One area where the political left has experienced almost total success since the 1960s has been in successfully imposing by force and persuasion a new fertility pattern on the Western world. Historians commonly attribute many of the changes to oral birth control, but changing mores also had quite a lot to do with it as well.

While women have been encouraged to delay child birth, be promiscuous, take contraception, and perform the roles of men in the working world, other forces have rushed in to supplant the missing mothers and home-makers.

In the domestic roles, we have some minor improvements in automation, but perhaps the larger change has been in things like food and dress — people now tend to buy ready-made meals (at greater expense to the household, health, and quality of life), wear simplistic, clownish clothing, and outsource most child-rearing responsibilities to the state.

The last is perhaps the most important part — because the family has been broken down as an independent, decentralized set of mini-institutions, most of its roles have been subsumed by corporations and the central state. None of those gains would be possible without the new morals around gender, sexuality, and contraception.

Further,  the lack of issue from the native stock increases demand (at least temporarily) from corporations to increase skilled immigration to the country. Because the best of the natives are curbing their fertility to make time for husband-and-wife careers, they have no time to raise their own children adequately to become highly productive. Instead, the hope has been to skim the best of the foreigners, educating them in the United States, and using global trade to make up for domestic deficits in quality of governance and corporate management.

As we’re seeing in Europe especially — but the United States as well — this complex isn’t properly sustainable. It’s not even sustainable in the corporations that tend to push for greater immigration — too much cultural diversity in any institution increases communication costs, which reduces competitiveness and effectiveness without any proof of compensatory benefits.

The solutions aren’t apt to be all that simple, in part because most of the culture has adopted this new family pattern with gusto. It’s become awkward to behave in the best interests of the broader community, and socially adroit to bend to the needs of the state and its partners. This is a pressure that young women in particular tend to feel from their peers — to conform to what the state wants from them, rather than other sources of influence — even real interests of their own families for perpetuation.

Just in terms of what’s socially acceptable for the better quarter of Americans — it’s embarrassing to even think about having children before the early to mid-30s, like admitting to being a bumpkin who loves monster truck rallies. To have more than two children is to appear to be like you belong in a trailer park. The fashion is to be suicidal, hard-working, pill-popping, and eager to divorce.

But some temporary awkwardness in that department is likely to be what’s necessary to keep the show going in the West, despite all the difficulties which are likely to arise.