by Allan Carlson, Ph.D.

“Sweden has solved the population and family problems of modern societies.  The depopulation that threatens all of the developed, industrial world has been countered there by an aggressive, feminist-inspired reconstruction of the family and by the single-minded pursuit of gender equality in all other aspects of social, cultural, and economic life.”

These two sentences represent the essence of the dominant family policy vision emerging within the European Union.  They are advanced by most European policy experts with an almost religious zeal.  As Jean-Claude Chesnois summarizes, “in Sweden,…empowerment of women insures against a very low birth rate.”[1]  With Sweden especially in mind, sociologist

Peter McDonald asserts that “[i]n a context of high gender equity in individual-oriented institutions, higher gender equity in family-oriented

institutions will tend to raise fertility.”[2]  J.M. Hoem links Sweden’s success to a “softening” of “the effects of women’s labor force participation on their

life sufficiently to reduce the inherent role conflict [relative to motherhood] to a manageable level.”[3]  Other recent articles claim to show that the gender equality provisions of Sweden’s generous parental leave benefit, which push fathers into staying at home with infants while the mothers work, actually increase the odds of having a second or third child.[4]  Referring to Sweden, Paul Demeny concludes that “[f]ew social policies enjoy greater unqualified support from demographers and sociologists than those seeking” to make “participation of women in the labor force compatible with raising children.”[5]

Of course, the deeper source of anxiety driving these analysts is the plummeting fertility of the European peoples, a continent-wide development.  In the year 2000, the whole of Europe (from Iceland to European Russia) recorded a Total Fertility Rate of only 1.37, roughly meaning that the average European woman will bear 1.37 children during her lifetime, only 65 percent of the level needed to replace a generation.  In that same year, 2000, 17 European nations already recorded an absolute decline in numbers, with deaths outnumbering births.  Within two decades, all European nations—with the possible exception of tiny Iceland—will predictably be in the same circumstance.  Some regions of Spain (such as Catalonia and the Basque country), of Italy (including Rome, Venicia, and Tuscany), and of Germany (such as Saxony) have total fertility rates well below 1.0.  In Northern Europe, marriage is increasingly rare, replaced by cohabitation; in Southern Europe, young adults increasingly avoid both marriage and cohabitation, refusing to form childbearing unions of any sort.  This is the essence of the joint European family and population crisis of the 21^st Century.[6] 

We can see an extreme illustration of this crisis and its geopolitical implications by comparing the populations—past, present, and future—of two nations: Russia and the poor, Middle-Eastern, Muslim nation of Yemen.  In 1950, the territory that now composes Russia had a population of 102.7 million.  Following the disasters of World Wars I and II, there was a large surplus of females over males; still, the population showed some signs of the “pyramid” typical to a growing nation.  Yemen, in contrast, was a tiny nation of 4.3 million, with only 4% of the Russian population figure. 

By the year 2000, sharp fertility decline was evident among the Russians, with shrinking numbers of children.  Still, because of past momentum, its overall population had climbed to 145.5 million.  Yemen, meanwhile, with a total fertility rate of about 7.6 during these years, had grown to 18.3 million, a four-fold increase over 1950.

For a projection to the year 2050, we turn to median-level calculations from United Nations demographers.  Here, the U.N. predicts (I think implausibly) an increase in Russia’s TFR of 50 percent by 2050.  Even so, Russia’s population tumbles by 40 million, to only 104 million, leaving a nation heavily tilted toward the elderly.  The U.N. demographers also project a decline in Yemeni fertility by over 50 percent (also, I think, implausibly) to a TFR of 3.35.  Even so, Yemen’s population would still grow to 102 million, almost equal to that of Russia!

We might also compare the 25 nations of the expanded European Union to 25 Muslim countries of North Africa and West Asia.  Again, using very optimistic assumptions for Europe (a rise in the TFR of 30 percent to 1.82 and the annual entry of 500,000 immigrants), the European population still falls from 451 million in 2000 to 401 million in 2050; while the population of North Africa and West Asia more than doubles from 587 million in 2000 to nearly 1.3 billion in 2050.  If these numbers prove to be true, the migratory pressures on Europe from these nations, which are already large, will become enormous, indeed uncontrollable.

