Natalism reborn

Lovelies,

I was just listening to NPR with my husband and On the Media had a show about JD Vance’s natalist policy proposals, the new (but actually old) movement to incentivize traditional family values and increased birth rates in order to stave off the supposedly looming cultural and economic collapse of the US. One segment focused on the work of Vox reporter Rachael M. Cohen, who recently wrote a story about the contradictions of the new pronatalist movement, and how it has emerged across both progressive and conservative political voices. As Cohen notes, Vance has brought these anxieties into the national spotlight, but they have been simmering for years. His comments about “childless cat ladies” ruining the country, or his proposal that people with children be allowed more political representation in elections, have caused many people to take notice.

It reminded me that my first book, Argentine Intimacies, includes a chapter about a very similar cultural phenomenon that took place in Argentina in the early 20th century, when members of the criollo elite worried that declining birth rates and increased immigration would lead to societal collapse and the end of human civilization. Yes, they were hyperbolic.

There are few moments in one’s life when an earlier research project becomes relevant again years later, but this is one of those cases.

Chapter 5, “National Essays, Home Economics: The Argentine Oligarchy in Decline,” addresses the rise of nationalism in Argentina by analyzing three book-length essays, Carlos Octavio Bunge’s Nuestra América: Ensayo de psicología social (1903), Delfina Bunge’s Las mujeres y la vocación (1922), and Alejandro Bunge’s Una nueva Argentina (1940). The main point of the chapter is that each of these essays offers a putatively conservative viewpoint on the decline of traditional family values, and yet, they also demonstrate an underlying ambivalence toward, a contradictory desire for, the place of the family in the ideology of the nation. They claim to want traditional family values, but to achieve that traditional structure, the deviant desires of the present must be corrected. Which is to say that for the future to become what the nation once was, men’s desires for children, most prominently, must be bolstered, because, according to this logic, the fact that the population is in decline means that there is something wrong with men’s desires—a queerness, an unnaturalness. (But Delfina’s take on women’s labor and childcare is a refreshing, but ultimately still conservative position, just FYI).

I won’t rehearse all the arguments here, but I do want to point out that the third example, Alejandro Bunge’s Una nueva Argentina, is particularly salient in relation to the recent surge of nationalist rhetoric and the fear of population decline in the United States. (To compare Argentina in 1940 and the US in 2024 is not as far of a stretch as one might imagine, dear reader). And just for context, Alejandro Bunge was one of the leading economists of his day, and has exerted a major influence on conservative thought in Latin America from the 1930s onward.

Toward the end of the chapter, I sum up my critique of this work:

Bunge’s Una nueva Argentina is an ethical critique buoyed by demographic trends and economic projections, but which maintains at its core the implication that the object of men’s desire must be corrected. Bunge seeks a fundamental shift in the way desire functions in the family structure of the upper class. If capital accumulation, the growth and maintenance of a family’s inheritance (“la vida cómoda” has led to the demographic crisis that threatens the future of the elite, then, Bunge proposes, the upper-class family can no longer operate exclusively as a system of material gain, but must put aside that historical endeavor in favor of one that serves the greater good of the nation: biological reproduction. In choosing nation over comfort, Bunge suggests the elite replace the desire for capital accumulation with the desire for whiteness itself. (265)

Now, perhaps it is too much to say that this paragraph could accurately describe the likes of JD Vance and the pro-natalists of the US today, but I do not think it is far-fetched to argue that any political program that advances a disciplining of gender roles, on the basis of a future vision of the nation rooted in past ethnic and cultural harmony, is doing two things that I point out above.

1. This type of thought implies that desire is something that the state can and should guide. The unspoken object of critique of pro-natalists is in fact heterosexuality. In other words, incentivizing family values and increased birth rates depends on an understanding of the present as one in which those values and those birth rates are corrupted. Heterosexuality is not doing well enough, not being heterosexual enough. The family is too queer, now, in other words. In the case of my book and in Argentina in 1940 the corrupting influences were imagined as bad Catholics, Italian foreign agitators, anarchist organizers, queers, and mixed-race (i.e. Mestizo) families. In the case of the US today, we see Brown and Black people, Immigrants, queers, feminists, and trans people as the primary targets (i.e. “childless cat ladies). Not much changes, though the specifics can vary. The nationalist argument depends on an understanding of gender as more malleable, more queer, than it is willing to admit. In order for the critique to function, which is to say, in order for the family values to be restored, there has to be an understanding of what is wrong, and it has to be identified, though not always spoken out loud, and then excised from the national body. The logic of restoring family values depends, in fact, on the understanding that the family is much more queer than any of them are willing to admit.
2. The argument also depends on an understanding of sacrifice. The greater good of the nation becomes a subterfuge for inculcating domesticity, heteronormativity, and white supremacy as the only logical conclusion of the nation, which is framed as a sacrifice for the historical weight of the nation. To sacrifice material comfort, or to add some of today’s language, to have children despite the economic, environmental, and cultural limitations placed on us, is to become part of the spiritual purpose—the manifest destiny—of the nation. The settler colonial investment in settlement is thus reaffirmed by reshaping economic and political policy as a spiritual sacrifice for the continuity of the nation, imagined as one big happy family.

I don’t think my reading of Argentine politics is exactly transposable onto the context of the US today, but I do think that many of the elements that I identified in that moment have resurfaced in the natalist movements both in the US and elsewhere. This should not be surprising. The burden of the family is not unique to the US. Though it does have its own political history and context, the ideas of sacrifice, spiritual nationalism, and the excision of queerness from the normative family, are shared across western ideologies and across moments in time.

But I don’t want to overreach. If you are interested, though, I’d suggest you take a look at my first book, or download the fifth chapter if you have library access, and let me know what you think.