The bravery and valor of young American men is usually what I take from memorials of D-Day. This year, something else has struck me like never before: the gratitude of the French for these men who liberated them of the Nazis before liberating the rest of Europe.

At first, these expressions of gratitude caught me off guard. (I know that’s stupid, but back in 2003, when I picked up a college-aged French hitchhiker in Galway and asked if he had ever visited the States, he said, “French do not go to America.”) But this immense gratitude is fitting, of course.

American soldiers, along with Brits and Canadians, did something of unfathomable difficulty and perhaps unequaled importance. Few, if any, military campaigns had the import of Operation Overlord.

Almost no Americans alive today have done anything that approaches the difficulty, virtue, and importance of what these boys of Pointe du Hoc did. And really, nobody else alive in 1944 had done anything like it, either.

It’s in this context that I think we need to understand the baby boom and today’s baby bust.

Here’s an underappreciated reason we are having fewer and fewer babies every year: We don’t believe we are good. I call it “Civilizational Sadness.”

We lack hope in the future and trust in our fellow man, and ultimately, belief in our own goodness. I dedicated the last chapter of my new book to Civilizational Sadness, and other commentators have noted this, too.

Birth rates in the United States are higher among the more religious and lowest among the saddest populations — liberal, secular millennials and Gen Zers.

So, how does the baby boom relate to this?

First, we need to recall that the baby boom was not a brief uptick in births to make up for babies not made during the war. It was a generation-long, unprecedented boom in marriage and family formation.

The average age at marriage got earlier. Marriage rates went up. Family size increased.

Why?

Here’s what I wrote in Family Unfriendly:

“The Baby Boom had a hundred causes (just like our current Baby Bust). But one cause was the national mood. Our young men got off a boat, having just saved the world by defeating two evil empires — some of the worst evil mankind had ever seen — and they were greeted by young women who had kept the economy going for five years.”

“Never before that moment or since have Americans been as certain that we were good. Our young men and women were the heroes of the planet. So these hero men and hero women high-fived one another, smooched on the pier, got married, went back to their new homes, and started making babies.”

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“While this was an extraordinary moment in modern history, and there were many pro-family dynamics at play, there’s also a universal rule at play here. A crucial and underappreciated factor in the desire of a people to reproduce itself is how the people answer this question: Are we good?“

If you trained for years, risked your life, defeated the enemy, freed a continent you had never seen before, ended a war, and did it alongside men from all over the country, you were pretty sure you — we— were good.