Then move to Vance’s plea for pro-natalism and higher American birthrates. It is not white nationalism to believe that countries like the United States would be better off with more babies. That belief can be held for racist reasons by racists, but it can also be held, reasonably and righteously, by people who worry about the economic consequences of demographic decline … or by people who worry about the social consequences of shrinking family trees and a widespread unfulfilled desire for kids … or by people who regard a higher birthrate as a cure for ethnic division because it actually makes assimilating immigrants easier … or by people who just think babies are good and societies that can easily afford to rear more of them should do so.
In reality, far from being creepily obsessed with birthrates, conservatism actually failed America over the last generation by paying insufficient attention to the economics of child rearing and the natural family’s strange decline. And a healthy post-Trump conservatism must be more pro-natalist or it will not be at all.
