I'm in particular very concerned about the loneliness of many Americans in all age groups, but it's really profound in that youngest age group that we would expect to be thinking about marriage. If we want America's next 250 years to be as glorious as its first 250, then some things have to be the same, and the family is absolutely at the same. Welcome back to The Kevin Roberts Show. I'm Larry O'Connor. Last week, we talked about how the family is the foundation of any great civilization. It's certainly true here in America. We touched on one part of that story that we want to dive a little deeper into, and that has to do with the dangers for a civilization when the family starts to erode. And some of the very real historical issues we've had here in America, some of them based on hoaxes and lies about the dangers of overpopulation. We're going to get into it right now with Kevin Roberts on The Kevin Roberts Show. Dr. Roberts, always good to see you, sir. Likewise, Larry O'Connor. Birth rates falling, marriage declining, loneliness starts to rise, people feel hopeless and despair. These are all very real issues and something that we as a civilization should really care about, I would think. We should. And last time we talked about sort of the policy effects, the problems that lead up to that. And those are really important. But another very important way to discuss this, as you just mentioned or analyze it, is from the standpoint of the individual. And all of those things you just mentioned are sources of worry. I'm in particular very concerned about the loneliness of many Americans in all age groups. But it's really profound in that youngest age group that we would expect to be thinking about marriage. Yeah. And ironically, social media, which we were told was going to connect us all and make us all so intimate, it actually has isolated us. It's made people withdrawn. And that, I think, is translated to fewer families. And is it true that fewer families ultimately means a weaker nation? Always. I mean, I just think about this, the lessons of history. I can't think of a nation. Maybe there's one. Maybe someone in the comments could mention it to us. I'm happy to see it. But even if there's one or two, the preponderance of nations that have seen this kind of demographic decline, this decline in the health of families, haven't existed very long. And so for us at Heritage, when we talk about this desire to work on family policy, whatever shape that takes over the next few years, the next several years, it really is born out of a desire not to be dramatic about history or what we might be facing, but it's a desire to fix it while we still have the ability to do so. And certainly from the standpoint of individual Americans who would like to be married but would say they can't because of all of these factors, that becomes a real emotional problem. Yeah, and, well, population decline is sort of a macro issue for our nation, but in a way it's also very much a personal problem too, right? And you hear people on the left who will sort of celebrate the idea of living their childless life. You see some celebrities, you know, celebrating on social media about the life they can live because they don't have kids. What's the appropriate response to that from a conservative perspective? Look, it's their right not to have kids. I think the appropriate response is to point to really positive examples. I mean, I think about a lot of men and women in public life, you know, whether it's Secretary Duffy and his wife. I think about the tail end of the last NFL season, Philip Rivers coming out of retirement after four or five years, 10 kids. And it isn't that you have to have that many kids. It's that the right answer to the one extreme is to point to these great examples of men and women who, by their own choices, are so fulfilled by the families they have. I think the more we see that in our media and pop culture, who knows? Maybe we'll even have some pop culture icons who can do this for us in a very good way. I think that's probably much more effective and persuasive than, say, me chiding the childless woman. Beyond the celebration of the free and easy lifestyle that you have when you don't have any kids, you also hear the left make the argument that more kids means more consumption, and we have limited resources on this planet, and therefore it's actually virtuous to not procreate. Yeah, which reveals, whether intended or not by everyone who makes that argument, the Malthusian foundation of all of this. And that is that, you know, when you and I were growing up, we were convinced because of what we were reading in our science and social studies textbooks that the earth had far too many people on it. And that this population boom, which had been theorized since Malthus was writing 200 years prior, was going to cause the earth to burn up and cause climate changes. Those two things are very much wedded. The reality is, if you look at good social science analysis, is that at least per capita there is less consumption by large families because it's so doggone expensive. Yeah, that's ironic, isn't it? And by the way, I want that whole population boom thing. It's fascinating to look at it now since we lived through it for the last several decades. We