“I believe the children are our future,” Whitney Houston famously sang — but that’s been an open question lately, as Americans have fewer and fewer kids.

Over 20 years ago, demographer Philip Longman predicted a coming “global baby bust” — and that moment has now arrived. 

As a pundit, I can recall people looking at me funny when I talked about this — weren’t all the headlines fretting about a population explosion?

But now there’s been so much gloomy talk about falling birth rates, and the (extremely) limited ability of governments to boost them with various incentives, that most people have caught on. 

And it does seem kind of gloomy. “Children of Men” was supposed to be a dystopian sci-fi movie, not a forecast.

But lately I’ve been rethinking this: Maybe all those graphics showing plummeting birthrates far off into the future won’t turn out to be true.

And politics may be the leading indicator.

At least since the 1960s, young people have leaned to the left. And in all that time, people who lean left have been less likely to have kids. 

But now something dramatic is happening: Young people are quickly becoming the most conservative demographic. 

In the last presidential election, US voters between 18 and 29 were largely pro-Trump; the core of his opposition came from elderly Boomers. 

In last week’s Canadian election, too, it was old folks who heavily voted Liberal, and Europe is seeing a similar phenomenon.

And for time immemorial, conservative people who support traditional values tend to have more kids than leftists do. 

If younger generations are becoming more conservative and more supportive of traditional values, then they will probably have more children.

Anecdotally, I’m seeing students at my university talking about marrying and having families in a way that I didn’t used to. 

Even among my law students, it’s not unusual now to hear a female student say she wants a career, but that a husband and family will be the first priority in her life. 

It’s not scientifically gathered data, but I can attest that you just didn’t hear that a few years ago.

More and more I hear similar comments from undergraduates, too, and I see them posting such things on social media. 

It makes sense: Today’s younger people tend to be closer to their parents than earlier generations were. 

There’s not mass social rebellion among them — their grandparents, the Boomers, took care of that — and one upside of smaller families is that parents and their kids often forge closer relationships.

As well, economic uncertainty has actually undermined careerism to an extent. 

It’s not the go-go 1980s, or the similar tech-boom aughts, where making lots of money was an overweening goal. 

Now people care more about security and quality of life — and that, too, means family and relationships over career.

A friend recently suggested that artificial intelligence, too, might actually encourage people to have more kids.

At first I questioned that. Won’t AI just make our relationships more atomized and distant?

But he suggested the opposite: As AI makes living cheaper and society richer, it will also remove opportunities for people to find meaning and fulfillment in their work lives. It’ll probably be harder to make it as a writer, a teacher or an engineer.

What kind of satisfaction will be almost impossible for a machine to take away?  Making and raising humans.

Oh, I suppose you can imagine a future where babies incubate in artificial wombs and are raised by robots, but that’s a long way off at best. 

In the meantime, having and raising kids is one of the greatest sources of joy and life satisfaction for most people — and always has been.

Throughout human history, most people have looked on their families as their biggest achievement, with everyone from peasants to kings and emperors dedicated to leaving many descendants behind.

One more reason for generational change in this department may simply be that it’s, you know, change. 

Not having kids was an exciting departure once; today, it’s ho-hum. 

A show about an independent “career woman” like Mary Tyler Moore was groundbreaking 50-plus years ago.

Now “Sex and the City,” a turn-of-the-millennium show about four such women, seems kinda dated.

Finally, there’s the optimism factor. A positive national mood typically encourages births. 

Donald Trump has promised a new Golden Age — and after 100 days, he looks like he just might deliver.  If he does, more people will probably have kids.

For all those reasons, I’m betting that even without government handouts and flashy media campaigns, the coming generation will turn out to be more fertile than the last. 

And that’s something we all could use.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.