This piece originally appeared in Compact.
In a column published during Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, The New York Times’s Ross Douthat observed that American conservatism had evolved into a surprising alliance between traditionalists looking back fondly to simpler times and technologists racing with glee into a wild future in which man’s only limit is his amount of compute. One of the key points of agreement bringing together this seemingly paradoxical “tech-trad alliance,” Douthat noted, is a shared concern with the demographic trends often ignored by other political factions.
In 2024, the US fertility rate had a near-record low of 1.6 births per woman, compared to a replacement rate of 2.1—just one instance of a global trend that is even more pronounced abroad. Just about the only people who seem to be concerned with this momentous shift are a subset of people from either side of the new conservative-technologist coalition.
Actually addressing the problem would require broadening the appeal of this cause, which for the moment remains somewhat fringe. Attempting to do just that is one of the missions of the Natal Conference, the second edition of which I attended in Austin in March. NatalCon, which describes itself as a gathering of “the brightest minds in the world in search of new solutions,” didn’t seem to find many converts in the mainstream media, whose coverage of NatalCon was universally hostile. This is unsurprising, given that many participants and attendees were openly enthusiastic about the new Trump administration, and the prospects of using natalist agenda to “outbreed the left.” For his part, President Trump had made his own contribution to the fertility narrative just days before this year’s gathering began, declaring that he hoped to “be known as the fertilization president.”
