JUST BEFORE THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS, ROSS DOUTHAT ECHOES VLADIMIR PUTIN

President Biden's first State of the Union address is tonight. In anticipation of the speech, The New York Times asked four of its columnists -- David Brooks, Gail Collins, Ross Douthat, and Bret Stephens -- to write what they wish the president would say tonight. Brooks and Stephens write mostly unobjectionable platitudes; Collins goes comic and Biden-folksy.

Douthat scans the horizon, sees the broad range of pressing issues facing America and the world, and focuses on ... fertility.

My fellow Americans:

I want to speak to you about a new challenge we face that few politicians talk about. That’s the challenge of falling birthrates, the fact that since the financial crisis in 2007, a smaller and smaller share of Americans is starting families, raising kids....

This is a free country. It’s not the government’s job to tell anyone when or whether to have kids. But we can do more, a lot more, to make sure that Americans feel they have the support they need to take the plunge into parenthood.

Douthat's Joe Biden sounds a lot like -- well, Vladimir Putin in 2020:

President Vladimir Putin announced measures on Wednesday to boost Russia’s birth rate, describing them as vital to the country’s future though they are projected to cost at least $6.5 billion this year alone....

“Our historic duty is to respond to this challenge,” Putin said in a televised state-of-the nation address to Russia’s political elite.

“Russia’s fate and its historic prospects depend on how many of us there are... it depends on how many children are born in Russian families in one year, five, 10 years, on what they will grow up to be,” he said.

Last fall, Putin renewed the push for increased fertility, saying, “A strong family bringing up two, three, or four children should be the image of a future Russia.”

Douthat's Biden also sounds like Hungary's Viktor Orban. Here's a BBC story from 2019:

Hungarian women with four children or more will be exempted for life from paying income tax, the prime minister has said, unveiling plans designed to boost the number of babies being born.

It was a way of defending Hungary's future without depending on immigration, Viktor Orban said.

The right-wing nationalist particularly opposes immigration by Muslims....

Mr Orban said that "for the West", the answer to falling birth rates in Europe was immigration: "For every missing child, there should be one coming in and then the numbers will be fine.

"Hungarian people think differently," he said. "We do not need numbers. We need Hungarian children."

Douthat's good buddy Rod Dreher, an admirer of Orban, also worries about birthrates. He thinks religion is a critical factor:

As Eric Kaufmann and others have documented, conservative religious believers generally have higher fertility rates....

We who hold on to the faith — and who have embraced a form of the faith that is resilient in the face of these powerful anti-natalist, anti-family, anti-religious forces — will be lighthouses to people who feel the whole horror of their poverty in this childless, dying world. That is my hope, anyway.

(Dreher must be a lot of fun at parties.)

Douthat published a book in 2020 called The Decadent Society, and regards low birthrates as a sign of our decadence.

Douthat argued that the United States and parts of Europe are experiencing "a sort of loss of the sense of possibility, hope for the future," and that this shows itself in slowing economies, gridlocked politics, and declining birth rates.

In his book, Douthat wrote that "amid all of our society's material plenty, one resource is conspicuously scarce. That resource is babies." ...

Douthat noted the similarity between his own arguments about a decadent society and Pope Francis' criticisms of a "throwaway culture."

"It's a society that doesn't have a strong idea of the future or of the past," Douthat said. "So it's sort of lost faith, it thinks that the past was bad and unprogressive and corrupt, but it doesn't have a lot of confidence about the future, so it does, I think, tend towards very disposable forms of culture."

"You don't get people, building the great cathedrals, and writing the great operas," in a decadent or throwaway culture, he said, "not that I attend opera all the time, I mean, I myself am decadent too."

Douthat doesn't invoke the "Great Replacement" theory the way Orban does. In his Biden speech, he expresses the naive belief that the GOP can someday change itself from a party of plutocrat bootlickers and middle-school bullies into a party that cares about families. He writes, in Biden's voice:

My administration is trying to do that with policies like a bigger child tax credit and universal pre-K. The other party likes to say that they’re the pro-family party, and some of them have reached across the aisle on this — but mostly they’ve just left American parents on their own. So tonight I’m challenging Republicans to step up and actually help the American family they claim to cherish, so that young people, young couples, feel they can afford it when it comes time to raise the next generation, to have the kids they already want.

But he concludes by saying in effect, Buck up, yoots, having kids is awesome.

I’ve seen a lot of struggle, a lot of tragedy, in the world and in my own family. But looking back, even with all the risks, all the danger, all the sorrow, I just want you to know: It’s worth it. It’s worth it. The challenges are big, but they’ve always been big — and the thing is, folks, human beings are bigger, and every new life you bring into the world is another candle lit against the dark.

Every new life you bring into the world is another candle lit against the dark. I'm sure that's what Vladimir Putin's parents thought. And Donald Trump's. And Ron DeSantis's. And Rupert Murdoch's. And Marjorie Taylor Greene's.