survived the population. Yeah, isn't that amazing? Let's talk about that in a minute because our libertarian friends want to chime in. As you know, they always have a comment here. They will, of course, reiterate what you just said, which is it's a personal choice. If you want to have kids, if you don't want to have kids, if you want to have a ton of kids, that's all up to you. That's fine. Why is this an issue for the government? Why should the government care about this issue? Because, to put it bluntly, there won't be a government one day if we don't address it. Now, that's decades down the road, right? By the way, there's a lot of libertarians who'd be fine with that. No government? They would celebrate that. But why is that bad? There won't be a government because there won't be an America. And I know our libertarian friends want an America, right? Sure. And we might quibble on some policy, maybe even disagree. But they want an America for sure, as I do. And so if you want an America and you want an America that is a beacon of freedom, economic freedom, freedom in every other respect, then you have to have an America that is built not on you know sort of atomized people or communities but communities people that are really connected not just as families but very healthy local communities and governments You got to have a healthy critical mass of population in order for this to happen. There's an element of this that is self-evident, but I don't mean that in sort of a frustrated or condescending way. It's that we've gotten so used to these numbers of the decline in marriage rates, the decline in birth rates, that we just assume there is going to be some magic solution to it. Best as we can tell at Heritage, you're either going to accept the consequences, which is ultimately that the society would be so weak, it can't withstand an invasion, maybe it can't afford all of the ridiculous safety net spending that it's been doing, military spending. You take a second option, which is to assume that automation and technology will solve the problem. That's kind of scary to us at Heritage. The third is, which is where a lot of libertarians are, and that will be fair to their argument, even though I fundamentally disagree, that you can fill all of those needs with immigrants. And you don't have an America then either. And so for us as conservatives at Heritage, we would like to try something else, which is family policy. All right. So population decline affects the workforce. It affects innovation. It affects military readiness because fewer people means a smaller military. These are all major issues for our country. It affects the social safety net and being able to fund it, as you just laid out there. Why don't you hear your neighbors here on Capitol Hill, politicians, talking about this more? I think there are a couple of reasons. The first is, to be fair to some of them, they're dealing with policy issues that are staring them right in the face. Budget needs by X date. They're dealing with other very pressing policies like health care and immigration and so on. The second is we shouldn't expect politicians to be long-range thinkers just by definition. I mean, just pause it. We're talking about the most virtuous, pro-American, pro-family politician there is. He or she's going to be worried about the next election cycle so they can continue to be a politician. It's the nature of the beast, as it were. It's incumbent upon us, adjacent to our politicians, who have not just the ability but also the charge, as my scholars, colleagues at Heritage have, to think long range, to be introducing those ideas and those policies into the mix. That's why it's important for us to be so bold at Heritage in talking about family policy. Well, and with the family policy paper that you've initiated, are they listening? Are you getting good reception and reaction from your friends? In fact, some of this was prompted by policymakers themselves. They started talking about this several years ago. And then, of course, we hear from everyday Americans who say this is a real issue. We're not sure where government should be in this formula. And we said, well, we're going to take a crack at it and see what comes up. All right. History time. My favorite part of every episode. Absolutely. I've read this somewhere that most great civilizations did not fail and come to an end because of foreign invasion. They actually eroded from within. Is that true? And what can we learn from that? Because it sounds like what you're describing here is sort of the beginning of that trend. Yeah, it's largely true in almost every case. You think about the most famous example people would cite is Rome. Yes. I think about the Roman civilization and the Roman Empire every day, by the way. Every single day. Sometimes for me, morning and night. Is that right? Yeah. Good for you. Good company. That's a famous example because it's true. And yes, there was an invasion that ultimately caused it to collapse. Why was that invasion successful? Because of these same problems. I think about another example, and that is, you ready for this? The Austro-Hungarian Empire. I do not think about the Austro-Hungarian Empire every day. That came to an end at the end of World War I because they were on the