In this case, however, I don't think he's being fair to the average American. Why are they having fewer children, beyond the economic factors that Douthat acknowledges (though without realizing all the ways they cut against his argument)? Perhaps "decadence" is a small part of the explanation. A married man and woman feel that they ought to have a second child, to give their first a sibling or to contribute to the world, but decide against it because the cost would force them to give up their vacation home in Aspen and ski on less desirable slopes closer to home.

I actually once spoke to a couple like that. They exist.

But as best I can tell, they are rare. What's widespread are opportunities for women that were unheard of even two generations ago. Women wanting to invest in the future recently had but one path available to them: motherhood. Today a woman who wants to contribute to the future can do so through any number of careers. Is it any surprise that many have shifted some of their "contribute to the future of the world" efforts from child-rearing to other areas? What is "decadent" about that?

Nor is that the only non-decadent cultural cause of smaller families.

Traditionalist Eve Tushnet wrote an astute post recently explaining what many social conservatives misunderstand about American culture:



Conservatives often talk as if we're combating hedonism and the solution is bourgeois normalcy. This makes our arguments look silly (everybody points out that "blue states" have lower divorce and teen pregnancy rates, or some other statistic indicating that they are winning on the bourgeois-normalcy front) and I think it probably makes our audience resentful.

Nobody likes to be told that they're not doing life right, but I think we especially feel indignant and even self-pityingly resentful when we're working very, very hard to follow the rules and somebody comes along and tells us we're just out for our own pleasure. We don't have a marriage crisis in this country because everybody has stopped following the rules. We have a marriage crisis because the rules don't work. There are all kinds of strict rules: Don't marry before you're "economically stable" (an endlessly-retreating horizon), don't wait until you're married to have sex, don't wait until you're married to live together, don't move back in with your parents. And, for the upper classes, don't have kids too early and don't have too many. I've written about these issues before (here and here) but I want to emphasize how the rules rely on completely bourgeois impulses to achieve and preserve. They're based on fear-primarily fear of divorce, but also fear of loneliness-but also on the intense, poignant desire to do the right thing.

She's right that many social conservatives underestimate the degree to which cultural practices they attribute to decadence are actually pursued for reasons that are nearly opposite.