Last year I wrote a long and detailed statistical analysis of James Taranto's Roe effect, but due to computer glitches I lost the essay and didn't rewrite it, only posting some of my final results. Alas, Larry L. Eastland has broken down the numbers on his own and come to the same general conclusion I did.
Liberal Democrats are having both more abortions--and more abortions as a percentage of their ideological and political group--than either of the other groupings.Fascinating, no?As liberals and Democrats fervently seek new voters and supporters through events, fund-raisers, direct mail and every other form of communication available, they achieve results minuscule in comparison to the loss of voters they suffer from their own abortion policies. It is a grim irony lost on them, for which they will pay dearly in elections to come.
It makes sense from a socio-biological perspective. The abortion meme is hideously self-destructive, and will eventually disappear or fade into numerical irrelevance, like homosexuality.
It would also be interesting to see overall fertility rates by ideology. I suspect that rightists have more children than leftists, and that the stereotypical scenario of rightist children turning left against the wishes of their parents is based in reality, but that rightists have more children to lose than to leftists. Politics and morality aside, demographics and sexual selection pressures rule the world.
I've met very few people who were raised in a left-wing household and eventually went right. I've met many, many people who went the other direction.
Remember that the Left controls the mainstream media, the schools, academia and large portions of the government bureacracy -- the ways in which most people get their information on the world around them. This gives them a natural and profound advantage in recruitment of converts that the Right does not enjoy, because the converts see themselves has having reached an "indepedent" conclusion on the workings of the world, rather than having been swayed by an evangelist of a political dogma.
If this at all seems odd, consider how many Leftists you've argued with who are blatantly ignorant of facts and history, but are more than willing to quote sources and insist upon a doctored version of history. They're disinclined to listen to anything you have to present because they're convinced in the credentials, objectiveness and veracity of those who have fed them information.
While the Internet is managing to combat some of the flow of Leftists' selective reporting, revisionist history and occasional outright lies, the segment of the populace with enough interest to find the gems among the morass is slender. Remember that bloggers are still a tiny fringe in American politics, and that the effect of a community is always recursively amplified within itself.
Which is to say, we all consider ourselves more important than we really are. It's going to take a lot of time before we have any significant impact on the current hegemony.
Don't be so pessimistic, Cypren. It's true that the left has media, academia, and government. But we have reality. Remember, every liberal out there is just one mugging away (or today, it might be a terrorist attack) from becoming a conservative.
I've known several women who, after having had children, have said to others - including their own children - that it's not worth it if you're not totally committed to the idea of having kids. Depressing? Yeah. But it does reflect the 'reality' that people come from these days - that is, a reality in which time and money are everything, and child-rearing is very consuming on both those counts. I guess it depends more upon the values with which one is raised than whether or not they have been given birth to (gr?).
But as an example of when it has worked: a friend of mine from Bermuda was saying that back in the sixties there was some political party in Bermuda that didn't have any power there by the sheer numbers of it. Its members were told to "go forth and multiply" as a political strategy. They did - and they recently got representation.
m: Wow, that's really sad to think that some women actually regret having children.
It is sad. But does it really surprise you?
m: I guess it does surprise me. I'm overly idealistic when it comes to women, I suppose.