wrong side. And what is now the modern nation of Hungary used to be three or four times larger than what it was with a commensurate population as well. Why were they susceptible to an invasion that ultimately cost them their civilization because of these same issues? Not as profound as we've seen in the United States, which is a little bit of a warning sign for us. Our worry would be that we become so weak socially, which is to say as a result of the family deterioration, at a time when we're heavily in debt and our military hasn't yet seen the benefits of the Trump-Fance-Hegseth reforms, that China has a window of opportunity to tip us over. I don't think that's going to happen. You know, we're careful about not being alarmist. But that's not a 0% possibility. Yeah. So you just said politicians is understandable. They think about the next election. They don't think about decades in the future. But as a society, when we stop thinking about families and growing our families and the next generation of grandchildren and what have you on a micro level, does that mean that we basically stop believing in our own country's future? Is there a connection there? There's a huge connection there. And, you know, the short-term thinking, which we see in policymaking, is profoundly true today because we've become short-term thinkers anyway. You think about the infamous 24-hour news cycle. You think about our ability to consume a tremendous amount of news on a small screen. There's a good side of that, obviously. But the bad side is we don't spend a lot of our brainpower thinking about long-range, even medium-term. And we see that manifest itself in policymaking where policymakers at the state level, the federal level, but people who might otherwise be working on this problem of the deterioration of families say it's going to sort of magically sort itself out one day. There's some solution out there that's going to happen. Well, at Heritage, we're not convinced by that, obviously. So in our last episode, we talked about China and their one-child policy and how it may just be irreversible really at this point. They're in chaos right now because of that. I want to get into that and dive deep into it. But I wasn't fair. You know, here in the West, we had our own sort of stupid phase there. It was all based on this book, The Population Bomb. You remember this whole thing? I remember it well. Cover of every magazine. Walter Cronkite talked about it. And our parents were all assured that if they kept having babies, they were going to ruin our country. It turns out, first of all, that was a hoax, right? That was never real It wasn based on anything No it wasn based on anything There a lesson there which I come back to I tell you a quick story If I may I remember I was in second third fourth grade and we were doing a tornado drill which was to get your head under the base Oh, yeah, I used to do those too. So the first time this happens, I go home, my mom says, what did you think about that? Were you horrified? No, I thought it was pretty cool. It was five or 10 minutes away of not having to be sitting in the desk. And I said, oh, Well, I'm much more worried about the population bomb. Really? Yes. Whatever grade that was. As a little elementary school kid, you were more scared of population than of a tornado ripping through. That was the fake science that the education elite were foisting upon kids. In the same way that a somewhat fake science about climate change, there can be climate change, but man-made, man-caused is still an open question. But even if I posit that it's slam dunk, it's absolutely incontrovertible, the solutions that have been presented by the climate change crowd, including not getting married, not having kids because of all the consumption and supposed environmental alarm, is ridiculous. It's as much fake science or at least a fake solution as the other. You heard people back then, and you're right, it's being echoed today because of climate change hysteria. You hear people say, oh, it would be selfish to bring a child into this world because it's not fair to my fellow human being because it'll ruin our planet. Then because of overpopulation, now because of climate and all of that jazz. But even the New York Times, even NPR have done reports on this saying, no, that's all fake, right? So why do we still have policies that seem to support those ideas? Well, because policymaking lags the popular will. And one of the things that I think my colleagues at Heritage do well is connect policy solutions with also helping to persuade the popular opinion. And so in this case, we've won. The center right in this country has won over the last couple of decades about the population, overpopulation myth. We've actually made some inroads on what I call the fake solutions of climate change. Even if you think climate change is real, the solutions would only create a 0.2 degree Celsius reduction in global temperature. This is important because the whole climate change thing is based in the Malthusian myth as well. All of that to say, it just takes a while to convince people so that when you're actually in office, you're kind of a lagging indicator. But we're really close to getting this right. All right. So now the real crisis here that should scare