Despite the surge in population growth over the last 40 years, and the teeming new industrial cities, China is actually not far removed from the same scenario as in Russia.  As Phillip Longman sums up in his 2004 book, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity [And What To Do About It]:

The consensus among Beijing’s population experts is that the average woman in China today bears somewhere between 1.5 and 1.65 children, whereas 2.1 are needed to replace the population…..If China’s birthrate remains unchanged,…[it] will join the ranks of Japan, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Spain—countries that stand to lose 20-30 percent of their population over the next 50 years.

Longman underscores the effects of this change on the structure of the population:

By 2040, according to official estimates, 26 percent of China’s population will be 60 or older, giving China an age structure similar to Florida’s today.  Increasingly, China is becoming what demographer Xiaochun Qiao calls a ‘4-2-1’ society, in which one child must support two parents and four grandparents.

This demographic shift has the potential to overwhelm the Chinese economic miracle.  As the Chinese author Lin Ying explains: “Whereas the now-developed countries first got rich and then got old, China will first get old.”[7]

Returning to Europe, Sweden now charges to that continent’s rescue, with claims of a unique solution to the joint family and population crisis, a solution which is applicable to all of Europe.  Recently, the Swedish Institute—what might be called that government’s propaganda arm on social and cultural matters—published a paper entitled “Gender Equality—A Key to Our Future?”  The author, Lena Sommestad, is professor of economic history at Uppsala University and director of the Swedish Institute for Future Studies.  This short document perfectly outlines the Swedish family policy model for the European future.

Professor Sommestad’s essay claims that Europe’s challenge of declining birth rates, population aging, tumbling marriage rates, and rising out-of-wedlock births has two sources: female emancipation and “a crisis of the traditional European male breadwinner family.”  She says that nations such as Germany, Italy, and Spain, which have tried to protect or shore up the male breadwinner and his homemaking wife, have failed to understand the irrelevance of these roles for the future, and have paid the price with extremely low fertility.[8] 

Sweden, in contrast, has recognized women’s full emancipation and complete gender equality as “social facts,” and as the keys to a sustainable future.  Professor Sommestad points to the theories of Alva Myrdal from the 1930’s; she had also argued that under modern conditions, the breadwinner-homemaker model, premised on a family wage for fathers, could no longer produce a sufficient number of children.  Myrdal instead insisted that “declining fertility rates should be fought with increased gender equality.”  This idea, Professor Sommestad admits, went dormant in Sweden during the 1940’s and 1950’s when, during a time of affluence, male-breadwinner families become common in Sweden (another author calls this “the era of the Swedish housewife”).  However, “[f]rom the 1960s and onwards, a growing number of Swedish women returned to gainful employment, and by the early 1970’s, the two-breadwinner norm had been firmly established.”[9]  Today, Sommestad continues:

Swedish gender equality policies build on a strong tradition of pro-natalist and supportive social policies….No entitlements are targeted at women in their capacity as wives.  The state uses separate taxation, generous public day-care provision for pre-school children, and extensive programmes of parental leave to encourage married women/mothers to remain at gainful employment.

Revealingly, Professor Sommestad argues that “[P]opulation ageing, problematic as it is, may prove to be a window of opportunity for radical gender-equality reform.”  Feminists, she says, “must overcome their traditional suspicion of demographic arguments and develop [instead] a new, progressive population discourse.”  During the 1930’s, Alva Myrdal proposed using the birth rate crisis as “a battering ram” for radical feminist social reform.  Dr. Sommestad now does so again, although this time on a larger European canvas.  She claims:

…that birth rates are particularly low in countries that support traditional patterns of marriage and breadwinning….[S]ince the early 1980’s, high birth rates in the industrialized world have tended to go hand in hand with a high level of female labour-force participation….In short: women’s access to the labour market appears to be a prerequisite for a higher birth rate.

Dr. Sommestad also adds “that countries that do not stigmatize non-marital cohabitation or extra-marital births have a better chance of maintaining higher fertility levels.”  Moreover, the Swedish model shows that to raise the birth rate, men must also take on “a greater responsibility” for child care.[10]

In sum, using less lofty language, the Swedish model of family policy sees radical feminism as the answer to the fertility crisis.  If European peoples want to survive in the 21^st century, she argues, they should eliminate the full-time mother and homemaker, crush the family wage idea, abolish the home as an economic institution, welcome out-of-wedlock births and cohabitation, push all women—especially actual or potential mothers—into  the labor force, enforce strict gender equality in all areas of life, re-engineer men into childcare-givers, and embrace expensive state child allowances, parental leave, and public day care programs.  The result—almost by magic—will be more babies!

