It's Still the Demography, Stupid

Twenty years ago this month - January 2006 - The Wall Street Journal and The New Criterion published the first draft of what would become the thesis of my bestselling book, "America Alone."

(Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

The Journal headline sums it up:

It's the Demography, Stupid.

The sub-head makes plain what's at stake:

The real reason the West is in danger of extinction.

And the lead paragraph spells it out:

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries.

Two decades ago that scenario was dismissed as "alarmist" by the bleepwits of The Economist. Today it is assumed by elites of all stripes, from the authors of the new US National Security Strategy...

Trump warns Europe faces 'civilizational erasure' in explosive new document

...to peer-reviewed papers positing that all Western European nations other than Portugal and micro-states such as Andorra will become majority Muslim...

...to the Deputy Leader of Britain's supposedly "populist" party reacting to news that native Anglo-Celts will become a minority in the UK by 2063 - and in England rather sooner than that:

I'll be long gone by then.

So, in the twenty years since my Wall Street Journal essay, the ruling class has gone from "alarmism" to "yeah, it's happening, but maybe not until 2100" to "okay, it's a fait accompli, but what's the big deal?" As to Richard Tice being long gone, which is devoutly to be wished, 2026 to 2063 is thirty-seven years - or Whitney Houston to now.

This is why nobody cares about the pleas of the "expert" class to save the "rules-based international order", which is a long-winded way of saying "1950". Trump, for one, is moving on:

JUST IN: 🇺🇸🇳🇴 President Trump tells Norway's Prime Minister he no longer feels an "obligation to think purely of peace" after not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, says he will prioritize American interests. pic.twitter.com/9IZWeoasMQ

— BRICS News (@BRICSinfo) January 19, 2026

The obsession with Greenland, so bewildering to US "allies", derives from America's need for an Israeli-style "Iron Dome", which, as the mighty builder of Trump Tower, the President has upgraded to a "Golden Dome". Why would he seek such a thing? Because in this scenario America's Israel ...and Western Europe is Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Iran.

Twenty years ago, my eventual book-length argument was summarised in the Toronto Globe and Mail by the eminent "political scientist" William Christian as "quite possibly the most crass and vulgar book about the West's relationship with the Islamic world I have ever encountered". Professor Christian has evidently led a sheltered life: he was born in the Queen Charlotte Islands, which are now officially known as "Haida Gwaii", a bollocks name invented in hopes of appeasing "the Haida nation"; it turns out that these days nowhere is really that sheltered, don't you find?

But just because something is "crass and vulgar" doesn't mean it's not correct. It's certainly straightforward. The western world is going out of business because it's given up having babies. The mid-twentieth-century welfare state, with its hitherto unknown concepts such as spending the first third of your life in "education" and the last third in "retirement", was carelessly premised on mid-twentieth-century fertility rates, and, as they collapsed, the west turned to "migrants" to be the children they couldn't be bothered having themselves. The condition of your maternity ward may be "crass and vulgar", but it's not a speculative prediction. Me in The Wall Street Journal all those years ago:

When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. 'Replacement' fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Somalia has since fallen to 5.91, possibly because so many of its most fecund loins are now residing in Minnesota, Ohio and Maine. But, if you're wondering why so much US news is Somalicentric in a way it didn't seem to be back in the Walter Cronkite days, well, there are a lot more Somalis than there were forty years ago and, on the economic model adopted by progressive societies, the fewer children American women have, the more they need daycares, oddly enough. Perhaps we should at least recruit the daycare owners from the secessionists of Somaliland, which, by comparison with Somalia proper, is the high-IQ end of the Somali territories (68.3 vs 67, or some such).

So the current news frenzy about Somali "corruption" is just bollocks on stilts - because "corruption" is not a Somali concept. Indeed, it's basically a north-west European concept - but don't worry: as Sweden - predicted to be thirty per cent Muslim by 2050 - Islamises, all those excitable Mohammedans are sure to embrace "Swedish values" like nude saunas and lack of corruption. As Laura Rosen Cohen likes to say, "Abbahu Akbar!"

A decade ago, in a Paris café where one would not have been surprised to find Yves Montand at the next table, the eminent and delightful demographer Michèle Tribalat suggested to me en passant that the French could become a minority in France by 2060. Which, to Richard Tice, would seem a long way off. But not if you let a quarter of the intervening years slip by and carelessly accelerate le grand remplacement.

"Civilisational erasure" has its patterns. My book begins with a famous line from Arnold Toynbee:

Civilisations die from suicide, not murder.

Yet, granted that, this is still surely the weirdest of civilisational suicides. The decrepitude is visible all around, from the "Quality Learing Centers" of Minnesota to the Turkish barbers of the English Home Counties. Yet still the "experts" insist it's all about the GDP - an entirely irrelevant metric to most western citizens - and the buffoon who assured us it was The End of History now says it's all about "getting to Denmark". If you're wondering about getting to Denmark, well, it's a ten-minute train ride across the Øresund Sound from Malmö, where, as is their wont, Reuters assures us there's nothing to see. Although oddly, when you're there, you see it staring you in the face.

We have one or possibly two election cycles in which to avert a once-in-a-millennium catastrophe. It's the biggest story of our time, and, twenty years on, the west's leaders still can't talk about it, not to their own peoples, not honestly. We could start by laughing the expert class off the stage.

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)