The Rise of Patriarchy?

While perusing various blogs I stumbled onto a link to this foreign policy article, an old one, that talks about the return of patriarchy. Can it be, that the West's intolerably low birthrates will be the harbinger of the end of feminized society? 

Now before I go farther into this post I want to clarify some things to prevent any confusion. That is the definition of what patriarchy is.  To most individuals when I say the words patriarchy they assume a society that is ruled by men and women are subordinate to them, by law and custom. There are historical precedences for this viewpoint, ancient Rome was a legally patriarchal society, but that isn't entirely what patriarchy is, and it is not what the author of the post intends when he rights about the return to patriarchy. Though at the same time the author doesn't discount that it has very much been a political system and that some of those political systems have been outright ghastly towards women, such as the Taliban.

In the Western sense, it would be an argument to a return of many, though not all, of the social norms and values that governed the west for the last few hundred years; for example I do not see the stigma of homosexuality returning to it's puritan influenced origins.  Perhaps in the most important sense, would be the return to the concept as the father being head of the household, which in the last forty years has declined significantly and is near non-existent today as evident by the rise of single parent homes and baby mommas.

This concept will be meet with a lot of flak, especially in the bluer more urban parts of America. It is not considered proper to speak ill of single parent hood, feminized society, the disparagement of men or the decline of traditional values. But these items need, nay will, be addressed. Society as it stands cannot exist the way it does. It is a simple impossibility. One of the most troubling issues today is the lack of fathers for many families, the black community being the largest example of this issue. 

Children need fathers in their lives, boys need it so they learn how to become functional men and girls need fathers to provide positive male role models from which they will later use as a template when selecting a suitable mate. Without a father, boys and girls are more likely to become dysfunctional adults.  Father figures are better than nothing, but they don't come close to real Fathers. And like it or not, Fathers have been heads of households since our species first walked the earth.

Like I said, this doesn't men we will return to the days were women traded like chattel between families; though to be fair young men often had little say in these arraignments as well. Or that women will retreat from the workforce. But I don't expect the feminized husband to remain, it is an absolute contradiction of a man's fundamental nature. Nor do I expect the stigma attached to women who choose to be housewives to remain. Either way, whether you think the return to patriarchy is good or not, the author argues that it will return, and there is nothing to be done to stop it. There is something to his argument.

The globe has seen a precipitous decline in birthrates which will challenge humanity in the coming century. What is interesting though is that societies have dealt with replacement rates below what was considered ideal. Often times this resulted in, or from, social discord, like in Ancient Rome and others it marked the permanent decline of the society that was eventually replaced by more virile ones. This is being seen in America as well. Joel Kotkin writes that much of the democrats base, outside of minorities, are white childless individuals, which raises long term issues for democrats, and more importantly, progressives. Conservatives are out breeding liberals, and if you look at US state fertility rates, you will see that only two of the top 20 states in terms of fertility have reliably voted democratic in the last four presidential elections.

Now this is ignoring the shifts due to increased Latino migration, who have overwhelmingly voted democratic, but there is a reason why. The reason is that I am not focusing on the democratic party, or even the ideology of statism as a whole, rather, it is a particular coalition of the democratic party, urban SWPL progressives. They have ensured their own demise, and that of their world view, simply due to the fact that they aren't having children, while more religious individuals are. There is a very real possibility that the state will grow, and we will see more socialism in America, but it won't be the kind that the urban progressive imagines, a gender nuetral society. Conservative minded individuals are more likely to have traditional, i.e patriarchal, families, and if this trend continues, then the premise of the authors article could very well come true.  There is more to this, but that is another puts, just remember, demographics is destiny.