Nice piece by Michael Barone in The American on childbearing and cultural differences in our society. He notes that women tend to conceive earlier in Republican leaning States than in those that lean liberal. This is interesting because of the prevalence of early child-bearing in many Democratic-oriented minority groups. Obviously the discrepancy in the general population must be quite significant to overcome that built-in bias. He then notes that age of first pregnancy has been shown to be a proxy for a number of cultural tendencies and the demographic divergence, which has been widening in recent decades, therefore seems to indicate a developing cultural split in our society.
All of this is to say something that we all know -- that there is a deep, profound, and growing cultural divergence in contemporary American society and that it has significant political consequences. America has passed through similar periods before and the outcome has never been benign.
Read the whole thing here.