you more than a tornado is underpopulation. Right. And that has to do with, you know, making sure that we have replacement of our current generation. and make sure that we have enough people to continue our programs and our society and our economy. We know from other countries in Europe, they've started to institute policies. You mentioned Hungary. Hungary has a policy like this. I think other nations in Europe, they've started to incentivize people to have families and start building larger families and having more children. How are those working out? Can we learn from those countries? We can learn from them even if the country initiated a program that didn't seem to have any effect on the marriage rate or the birth rate. And we did. We went into the study thinking, we're going to find out at Heritage what the government should offer as incentives to get the marriage rate and maybe the birth rate up to a certain number or a certain level. And we just didn't find the evidence for that from those countries, number one. Number two, the results have been mixed as it relates to the marriage rate and perhaps the birth rate in Hungary, although it's a little choppy over the last several years. Nonetheless, it's at least arrested that Hungarian programs seemingly have at least arrested the decline in the birth rate. You haven't seen this boom. The one thing that we have seen, especially in Hungary, is that the abortion rate by married children has dramatically declined. And there is some argument to be made, and we're trying to tease out these numbers or we'll tease out these numbers over the next months and years, that the money that was spent by Hungary had an effect on that. And that's why you have seen the birth rate in Hungary stabilize, although it's not gone up. All of that to say, this is carefully presented in our paper, as we've discussed, as not being the magic bullet, but at least it's a beginning that helps to stabilize the situation. We would say, just to add one element to this, that perhaps the most promising level of government to try this out would be the state level. You know, why not? We have states maybe competing for federal block grants for this. At Heritage, we will want to pay for that money by having commensurate, corresponding budget cuts elsewhere. That's always our ideal. But we think this is enough of a civilizational question to be experimenting. You know, there's no doubt that policy will affect people's behavior. Because I hear a lot of times, like, it doesn't matter what policy you put forth, If people are going to do what they're going to do, it's cultural, it's societal, you're not going to be able to face it. If you proposed or if we had a law that said, okay, you have four or more children, you will not have to pay any income taxes for the next 20 years. People are going to have babies. There's no doubt, right? Yes. And we've not yet gotten to that point of proposing that. You can add that to your paper if you'd like. That can be the O'Connor clause. We can credit you. Yeah, I wish you would. Let's talk about the other side of it. We can learn lessons certainly from some of these countries who have started to incentivize people having babies. What about China? I mentioned it a couple of times here. They have a real problem here, partly demographically, because during their one-child policy, tragically, horribly, baby girls were killed. When they found out that they were going to have a baby girl, they valued boys so much in that culture that they would abort those babies, sometimes even worse, or they would put the babies up for adoption. We have a lot of Chinese-born women here in America or in the West who were adopted from China. But now they've got all these men. They don't have any women? I mean, I don't know a lot about biology, but that's a big problem. It's a huge problem. And history will tell you where, for whatever reason, famine, in most cases in the Middle Ages, where you have a higher percentage of men in the population, that those men tend to join the Army because they're looking for something to do. And while this is a discrete issue from what you just asked about and I get to that No that is is connected because that why men tend to Yeah I actually think that reality in spite of China instability from the One Child Program makes them more dangerous in the next 10 or 15 years. Because they have an expendable military. They've got to do something with those men. Yikes. Now, again, don't mean that to be alarmist, but we're concerned. No, no, no. That's a fair thought. The broader question, though, about the lesson is obviously sort of the reverse example of that countries like Hungary, Israel, Singapore, for that matter, who've experimented with pro-natalist policies, it's the example of what not to do. Now, the United States and almost all of the West is heading steadily toward its own one-child policy, not exclusively male, obviously, because this would be happening through personal choice. How we arrest that decline mostly is going to be at the social and cultural level. But what we're saying at Heritage is let's maybe help those factors by doing something on the economic and government side as limited as it should be as conservatives so that we have a chance. Ironically, when