These are not just the ideas of academics, I hasten to add.  In its official statement of policy toward the European Union, the Swedish government summarizes its goal in one sentence: “We want to see a Union that is open, effective and gender equal.”  Let me underscore this: the attainment of the feminist agenda is Sweden’s primary purpose within the EU.  This government statement from April 2004 elaborates:

Sweden has a particular responsibility for increasing the pace of gender equality efforts in Europe.  Decisions have already been taken to the effect that an equal opportunity perspective shall permeate all aspects of the EU’s employment strategy.  Gender equality aspects should be integrated into all areas of policy.  Modern family policies that promote the supply of labour regarding both women and men and which enable family life to be combined with a professional life, are needed in order to meet the demographic challenges Europe faces.[11]

Moreover, official documents pouring out of the European Commission emphasize ever greater attention to gender equality and harmonization of European family policy around the Swedish model, stressing “an individualization of rights” and a “new gender balance in working life” involving basic “changes in family structure.”[12]

So what shall we make out of all this?  To begin with, I do want to admit that there are aspects of the modern Swedish model of family policy that are attractive, at least to this social conservative.  To begin with, the Swedish system does do a better job of bonding newborns to mothers and fathers, in the short run.  The generous “parents insurance” program provides new parents with 390 days of paid leave, at 90 percent of salary, and another 90 days at a lower allowance.  This means that virtually all Swedish children enjoy full time parental care during their first 13 months of life (compared to only a third of infants in the United States).  This also allows new Swedish mothers to breastfeed their newborns.  Again, the  majority of Swedish babies enjoy the health-giving effects of mothers milk for at least six months, compared to only 20 percent in the United States.  And even some of the more coercive aspects of Sweden’s parents insurance program—such as the requirement that fathers take 45 days of the paid parental leave for the couple to receive the full benefit—these have their human side: it turns out that Swedish fathers have a strong preference toward taking their parental leave during Sweden’s elk-hunting season![13]

But that is about it.  For the other claims by advocates for the Swedish model—particularly the claim that this approach will be Europe’s demographic salvation—quite simply vanish under scrutiny.

To begin with, the Swedish model of family policy has not solved the birth dearth in that land.  Assertions that it has rely on a peculiar development during the 1988-1993 period, which has since proven ephemeral.  Consider these Total Fertility Rates for Sweden, by year:

1960-64:     2.30

1965-69:     2.21

1970-74:     1.89

1975-79:     1.67

1983:  1.61

1987:  1.88

1991:  2.11

1995:  1.74

1999:  1.60

2003:  1.54

As you can see, during the last decade of Sweden’s “breadwinner father/homemaking mother” era, 1960-69, the nation had a fertility rate well above the replacement level of 2.10.  Contrary to assertions by Alva Myrdal and Lena Sommestad, this “family policy” system clearly succeeded relative to population.  However, once Sweden implemented the new model built on the deconstruction of marriage, out-of-wedlock births, working mothers, parents insurance, and day care, fertility fell by 30 percent to 1.61 by 1983.  However, during the late 1980’s, the number apparently started climbing again, reaching 2.11 in 1991, just above the replacement level.  Progressive social analysts around the European continent shouted hosannas!  Sweden had found the answer!  But it did not last.  By 1993, fertility was falling again, and by 2003, Sweden—at 1.54—was close to the European Union average.  Indeed, in the year 2000, Sweden joined that grim group of nations where deaths actually exceed births: more coffins than cradles.[14] 

It turns out that Sweden’s “success” in the early 1990’s was a statistical fluke.  A change in policy regarding eligibility for parents insurance, called a “speed premium,” had the one-time effect of reducing the spacing between first and second births; but this change did not significantly increase the total number of children born per family.[15]  Judged empirically, then, the Swedish model simply does not work. 

