Elon Musk is obsessed with falling birth rates, as is the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Why would leftwingers want to buy into their ‘pronatalist’ agenda?‘Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus,” read an article in the Atlantic last week, “but the left was mos tly absent at a recent pronatalism conference.” It’s such a simple proposition – everyone loves babies and wants the species to perpetuate, right? – but pronatalism has provoked a ferocious battle on the American left. Should they be trying to engage meaningfully at a preposterous far-right conference? Or should the left stop self-flagellating and start organising?But what is pronatalism – and is it really borderline fascist? I don’t want to think about slippery, bad-faith, rightwing claptrap any more than you do, but in an era in which US politics can sneeze and the world catches encephalitis, we do, regrettably, have to think about bad-faith everything, all the time. Continue reading... ...read more read less