The Affluent Progressive Lifestyle Is Unsustainable

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

 

It hasn’t really hit the headlines yet — it’s only being passed around as a piece of video samizdat — but, during an interview at the 92NY as part of the Newmark Civic Life series, Hillary Clinton uttered a barely utterable truth: lifestyle liberalism, and the feminist ideal it embodies, is the privilege of affluent Americans, and it has been supported by mass immigration, legal and illegal. By implication: progressivism is not economically or socially sustainable beyond two or three generations.

Of course, any admission against interest was inadvertent. Clinton meant to attack conservative figures such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, who, she says, want to “make America great again by returning to the lifestyles and the economic arrangements of not just the 1950s — I mean let’s keep going back as far as we can.” Clinton says these people promote “the nuclear family, return to being a Christian nation, and return to producing a lot of children,” even though they, she alleges, have no interest in paid family leave or in “funding quality child care” and are “cutting Head Start,” the early-childhood education program for low-income families.

 

Clinton observed that this attitude was “sort of odd, because the people who produce the most children in our country are immigrants, and they want to deport them.” “So, none of this adds up,” she says. In fact, “one of the reasons why our economy did so much better than comparable advanced economies across the world is because we . . . had a lot of immigrants, legally and undocumented, who had a larger than normal, by American standards, family.”

 

Taken together, Clinton says that immigrants make the American lifestyle of today “add up” in part because of their higher birth rates. We can argue a little about the economics, but she’s correct that one of the largest components of economic growth is population growth. And without immigration, American population would be growing much more slowly than it is, with huge economic consequences.

 

But she’s more correct in this than she thinks. In a way, the affluent progressive lifestyle is also enabled by mass immigration precisely because it outsources features of the 1950s homemaker mom or weekend dad to immigrant labor. Landscaping, home-cleaning, remodeling, and nights at the restaurant are cheaper than they would have been because of the influx of labor that’s paid under-the-table. Lifestyle progressivism is therefore directly at odds with former egalitarian progressivism.

 

But there’s a problem. This isn’t sustainable, either politically or as a matter of math.

 

Democratic peoples the world over are asserting themselves against mass immigration. Why? Because when the native reality is falling birth rates, immigration is more disruptive. Instead of being welcomed as reinforcements to a thriving society, immigrants are feared as replacements in one with an uncertain future.

 

Even if democratic backlash could be managed, or quelled by liberal technocracy, there is also a math problem at work. Although birth rates among immigrant families in the U.S. are higher than the native birth rate, since 2013, they’ve been falling faster than the native birth rate and converging, within a single generation, to levels well below replacement. That is, if American society is a machine that depopulates the world of Americans, it isn’t halted or slowed much at all by feeding it immigrants. This society devours their posterity, too.

 

And what’s worse is that it’s a self-perpetuating problem. The lower the fertility in one generation, the more you deny the next one the tools to maintain or raise fertility. That is, the primary thing that gives people the confidence to form and raise larger families is their having had the example of a larger extended family and the support of younger grandparents, in-laws, aunts, uncles, and cousins — whether moral, financial, or simply tactical: Who’s going to pick the kids up after school today?

 

So, what does that say about the “lifestyle and economic arrangements” that Hillary Clinton is defending? It’s a strange thing that we put so much thought into whether certain means of raising fish or harvesting lumber are sustainable for five or six generations, and yet the way of life that Boomers pioneered and handed to us relies on an unsustainable rate and exploitation of migration, leads to low economic growth, and breaks down altogether in just two or three generations.