David Horowitz is freaking out right now

Because he won't know what to do with himself. After all, he has created a career fighting the activist counterculture academics of the 1960s, painting all of academe is a haven of iniquity and poststructuralist evil.

But this is all changing, the New York Times reports, as the vanguard of Baby Boomer intellectuals who teach in America's universities are nearing retirement age. "More than 54 percent of full-time faculty members in the United States were older than 50 in 2005, compared with 22.5 percent in 1969," Patricia Cohen writes. "How many will actually retire in the next decade or so depends on personal preferences and health, as well as how their pensions fare in the financial markets."

In their place is a new crop of younger folks who, while still overwhelmingly liberal, are no where nearly as politically partisan and radical as their parents. Or in some cases, as the young academic quoted in the story says, their grandparents.

Could this mean a new trend in the perception and self-definition of American academia? Truly, the inexorable conflict between radical countercultural ideologies and the vitriolic, anti-intellectual, and often paranoid ravings of conservative critics had to end some time. But what will this new generation bring? Will they mark a return to the civic republican style of the nineteenth century, when academics sought to steep students in great ideas to allow them to enter the public sphere? Or will they bring a bureaucratized, intellectually safe, glorified-high-school-teacher sort of existence to an industry—and I do not shrink from calling it that—that is struggling to justify its existence and costliness?

The plugger economy

Newsflash: The economy is tanking, but not tanking enough. The lingering recessionary tendency is more like a chronic back pain or knee injury that you need to take ibuprofen for. Sure, surgery might work, but know one knows what to do except wait it out and see if it works itself out on its own.

In reading the article, I began to wonder whether we're looking at a new type of economy, in which the fast times and fast fortunes of the technology markets are giving way to a slower sort of pace. It reminds me of Gary Brookins's cartoon Plugger, which "chronicles the hardworking people the world depends on . ... the 80 percent of humanity who unceremoniously keep plugging along."

Don't get me wrong. When the economy is bad, people hurt. But for the fat and happy, getting in touch with their inner plugger may not be a bad thing.

Favorite quote:

“Slowing wage growth and falling employment is absolutely toxic if your business is selling anything to consumers,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief United States economist for High Frequency Economics.

Of course, he means businesses in the consumer product industry, but it's still kinda funny.

An election about big ideas

Barack Obama is going after young evangelical Christians, the New York Times is reporting. McCain is not, or cannot. This may not hurt him, since many older conservative evangelicals will refuse to support Obama because of Obama's support of abortion rights, but Obama is looking for younger evangelicals, who are less interested in the hard-core Christian right—what Andrew Sullivan calls "Christianist"—point of view. But the support of this group is far less certain:

Gabe Lyons, founder of the Fermi Project, a nonprofit group that educates church and youth leaders about Christianity and society, said many young evangelicals from the left and right had been turned off to politics.

“Obama is doing a better job of talking about his religious views and values than John McCain is,” Mr. Lyons, 33, said. “The challenge is that the closer young evangelicals get to understanding his policies the more they will struggle with them and many will slowly back off because for them abortion is such a huge point.”

I don't know if Obama will be able to pick off many of these younger folks in the same way that he has other young people disaffected by politics. If he does, this will raise deeper concerns for older evangelicals about the power and sustainability of their movement. After a half century of moving into the culture, they may begin to wonder if they have been corrupted by it.

Bad economics as population control

There was an interesting cover story over the weekend by Russell Shorto in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on the rapidly falling population in Europe. In a nutshell, the birthrate across Europe has dropped throughout the continent to well below what is considered to be the "replacement rate" of 2.1 children per woman. In southern and eastern Europe, the birth rate is 1.3 children per woman.

Demographers describe the new phenomenon as "lowest low" fertility rates. If the trend continues, Shorto suggests, Europe by midcentury will be a shadow of its former self, and the continent will have to confront a variety of daunting—and for some, disturbing—social and cultural changes. In a way, P. D. James's novel Children of Men, which was recently turned into a film starring Clive Owen, reflects the sense of apocalyptic crisis that is dawning upon the continent.

Depending on who you ask, any number factors are causing the decline. P. D. James's novel, unlike the film, draws deeply on Christian imagery to suggest that the falling birthrate is, at root, a spiritual problem. Indeed, as Shorto notes, many of Europe's Christians seem to agree:

After arguing for decades that the West had divorced itself from God and church and embraced a self-interested and ultimately self-destructive lifestyle, abetted above all by modern birth control, they feel statistically vindicated. “Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future,” Pope Benedict proclaimed in 2006. “Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present.”

Certainly, a sense of European spiritual malaise—a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of "why bother?"—could be at work here.

But what is interesting about Shorto's piece is that he suggests that there are other factors in play. While many women in Germany and Austria are indeed preferring to remain childless, many European women actually want to have more children than they currently have. "Women were asked how many children they would like to have," Shorto says, "the average result was 2.36—well above the replacement level and far above the rate anywhere in Europe. If women are having significantly fewer children than they want, there must be other forces at work."

What are these forces? Demographers are noticing is that childrearing is not only a spiritual question but is also an economic one. That is, the conditions of life are such that they are not permitting women to have the children that they want to have. The costs—not only the direct financial costs of raising a child but also the opportunity costs of staying out of the workforce and the relational costs that children bring to bear on the family—are prohibitively high.

Shorto notes that Scandanavia and the United States do not share in Europe's decline in birthrate, but for different reasons. Scandanavian countries have an extraordinary broad network of social welfare that eases the costs of childrearing. The United States, while far less extensive in its welfare system, is far more socially and relationally flexible.

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. [Arnstein] Aassve [a Norwegian demographer] put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”

Shorto's article is important because it reminds us that societies need to find ways to permit women to have and welcome children, and that this effort is only partially a spiritual one.