Second, Professor Sommestad’s brief history of the introduction of Sweden’s new family policy during the 1960’s grossly overlooks its radical and coercive nature.  As honest Swedish feminist historians have admitted, there was no pressure for change from young Swedish housewives and mothers during the mid-1960’s.  By all accounts, they were largely happy with their lot.  Instead, the pressure came from other directions.  Government planners in the Labor Ministry foresaw labor shortages in Sweden’s future.  Instead of opening the doors to greater immigration, though, they decided to pull Sweden’s young mothers into the workplace.[16]

At the same time, the radical wing of Sweden’s ruling Social Democratic party took power, inaugurating what feminist historian Yvonne Hirdman calls Sweden’s “Red Years,” 1967-1976.  As their heart was a massive “gender turn” that would radically alter the nature of marriage and family in Sweden.  In 1968, the Social Democrats joined with the labor unions in a joint report concluding that “there are…strong reasons for making the two-breadwinner family the norm” in all welfare and social policies.  The next year, our old friend Alva Myrdal chaired a major panel “On Equality,” which concluded that “[i]n the society of the future,…the point of departure must be that every adult is responsible for his/her own support.  Benefits previously inherited in married status should be eliminated.”  The Report also called for an end to tax policies that favored marriage.[17]  In 1969, a Ministry of Justice committee declared Swedish marriage law “clearly anachronistic,” based as it was on the now discredited Christian notion of “two becoming one flesh.”  Instead, the law should focus on the new imperative of “personal fulfillment.”  In 1971, Sweden’s Parliament abolished the income tax system favoring marriage, so giving this land the most “fully individualized taxation system” in the world.  According to analyst Sven Steinmo, this single change “more or less eradicated” the traditional home in Sweden.[18]  The Family Law Reform of 1973 introduced “no-fault” divorce, deeming it “only natural that if one of the spouses is dissatisfied, he or she may demand a divorce.”  All social and welfare benefits tied to marriage were abolished.[19]  By the time the Social Democrats were driven out of office in 1976, their forced revolution in family life was complete; the Swedes had been re-engineered into a post-family order.

Moreover, Sweden—and Europe as a whole—now finds itself in new circumstances where the old calculations no longer apply.  In the year 2000, a team of demographers reports in Science magazine, Europe’s population reached a vital turning point.  Until then, although fertility was abnormally low, the overall age structure of the continent still had a “positive momentum;” that is, long term stability could still be gained if women raised their average family size to slightly over two.  In 2000, however, prior decades of low fertility produced a new effect.  Europe’s population entered into “negative momentum,” which means that a TFR of 2.1 will no longer suffice to gain even stability.  A TFR approaching 4.0 would now be needed to achieve the same end.[20]

Further, it is becoming increasingly clear that forced “gender equality” can never be the solution to fertility decline, no matter how hard feminist analysts work to cook the numbers.  For example, a team of analysts recently noted that the key components to the Swedish model—the reconfiguring of women’s education into equality with men, the movement of women into previously “all male” jobs, the deconstruction of marriage—are the very same policies which have generated dramatic declines in the fertility of women in the developing world.  Contra Alva Myrdal and Professor Sommestad, you cannot turn a cause of fertility decline into its cure, no matter how much money you throw at the problem.[21]  Indeed, no less an authority than Joseph Chamie, Director of the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, concluded earlier this year:

While many governments, intergovernmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, and individuals may strongly support gender equality at work and in the home as a fundamental principle and desirable goal, it is not at all evident how having men and women participate equally in employment, parenting and household responsibilities will raise low levels of fertility.  On the contrary, the equal participation of men and women in the labor force, child rearing, and housework points precisely in the opposite direction, i.e., below replacement fertility.

The Swedish model flies in the face of other well documented causes of the decline in fertility.  John C. Caldwell, one of the world’s most eminent demographers, recently examined the dozens of rival theories behind what he calls “the fertility crisis in modern societies.”  He explores the perils of a liberal economy which create doubts among women whether they should devote themselves to children.  He dissects the special circumstances behind fertility decline found in Southern, Eastern, and Central Europe and in Asia.  And he considers the effects of varied social policies on fertility, looking for common threads.  He concludes “that a social order that does not reproduce itself will be replaced by another” and that the Swedish model works no better than any other social welfare model in countering depopulation.  In the end, he admits that he can do no better than repeat the conclusion of Kingsley Davis from 1937, when the Western world faced a similar challenge: “the family is not indefinitely adaptable to modern society, and this explains the declining birth rate.”[22] 

Under this explanation, the Swedish model stands doubly condemned.  First, it represents an attempt to engineer a wholly new family system, which can only fail in face of the constants of human nature grounded in the natural family.  And second, the Swedish model represents a forced march of all its citizens into modern urban-industrialized society: the very problem to be overcome.

