We both see "unexpected passion." The tendency of particular geographical regions to swing one way or another, when presented with extreme choices, may well have something to do with birth rates, I don't know.

But I don't see how the passion itself could be the result of birth rates. Birth rates didn't suddenly change radically in the past two elections.

What did change is the successful political alliance of economic, social, and neoconservatism under a single banner opposed to a common "liberal" enemy (few of whom would even recognize themselves as such!).

Essentially, our social stereotypes were effectively manipulated to leverage political power. Our rational fear of attack was sucessfully leveraged to promote politicians who were more successfully marketed as decisive, protective parents instead of untrustworthy, unrealistic, and overpermissive ones. Our observation of the disruption of social fabric and vulnerability to attack was successfully explained for most people in terms of creeping permissiveness and indecisiveness (the flip side of what many of us think of as freedom, caring, and wise reflection).

When people talk about "values" as deciding the past presidential election, this seems to me to refer to people feeling in their gut that they are putting their trust in someone disciplined, strict, and supporting a natural moral order.

If we all accepted this stereotype, there would be little need for "unexpected passion" against it, it would make perfect sense to nearly all of us. However, we don't all accept this stereotype.

The more conservative of the two conservative parties in the US is now marketed as the party of good discipline, parental protection, true families, life, moral authority, and simple, basic values. The less conservative party has yet to come up with their own effective marketing strategy, and has seemingly been forced to accept the way the more conservative party defines things, that they are the party of death, permissiveness, spoiled dependents, and out-of-touch elitists.

One cost of this success has been that the nuances of American conservatism have been pretty must lost by being absorbed into the common marketing vision, just as the stereotype of the "liberals" turns them into an impossibly homogeneous population.

The actual correlations that might be observed between birth rate and motivated political belief are obscured by the shifting political coalitions and the perceived pragmatic need for the parties to promote themselves as diametrically opposed ideological extremes.

We might also consider that what we perceive to be voting our own survival and comfort depends on how the issues are presented to us and the options offered to us. The above analysis seems to me to depend a lot on assuming that we are rational self-interested actors with clear common insight into what promotes our own self-interest. I'm not sure that this assumption is warranted. I suspect that our perception of what promotes our own self-interest is fairly easily manipulated.

kind regards,

Todd