It is not really news that conservatives are likelier to have children and large families than are progressives, but it is rarely documented as dramatically as John Burn-Murdoch does in the Financial Times. Using “the U.S. General Social Survey and the World Values Survey, extending prior work by Fieder et al (2018)” to “ask respondents how many children they have, as well as where they would place themselves on a political scale from left to right,” Burn-Murdoch produces striking graphs for both America and the developed world as a whole showing a modest decline in birth rates among conservatives between the 1970s and the 2020s, but a much sharper decline among progressives. In the U.S. data, for example, progressives at the start were just below conservatives around 2.7 children per family, and are now below 1.8, while conservatives had declined to around 2.4. The decline across the developed world for progressives starts falling off sharply in the decade of the 2000s, when environmental indoctrination really took hold, and starting around 2.1 in the mid-1990s, hits 1.6 by 2020.

As Burn-Murdoch concludes:

From the U.S. to Europe and beyond, people who identify as conservative are having almost as many children as they were decades ago. The decline is overwhelmingly among those on the progressive left, in effect nudging each successive generation’s politics further to the right…It is well established that children’s values are strongly shaped by those of their parents. A growing left-right birth rate gap will slow that liberalising conveyor belt. . . . The greatest trick the right ever pulled was convincing the left that talking about families and children is conservative-coded. Rather than worrying about adding more carbon footprints, maybe progressives should embrace the prospect of raising the people who invent the technologies or elect the governments that deliver net zero.

All of this, of course, is why the left works so hard to control education and/or immigration: if your movement isn’t replicating itself naturally, it needs to either indoctrinate other people’s children or import foreigners from the non-developed world with whom coalitions of convenience can be made.

The irony of “great replacement” theories is that the people progressives are scrambling to replace are themselves.