Taking another broad look at Europe’s population crisis, Paul Demeny underscores how the two-income, or two-career, family norm eliminates all incentives to have larger families:

…despite flexible work hours, generous paid vacation, father’s temporary home leave to care for an infant or a sick child, or other similar benefits—the actual chosen number of children in two-working-parent families gravitates toward…families that are either childless or have only one or two children.

He adds that as low fertility continues, the elderly base of the electorate grows, making it highly unlikely that state welfare benefits could ever be rechanneled toward young families.  Demeny concludes:

What can be taken as highly probable is the failure of the now prevailing orthodoxy governing European social policies.  These policies will fail to increase fertility up to replacement levels and thus will fail to prevent the long term numerical decline of the European population.[23]

Finally, Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe underscores that “secularization,” defined as “the decrease of adherence to organized religion,” still serves as “the most powerful variable at the outset of fertility decline” and “the one with the longest lasting effect or the highest degree of persistence.”[24]  He sees plunging European fertility during the late 20^th Century as simply continuing the “long term shift in the Western ideational system” away from the values affirmed by Christian teaching (namely “responsibility, sacrifice, altruism, and sanctity of long-term commitments”) and toward a militant “secular individualism” focused on the desires of the self.[25]  And as you might guess by now, Sweden leads Europe in measures of secularism and feminist inspired individualism.

In sum, 21^st Century Sweden embodies, even cherishes, the very social, economic, and cultural qualities that cause fertility decline.  And we also know that the “magic” of the Swedish model does not really work.  It is a dead-end. 

And yet, it is true that Europe’s other, and older, family policy model—a system premised on the breadwinner/homemaker model of the 1950’s—has also failed to work since 1970.  Still found to some degree in Germany, this model encourages the full-time maternal care of children through maternity benefits, child allowances, and homemaker pensions.  All the same, Germany’s TFR stands at 1.3, 15 percent below Sweden’s already low figure.  For some reason this approach, which had worked effectively in the decades following World War II, no longer does.  I suspect that “secularization,” the retreat from faith, is the cause.  In any case, this model also seems to hold little real promise for the future. 

Might Europe as a whole look elsewhere for answers?  Is there any modern nation that has beat the depopulation problem?  Yes, as a matter-of-fact, there is.  The surprise, perhaps, is that it is the United States of America.  As John Caldwell suggests, instead of studying Europe, “[p]erhaps what [really] needs explanation is the curiously high fertility of the USA.”[26]  Indeed, while the U.S. led the Western world in fertility decline between 1964 and 1976, the U.S. birth rate began climbing again during the 1980’s.  By 2000, the USA could claim a Total Fertility Rate of 2.14, by far the highest in the developed world, and 22 percent above the 1976 level. 

One retort is that this must be due to America’s greater ethnic diversity, particularly to the flow of high fertility Hispanic immigrants into the USA.  This is part of the puzzle, but not all.  In fact, American women of European descent actually recorded the greatest increase in fertility between 1976 and 2000, rising 28 percent to 2.114.  Another retort is that this American difference must be due to a rising number of out-of-wedlock births.  Again, this is part of the explanation, especially before 1995, but not the whole story.  Rather, marital fertility has also risen: by 11 percent since 1995.  As The Economist magazine ably summarizes: “Demographic forces are pulling America and Europe apart…America’s fertility rate is rising; Europe’s is falling.  America’s immigration outstrips Europe’s….America’s population will soon be getting younger.  Europe’s is aging.”  The Economist predicts a U.S. population of 500 million by 2050, an 80 percent increase over the figure for 2000.[27]  Indeed, perhaps the European nations should be looking to America, not to Sweden, for answers.

If they did, what explanations might they find for this American exceptionalism?  Simply put, pockets of Americans have crafted new ways, often in spite of poor public policy, to counter the modern forces driving family fragmentation and fertility decline in the developed world.

