Bubba has the babies

Today Colin Woodward, author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, has an op-ed up, The Maps That Show That City vs. Country Is Not Our Political Fault Line: The key difference is among regional cultures tracing back to the nation’s colonization. Woodward’s thesis is basically that the modern shape of American cultural and political conflict has deep structural roots in American history. This is the same argument that David Hackett Fischer makes in Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, and Kevin Phillips more broadly about the Anglo-world in The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America. These perspectives are useful because there is a tendency in modern American discussion to reduce the sum totality of the dynamic to the white supremacist order, as opposed to the “rising tides of color.” There is an area where the cult-of-Pepe and the identity Left agree descriptively (they just flip the good guys and the bad guys).

There is some of this in the Ezra Klein Vox piece, White threat in a browning America. There are the whites. And there are the non-whites. And never the twain shall meet.

On a side note, Klein’s reliance on social psychological research about white racial anxiety being elicited by priming or information which makes non-whites salient should be critiqued more thoroughly. I suspect most of us find the argument intuitively believable, but the past five years of the replication crisis in psychology, where social psychology was ground-zero, should really make us put our guards up about evidentiary claims which support views we already have a bias toward accepting.

In any case, Klein cites research which shows that non-Hispanic whites are now less than 50% of the births in this country. Rather than arguing about the future of racial identification, I was curious about which whites were giving birth. The problem with raw average total fertility rates is that they mask underlying variance. For example, in Britain the majority of Jews are non-observant, but the majority of Jews under the age of five are from observant families. This is a function of the extremely low fertility of the non-observant majority, and the very high fertility of observant Jews in Britain.

The reason I bring this up is that the different subcultures of the United States have different fertility rates. David Hacket Fischer posits four major Anglo-American streams which date to before the Revolutionary War: New England Yankees, Tidewater and lowland Southerners, Scots-Irish highlanders, and the diverse polyglot Mid-Atlantic region, from Quakers to Dutch. Woodward and others have a somewhat different taxonomy, but the broad sketch aligns.

The curious fact is that up between the 1640s and 1840s New England Yankees were the most fecund of the American Anglo-cultures. The fertility of New England was such that the region began to colonize parts of the United States which had heretofore been dominated by other groups. The eastern half of Long Island was taken over by New Englanders, and they became prominent in New York’s merchant class (there was also a Yankee migration into the Canadian Atlantic provinces). New England farmers swept past the Dutch dominated lower Hudson Valley and overwhelmed the rest of upstate New York, creating a cultural fission that persisted up to the Civil War between the pro-Southern city of New York and the fiercely Republican upstate areas.

In contrast, the population growth rate in the South was depressed compared to the North. Much of this probably can be accounted for by endemic disease.

Things are different now.

The CDC has data on total births by race and ethnic identity by state. I pulled the data and plotted them. The correlation between the number of births and the number of people in the states by race and ethnicity were very high (0.98 and such). Also, I removed about the bottom five states in total population. The data are from ACS sample surveys, and it is pretty clear that small sample sizes are a problem in some of the cross-tabs/states.

In any case,

1) everyone seems to have lower fertility in California
2) Texas is good for whites and Hispanics in terms of having children
3) blacks have very high relative fertility in Florida

Yes, you can see Utah has elevated fertility. No surprise there. Here are the ten states in my data with the highest number of white births to their white population from top to bottom:

Utah
Hawaii
Nebraska
Kansas
Idaho
Louisiana
Kentucky
Oklahoma
Missouri
Iowa
Indiana

Here are the states with a relatively low number of white births to total white population (Connecticut has the lowest number of white births to white population):

Connecticut
Rhode Island
Massachusetts
New Hampshire
Florida
California
New Jersey
Nevada
New Mexico
Arizona
Maine

California is expensive. Florida and Arizona are filled with old white people. Many of the rest are Yankee.

The General Social Survey allows me to look at white ethnicities. I wanted to look at the number of children of various white ethnicities. I limited the sample to Protestants and Catholics.

Here are the results:

In the early 20th century Nordicists like Madison Grant were worried about the fact that Southern and Eastern European ethnics were going to overwhelm the Nordic stock of this country. But take a look at Italian and Polish fertility. People in urban areas have fewer children, and presumably white ethnics who remained identified by their ancestral heritage are disproportionately urban. When the Irish are split up by religion, Catholics tend to be more childless, and also have a minority with large families. This is probably tracking the intense secularization of white Catholics over the last generation, but the persistence of a traditionalist minority. Protestant Irish, who are probably often Scots-Irish, are similar to the other British Americans.

Finally, the ideological differences are really striking but unsurprising:

Left-liberal dominance of cultural institutions such as the media and academia are essential in part because it allows them to generate defections from people raised conservative. They can’t maintain their numbers through “natural increase” alone.

We’ll see what 2050 is life. I hope to be alive. But I think we’ll all be surprised in some ways by some of the defections and realignments. Michael Dukakis won West Virginia in 1988.