Or BOTS! A much better term than J D Vances’ crack several years ago about Childless Cat Ladies because BOTS is a more accurate description of the ideological motivation of unmarried woman in their overwhelming support of the Left, although it does sound a bit PC.

A narrow majority of married women (51 percent) supported Trump, but he lost by a landslide among unmarried women, earning just 36 percent of that demographic’s vote.

The article in City Journal from which that quote comes (but which does not use the term BOTS), explores possible reasons for that gap beyond the starting point of marriage status:

  • Religious people lean GOP and they tend to get married at a younger age,
  • Older people lean GOP and have higher rates of marriage.
  • Hispanic and Black voters heavily lean Democrat and have lower rates of marriage (very low in the case of the latter)

But even so the marriage gap remains and there have been studies trying to figure out underlying reasons:

  1. Sociological research in the 1980’s showed unmarried women being more concerned about gender equality, economic or otherwise, plus being more pro-choice than married woman who supported a status quo that helped their husbands economic prospects.
  2. In the 2000’s economic research showed that marriage tends to have greater positive economic effects for women than for men (even in the world of “equal pay” men typically have higher incomes) and this makes married women lean to conservative economic arguments. But as fewer women get married the pool of those who enjoy these economic benefits shrinks, and more women are thus persuaded to support the party of economic redistribution.
  3. More recent research showed unmarried woman being more likely to believe that the status of women as a group is closely connected with their own prospects and were this more liberal and likely to support the Democrats.

Point Number 2 sounds like BOTS!

The article moderately concludes that the GOP should not berate the single ladies and try and encourage family formation via things like lowering housing costs in relation to incomes and steering the middle class away from getting into massive debt via university.

Marriage and family formation also counts as the conclusion of this rather long and detailed article, “The Baby Boom” that investigates the post WWII Western Baby Boom and other peaks and troughs in human reproductive history in the West. That’s a topic of special interest now because of a global decline in birth rates to near or below replacement level, as opposed to the fears sixty years ago of a Malthusian disaster of overpopulation. The article is interesting precisely because it makes clear that the common understandings about the Baby Boom are wrong – and thus why many proposed solutions to the Baby Bust won’t work:

  • The decline in Western fertility rates has been happening since France in the 1760’s, the Baby Boom is just a blip.
  • All those countries that experienced it had previously hit levels of fertility at or below replacement levels. We’ve been here before.
  • The Boom actually started before WWII: it wasn’t just the result of soldiers returning home.
  • It happened even as the West advanced in all measures of prosperity and freedom, which puts paid to claims that today’s Baby Bust is because we’re too well off and free to want to be burdened by families.
  • It was not due to married people having more babies in the marriage – the classic Catholic family with 15 kids; larger families only explains about 15% of the Baby Boom.
  • It’s not due to rising incomes, more household appliances lowering the cost of childbearing, antibiotics reducing STD’s or contraception failure.

The article concludes that the Baby Boom was simply the direct result of a marriage boom: more people getting and staying married at younger ages. Similarly there is a direct correlation between today’s Western Baby Bust and the huge decline in marriage.

So boosting marriage rates would fix the below-replacement problem as well as cultural stability issues.

There’s just two things wrong with this answer.

First, there’s an increasing number of Western men and woman who seem to be keen on the idea of a shrinking human population because it would supposedly save the environment. This may be just a small fringe but so too have other movements been and even if that’s the case their numbers might be sufficient to stop any government policy for increasing marriage rates and family formation from being implemented.

Second, unlike City Journal’s hopeful conclusion (based on surveys) that, “A majority of single, childless Americans aspire to get married and have children eventually” the cultural reality suggested by those voting patterns is that single, childless woman are becoming more radical against marriage and children.

That ties in with The Baby Boom’s argument as to what ended it – and it wasn’t contraception; Western fertility was dropping fast before The Pill arrived. No, the answer is: “three words: second wave feminism”; specifically no-fault divorce, normalisation of sex outside marriage, and the linked delegitimisation of marriage for forming families (cohabitation lacks pre-60s marriage’s implicit promise of stability). Having established a new status quo the economic drivers are now different also:

Thanks to progressive taxation, men pay the vast majority of taxes while women receive the vast majority of benefits. Since married men are the most productive, while single women are the poorest (on a per-household basis), this is predominantly a transfer from married men to single women. This makes marriage less attractive to women; they can get men’s money for free, courtesy of the government, without having to give anything in return. The state serves as a surrogate husband.

Exactly. BOTS.

That is not going to change given the economic and cultural drivers that are now in place. If you want to understand that just look at the last past of Baby Boom where proposals are made to fix this problem. They’re all utterly rational in deriving from the analysis – and all utterly impossible politically, let alone culturally.

As such I’m wondering what does break this status quo? The only thing I can think of is the destruction of these Western systems, most likely at the hands of the non-Western world which, although it’s also experiencing a fertility decline, is decades behind the West on that measure and thus will still be increasing in population for a few more decades as the West plateaus and then shrinks.

They won’t be invading the West in the traditional sense; we will invite them in to do the jobs we no longer have the bodies for, even with productivity increases. We’re already doing that, and if they try to take advantage of Western state wealth redistribution it will just crash the systems faster.