To begin with, the last three decades have witnessed a remarkable experiment in the de-industrialization of a key aspect of American family life: namely, education.  Starting back in the 1840’s, the states had taken over the schooling of children, using industrial organization to displace parents as the chief educators of the young.  Demographer Norman Ryder has shown how this modern interruption of the parent-child bond was critical to the emergence of both “modernity” and fertility decline.  There was a struggle, he reports, between the traditional family and the modern state for the minds of the young.  The state school served as “the vehicle for communicating “state morality” and a modern political mythology designed to displace those of families.[28]  And there is clear evidence that this spread of state schooling was closely tied to a sharp decline in family size among Americans.[29]

However, starting in the mid-1970’s, a growing number of American parents—for various reasons—turned to home schooling.  At first, they faced hostile state authorities: hundreds were imprisoned for seeking to reclaim this pre-modern family task.  Yet the movement grew, and by the early 1990’s had regained this natural right in all 50 states.  By 2004, over two million American children were in home schools.  And relative to family life, there was a significant result.  Virtually all home schooled students were in married-couple homes.  And 77 percent of home schooling mothers did not work for pay, compared to 30 percent nationwide.  Importantly, the fertility of these families was substantially higher.  Sixty-two percent had three or more children, compared to only 20 percent nationwide.  And slightly over a third (33.5 percent) had four or more children, compared to a mere 6 percent in all homes with children.[30]  By rejecting “modern” state education, and by embracing “pre-modern” approaches, American families grew stronger and larger.

Second, America also rediscovered about 20 years ago an alternative to state child allowances and paid parental leave that has a positive fertility effect.  Specifically, after two decades of neglect, the U.S. Congress in 1986 nearly doubled the value of the personal tax exemption for children to $2,000 per child, and indexed its value to inflation.  Repeated studies have found that European child allowances—where the state pays mothers a monthly stipend for each of their children—have no significant positive effect on fertility.  However, there is strong evidence of a “robust” positive relationship between the real, after inflation value of the tax exemption for children and family size.  Economist Leslie Whittington has actually calculated an astonishing elasticity of birth probability with respect to the exemption of between .839 and 1.31.  This means that a one percent increase in the exemption’s real value results in about a 1 percent increase in birth probability in families.[31]

Why this difference?  It appears that allowing families to keep more of what they earn while raising children—that is, turning children into little tax shelters—has a positive, even life-affirming psychological effect on parents that money coming from the government cannot replicate.  In any case, the significant uptick in overall American fertility coincides with the sharp increase in the exemption’s value in 1986.  More recently, the rise in marital fertility, starting in 1996, correlates precisely with the introduction of the new Child Tax Credit that year.  It seems that pro-family tax cuts work!

Third, Americans stand almost alone among modern nations as a people bound to active religious faith; and active faith commonly translates into larger families.  At the most dramatic level, some faith communities still on the margins of American life—the Old Order Amish found in rural communities in 20 states, the Hutterites in Montana and North Dakota, and Hassidic Jews in New York, Cleveland, and other cities—continue to report average completed family size in excess of six children.  Closer to the mainstream, the fertility rate of the state of Utah is nearly twice the national average, reflecting a TFR among Latter-day Saints or Mormons there of about 4.0.  Surveys also show that “fundamentalist Protestants” and traditional “Latin Mass” Catholics who attend religious services at least once a week also record higher total fertility.[32]

Finally, Americans are generally held less hostage to the deadly dogmas of pure “gender equality” than are the “Swedenized” Europeans.  As the University of Virginia’s Stephen Rhodes’ new book, Taking Sex Differences Seriously, reminds us, women and men are hardwired to be different.  Denying these differences can only result in inhuman, indeed violent acts, particularly against existing and potential children.[33]  After decades of work by feminist ideologues to re-engineer human nature, Americans remain resilient, open to the natural power of gender complementarity.  For example, despite massive Federal financial preferences and incentives for putting small children in day care, a full third of young American mothers still find ways to remain home full-time with their pre-school children.  And this proportion appears to be growing again.  The imperatives of biology, of human nature, are still in play in our land.

The Swedish model, resting on state child allowances, the near-mandatory employment of mothers, parents insurance, day care, and gender equality in all aspects of human life, has failed.  The current fixation of European scholars and policymakers on this response to depopulation is both a delusion and a death wish.  If Europe’s political leaders seriously want to renew their nations, they need look elsewhere: even, perhaps, to “the American model” involving the empowerment of families through home schooling, tax cuts sensitive to marriage and family size, religious belief, and respect for the natural complementarity of man and woman, wife and husband.  The issue is, after all, a matter of the life or death of nations.

Endnotes: