Emmanuel Todd's Writing About Natality

When Emmanuel Todd published his La Défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West) rightist commentators in America were visibly delighted at the fact of a prominent French academic who had tended to be associated with the left presenting America as being in economic decline, and general decline as a leading power, due to the decline of the homogeneity of its elite, waning religiosity and a neglect of engineering-oriented education, and its championing of "non-traditional" ideas about family and gender internationally in a world for the most part little inclined to have anything to do with them. (Thus was it the case that, while it is far from the norm for major American newspapers to devote pieces to books not even available in English, figures like the Claremont Institute's Christopher Caldwell wrote about the book for the New York Times.) However, those writers seizing on Todd's authority in support of these positions were of course being very selective, overlooking much else that Todd had to say, not least about the subject of natality. In Todd's view fertility correlates inversely with neoliberalism--the prevailing version of capitalism depriving people with middle class standards with regard to "personal responsibility" in regard to marriage and family of the security that they would regard themselves as requiring before they have children, with neoliberal champion Korea's plunging fertility rate and neoliberalism-resistant France's relatively high rate both making the point in his view.

If any of those rightist commentators' approval of Todd's discussion of such matters as the decline of Protestantism translated over to an openness to his criticisms of neoliberalism, it has so far escaped me.