Exploring the decline of progressive cultural influence and birth rates compared to conservatives.
Today I came across this newsletter by Ross Douthat in which he argues that progressives aren’t doing as well as they once were. His jumping off point is a recent analysis from the Financial Times which suggested progressives had a low and declining birth rate compared to conservatives. Ed wrote about that story here last week. Here are a couple of charts that sort of summarize the trend.
NEW: Progressives have a birth rate problem
For all the talk of a general fall in births, the drop is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left having fewer kids.
By ceding the topic of family and children to the right, progressives risk ushering in a more conservative world. pic.twitter.com/FmpYEsGVio— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) August 29, 2025
Douthat doesn’t doubt that progressive politics play some ideological role in that divide but he doesn’t think it’s the whole story.
I’ve listened to enough people talk seriously about the supposed dilemmas of starting a family in a warming world to believe that climate change anxiety has some modest effect on when progressives start a family and how many kids they have.
But if you look at Burn-Murdoch’s data, it’s clear that a self-defeating pessimism can’t be the main driver of liberal childlessness. The ideological divergence started decades ago, at a time when there was general confidence that the future belonged to liberalism, that the arc of history was likely to bend leftward and that the right would age and die and disappear. (Yes, there has always been progressive angst about fascism or theocracy or environmental disaster, but these were not the defining themes of, say, 1999 or 2008.
