Thread by @DouthatNYT

I'm going to rant for a minute.

There's a sort of populist conservative that likes to talk a lot about civilizational struggles, demographic suicide, the idea that Islam owns the future because Western nations don't have any babies, etc. etc.

I'm thinking of all sorts of people here, everyone from @MarkSteynOnline to the Breitbart crowd to Pat Buchanan to @SteveKingIA and many more.

This group has generally been one of Donald Trump's key cheering sections. For them, a vote for Trump was a vote against Western decadence, a vote against a globalist corporate-dominated GOP and a liberalism ready for dhimmitude, etc.

Okay. Well, guess what? We're in the middle of a major baby bust in the United States of America right now. Exactly the sort of thing these guys are always warning about. "You can't save your own civilization with other people's babies," that sort of thing.

Here are the details -- this isn't just a general decades-long trend, it's a plunge right now:
medium.com/migration-issu…

In the midst of this baby bust, the Republican Party is having a debate about whether its tax plan should take just a pinch of the money that it's devoting to tax cuts for globalist cucks -- er, sorry, corporations, and spend it instead on families with kids.

The proposed tax credit is linked to having a job. It's specifically designed to satisfy conservative concerns about subsidizing dependency, welfare mothers, illegal immigrants, etc. Lots and lots of its beneficiaries live in Trump country.

It's not going to end the baby bust. It's not big enough to have some major effect on birthrates. But it's SOMETHING. It's a conservative policy that's actually mildly responsive to the trends all these folks freaking about the Twilight of the West (TM) claim to care about.

And guess what? Their great champion, their idiot's version of Constantine or Charles Martel or whatever, came out *against* expanding it today. Because he doesn't want to take any $ away from his yuge tax cut for the very globalist types that all these guys claim to be against.

And naturally if you go to Mark Steyn's feed or Steve King's feed or the homepage of Breitbart dot com you'll find lots of outrage about this, because globalists are bad and demography is destiny and the family is the cradle ... oh, wait, no, there's nothing like there at all.

THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT THIS. It isn't a video of a Muslim doing something bad or a Hollywood sex scandal or a stupid left-wing academic saying something stupid. It's just a pro-natalist policy in the midst of a baby bust and who would care about THAT?

I give them a hard time, but I don't really blame the Wall Street Journal guys for being against the child tax credit. They have a theory of what conservatism should be, what tax policy should be, and this stuff doesn't fit. Opposing it is just their nature.

But all these other "populists," these Trump-worshipers who presume to lecture the rest of us on how we're just surrendering to liberalism and refusing to charge the cockpit and blah blah blah -- what crap. What CRAP.

And now I hear the liberals saying, "oh, you just discovered the clickbait populists are full of it and doing Muslim-bashing for bubbas, welcome to reality." No, I didn't just discover it. Thanks. I AM WELL AWARE OF WHAT THE SITUATION IS LIKE ON THE RIGHT THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

But there are people within this populist world who are not cynics, who are sincerely afraid for the West's future. And I want them to stop and think about why this actual REAL WORLD "natalists versus globalists" policy debate isn't getting any traction in their favored outlets.

I want them to stop and think about why populist movements elsewhere in the West actually try to have a pro-family policy agenda to match their demographic worries, while American right-populism still lets Wall Street write its economic policy.

And I want them to wonder, while Mike Lee and Marco Rubio fight a lonely battle for a *pittance* of a refundable tax credit for American families IN THE MIDST OF A BABY BUST, why nobody in professional Populist Conservatism seems interested in making this a cause celebre.

I'd like to wake up tomorrow and find everyone from Steve Bannon to Tucker Carlson publicly hammering the president and the party on this issue. That would be nice. But assuming they don't, this thread is my way of saying to professional Populist Conservatism, to hell with you.