China embarked upon their one-child policies, they rationalized it. And there were a lot of people at the United Nations, I remember, who was like, oh, this is great that they're doing this. It was rationalized because, well, we have a billion people. And if everyone has 2.5 children, that means within a generation we'll double that. and we can't sustain that. But ironically, they couldn't sustain it because they're Marxists. That's the problem. It was their whole government structure and their economy and their centralized control of government or the economy that was the real problem, not people doing what people naturally do. Yeah, had that been the situation in the West, I mean, think about the economic prosperity. Right. And now think about under Xi's leadership how that centralization, which has become profound under him, And it's actually been sort of proto-capitalist, if you will. That's actually the perfect regime for them if they want to be the world's hegemon at our expense. Let's talk about your personal experience with this issue. When you travel around, you talk to young people a lot. I know you've got a lot of young people who work here at Heritage. What are their concerns? Do they have a resistance to starting a family and having large families? Is it economic or have we just moved socially so far that it's just unheard of for a young person to think about having more than two kids? You know, Larry, the way I would sum up all of those conversations, whether it's with men or women, you know, whatever their religious affiliation is or is not, it's that if they make the choice that they want to be married and then if they make the choice that they would like to have children, they want to be able to do so on their timeline or what some of them might say is God's timeline. And what they're encountering are a lot of headwinds from different sources, the government, the economy, higher ed costs, health care costs. They're, you know, some of them who build budget Excel files for the next 10 years, start researching, especially if they're in a serious dating relationship on the cost of child care. And they put all of this into this equation and it just doesn't make economic sense. So at the end of the day, in addition to whatever social issues exist, and there are some of those, obviously, the economic ones become really, really profound. And that makes sense in the West and especially in the United States. And so that's why Heritage says, let's go press on those and see what we can do at the societal and cultural level to improve those. But clearly, government has a role. It has had a role in making some costs artificially high. Let's see if we can fix that. Well, that's the thing with the cost of living and the affordability issues that you can't blame them for being registered. Absolutely not. That's what I tell people. Mom Donnie diagnosed the affordability issue perfectly. His solutions are awful. Let's not say that because the word affordability has been used by the left that we're just not going to use it. Let's go co-op something from them. Right. Well, I think it's frustrating because you can look at their policies for causing the affordability problem, and they don't have any solutions. Last I checked, government can't make things more affordable. Haven't seen that yet. They only know how to make it work. All right, so let's talk about this America 250 angle, Heritage's family policy paper, but also sort of celebrating America's 250. How are you, through Heritage, going to reconnect America to its founding principles and this idea of the family being the building block? Well, we're going to do so, number one, by celebrating America's history. And then number two, while we're celebrating that history and reminding Americans what made America great, patriotism, great men and women who sacrificed in our military, and heroes and heroines, that at the root of that was always the stability and flourishing of the nuclear family. And we have commenced an advertising campaign that conveys that. We're very proud of that. But the policy side of that is to say, if we want America's next 250 years to be as glorious as its first 250, then some things have to be the same. And the family is absolutely at the center. Our founders were visionaries. And when they were just sitting in those 13 colonies, I think they always assumed that we would grow and grow and grow and fill up that space. And if you ever fly from New York to L.A., we've got a lot of space to fill. A lot of empty space. Yes, a whole lot of empty space. So it really is still sort of celebrating our founders vision here 250 years later to reenergize that approach. It is. And and as we like to say, the golden age is a choice. It's right there for us. Well, population decline is not a distant threat. It's a very real thing. And it's affecting us right now. And if we are going to see America's next 250, we got to do something to fix it. So stop watching this and go, you know, do what you got to do. Thanks for watching this week's episode. We'll be back next week with The Kevin Roberts Show. And don't forget to subscribe to this show on this platform that you're watching or listening to us on. And give us a thumbs up and a like because you know you liked this. the
