commonplace (the new name of American Compass’ online journal) is about how most red states are structurally weak.

America’s economic and cultural capitals are the so-called “global cities” like New York and Washington, often described as the “command nodes” of the global economy. They are home to the most important firms and institutions in strategic sectors like technology (Apple and Google in the Bay Area), finance (JP Morgan Chase in New York), higher education (Harvard and MIT in Boston), government (the federal government in Washington), and media (Disney in Los Angeles), as well as leading specialized financial and producer-services firms. These key cities and institutions are typically in very blue cities in solid blue states.
By contrast, many red states have an almost neocolonial air about them, operating at the economic and cultural periphery. Their economies are dominated by natural and agricultural resources, as well as branch plant operations and activities at the lower levels of the value chain. Their rapid population growth—if they have it—is in part from them serving as a demographic relief valve for people out-competed in or priced out of the metropoles; the same function played by Britain’s colonies back in the day.
Oklahoma fits this bill. Gas and oil are leading industries in the state. All of its Fortune 500 companies are in the energy space. Its economy is otherwise dominated by branch plant type operations and companies. Its non-energy headquarters are in non-strategic sectors, such as retail operations like Love’s Travel Shops and Sonic Drive-Ins. It is lacking in nationally or globally important institutions. Its top college is the University of Oklahoma, only ranked 132^nd in the country by U.S. News. It ranks 15^th among states in population growth since 2020, powered by wide-open spaces and relatively affordable real estate prices.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Governments Can’t Pay People to Have Kids

The Financial Times took a great look at the failure of financial incentives to raise birth rates.

Policymakers around the world are grappling with the same problems as those in Lestijärvi: no matter what they seem to offer in the way of incentives, people are not having more babies. For the Finnish municipality it failed even to lure people from elsewhere: “It didn’t stop people moving away, and it didn’t attract new families,” Aihio said.
China has offered free fertility treatments, Hungary big tax exemptions and cash, and Singapore grants for parents and grandparents. A Danish travel company even ran an ad campaign to “Do it for Denmark”. In Japan, the state funds AI-powered matchmaking, while Tokyo’s metropolitan government is offering a four-day working week to staff in an attempt to encourage people to become parents.
…
Politicians worry that they may be powerless to act, as social pressures on women undergo a profound change. Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology and director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, said surveys of young women across the world, from Europe to south-east Asia, suggested a once built-in social obligation for women to reproduce — and an assumption on their part that if they could, they probably would have children — no longer existed.
Careers and increased gender equality are a part of that. “We have a whole cohort of women in high-income countries, but also in south-east Asia, and particularly east Asia . . . who have been educated in a very gender-neutral way,” said Harper. “They enter the workplace in a gender-neutral way, and then they become parents and suddenly, no matter how hard one tries, it’s not gender-neutral.”
…
“You can either increase migration rates or retirement age, or encourage people to have more children,” said Edward Davies, policy director at the Centre for Social Justice in the UK. “I suspect of the three, people naturally would like to have families, whereas actually telling them they have to retire later or you have to have mass migration — it’s probably just less popular.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

Taking Care of Others

I saw Jordan Peterson post this thought:

I would probably caveat that a bit. Even when you are trying to address your own problems, there are benefits to having an other directed focus. I believe this is part of the logic of Alcoholics Anonymous and other such groups.

But this is a basically true sentiment. If you aren’t healthy, it’s hard to be a help to others. You can’t be generous with resources you don’t have.

This type of talk is an example of how the men’s influencers differ from churches, which if anything seem to lean in the opposite direction. I’m no theologian but it does seem to me that there’s biblical support for Peterson’s general take (e.g., Ephesians 4:28). It’s another example of how traditional authorities and institutions need to change how they talk to men in order to be more compelling.

A New Evangelical Harvest

James Wood is out with a great piece in First Things about the implications of the “vibe shift.”

And yet, over a week into his second term, it is clear that gospel opportunities were not sacrificed on Trump’s altar; evangelical voting patterns did not devastate evangelism. In both politics and culture, there has rarely been a time when more people have been interested in Christianity. We are entering an evangelistic hot zone, especially among young men who are searching for faith and meaning on YouTube and popular podcasts. This may be the spring before an evangelistic harvest of what I call “reality-respecters.”
Just a couple of weeks ago, Wesley Huff, a popular young Christian apologist, was invited on The Joe Rogan Experience, the biggest podcast in the world. For over three hours, Huff defended the faith and presented the gospel to Joe Rogan and his millions of listeners. Amidst the digressionary journey that is a Joe Rogan episode, Huff ably defended the faith and the reliability of the biblical text using classical, left-brain arguments that many had assumed were obsolete in our postmodern age. Huff employs logic with the assumption that reality can be known—that we can have confidence about events in the past. And Rogan ate it up. Many have already speculated that this will be the most heard presentation of the gospel in world history.
…
Huff’s Rogan episode was released on January 7, one day after Donald Trump’s election was certified and just two weeks before the inauguration. The timing is noteworthy. Fears that Trump’s evangelical support would undermine evangelistic efforts, discredit our witness, and offend seekers are not coming to pass. That Trump’s victory did not impact evangelism the way many expected should invite us to reconsider some of our assumptions about how politics and the capacity of the church to spread the good news are related….We can’t be certain about what is on the horizon. But it is clear that things are not necessarily panning out according to the never-Trump jeremiads.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

Nate Moore: “Monk Mode” Is Destroying Young Men - What I’ve always found interesting is that people online who advocate the “grindset” or ultra hard work tend to portray themselves as having a lot of time for leisure and consumption. This is part of the hustle.

GQ: How Zyn Conquered the American Mouth

The Point: Last Boys at the Beginning of History - A sympathetic profile of young new right men at the NatCon conference.

These young intellectuals call themselves—like pitch-perfect nineteenth-century romantics—“sensitive young men.” At the after-parties they discuss metaphysics. Despite this being a D.C. social event, I don’t know where they work. It’s obvious, however, that some of the best congressional offices on the Hill, several conservative magazines and the D.C.-area universities are well represented. I do know, though, what they think about free will and contingency, ancient history and EU regulatory disputes. Among them I’ve heard discussions of twentieth-century espionage and historical intrigues and quotes from Kissinger, Freud, Kierkegaard, Homer, Virgil, Montesquieu and the Federalist Papers. They revive the best parts of their undergraduate curricula and try their best to cultivate serious intellectual lives.

John Judis: Family, Fertility, and Gender Fluidity - Judis makes a point I stress when people talk about a “vibe shift.” Even if there’s a conservative turn in the culture, it’s unlikely to completely roll back the changes of the last decade or so. In fact, as I’ve argued elsewhere, it could even institutionalize many of those changes.

Johann Kurtz: Meritocracy is not a good thing

First Things: A Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right

Michael Lind: Why There Won’t Be a Deportation Apocalypse

Manhattan Institute: The Persistence of Religious Discrimination in Publicly Funded Pre-K Programs