Tim Stanley: The Paradox Of Tradition
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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all of our podcasts at foxnewspodcasts.com. I hope that you'll rate, review, and subscribe to this one.

Today we have a conversation with author Tim Stanley. He is best known as a regular columnist for the Daily Telegraph in the UK. He has written a new book called "Whatever Happened to Tradition: History, Belonging, and the Future of the West." It's an interesting book that comes at an interesting time of discussion about tradition and about differences in the conservative movement and their attitude toward it.

Tim's an interesting young thinker, and I hope that you will enjoy our interview. Tim Stanley coming up next.

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Tim Stanley, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. It's a pleasure. So I want to talk about your book, obviously, What Happened to Tradition. But before I do, I wonder if you could give us a little bit of perspective on what is going on currently in the UK surrounding both this new variant that has attracted so much attention and the controversies that

flowing out of it as considerations increase for renewed lockdown or perhaps a sliding backward when it comes to the policies pursued by the government as it relates to COVID. The situation in Britain is very interesting because we were ahead of the curve when it came to rolling out vaccines.

And there was a sense that the deal was, we will jab everyone and you should all get jabbed. And as a result of that, you can go back to normal.

And to a certain extent, that's actually what's happened. Britain has one of the most liberal regimes in Europe, certainly compared to some other countries. So essentially, society is still open here. We have some limited restrictions, things like mask wearing and what sort of thing. But over Christmas time, people will be able to go into each other's houses and they'll also be able to go to pubs and restaurants to eat. The strange thing is that the government has failed to give a clear message on what

on what it really wants. So it's not just confused people by saying there might be more restrictions, there might be less, which to be fair, is partly because no one's sure yet just how dangerous the Omicron variant is. We know it spreads fast. We don't know how deadly it is. So the government has hummed and hard over whether or not there will be more restrictions. But also it hasn't been honest about the fact that it's running a relatively liberal regime.

And that's because although the government is in its heart of hearts, not quite libertarian, but it's on that wing of conservatism, that is essentially what it is. It's also up against a vast scientific, medical and media establishment, which really wants the country to shut down, which is convinced the only way through this thing is to shut everything down.

So rather than incur the wrath of that, the government's sort of playing a strange game of persuading people that its regime is very controlled and that we're really quite locked down, when the reality is, if you step back from it, we're actually one of the freer countries in Europe right now. I think something similar is playing out here in America, not exactly the same, but you have the same media priority, health policy establishment priority,

that really is not reflected in the way people are living their lives. For instance, you may see, you know, in popular media, the depiction of the senior health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky over at the CDC and the like, saying, giving out advice regarding holidays that is simply not going to be accepted by the vast majority of Americans.

you know, a demand, for instance, that people show their vaccine proof before they attend family functions or that everyone be tested before you gather around a Christmas dinner table. This is simply not the way that most Americans are going to live. And that's evidenced by the fact that, you know, in the midst of

a college football and pro football season, you know, you have all of these different sporting events where you have tens of thousands of people gathering together in one place unmasked and, and without having to show any kind of proof of,

of any sort in order to attend such events and having no reporting of such events resulting in major super spreader activity or the like that is depicted every weekend for Americans and stands at odds, creating this kind of cognitive dissonance with what they're hearing from health officials. I wonder why you think that is and whether it has anything to

kind of reflect on the unwillingness perhaps of citizens to become publicly confrontational in an organized way, but perhaps to use their own organic activity as a representation of a kind of quiet defiance of the policymakers at large.

I think Britain is certainly split. You will have heard the phrase an Englishman's home is his castle. So on the one hand, we're very pro-privacy and being left alone. On the other hand, we also have phrases like keeping up with the Joneses. And we have nosy parkers. But we are also very interested in what our neighbour is doing. So you pull up the drawbridge, but you're always looking over the castle wall to keep an eye on people.

And that's definitely come out in this crisis. An illustration of that is that the government has been hit by a series of scandals that it turns out that last year, when we had a proper lockdown, some people working for the government may have had a bit of cheese and wine after work. And the media is playing it up and giving the impression that the country is absolutely outraged by this. And some people are, because the rules back then were mad. The rules said that you couldn't be with someone who was dying.

Now, why couldn't you be with someone who was dying? They were dying. What could you possibly do to them that would be any worse than them dying? So the rules were mad, but instead the media's focus is upon the fact that some people working for the government might have broken them. But also a lot of people, I'm sure, were breaking those rules themselves. And...

I don't know how much this has to do with national character or the Anglo-Saxon way of doing things, or if it's just something which is universal, which is that when governments compel you to live a certain way and when the media backs them up, you force citizens to become liars.

people, and that's a really sad aspect of authoritarianism. And I'm not dismissing all the measures, some of them are necessary. But one of the downsides of creating a fevered atmosphere in which people are keen to be seen to be behaving, is they end up just lying. And it is kind of analogous to life in the Soviet Union. It's not nearly on that scale, I understand that. But it's a situation in which

which the government says this is not just, not just that the government says that this is working, it says everyone's on board with it. And because people are terrified of the consequences appearing otherwise, people pretend to be all the while that they're buying everything on the black market. So I just think this is what happens when governments try to tell people how to live. The book that you have written here focuses on a number of different questions and tensions at the heart of what is essentially a dispute between

within the Enlightenment values that we have inherited. As you see it, today there is a real split that is taking place and that is playing out in front of us with a number of different key players and voices arguing about tradition, about liberalism, about the values of the West.

And I want to ask one overarching question about this as you took up this task of writing this book. There is, among some corners of the conservative intellectual cohort today, a real attitude that I would describe as being anti-Western.

Yes. That essentially says the West is decadent. It had its time. It has failed to live up to its values and it will be replaced by

by something that is less decadent or has firmer values, is more grounded in tradition. You make reference to Mikhail Welbeck's submission, for instance, in passing. But there are some that essentially would cheer that, or at least are currently cheering it. I doubt they would be cheering it if it actually came to pass.

The idea that, well, you know, say what you will about the Chinese Communist Party, but they don't have, you know, trans drag twerking hours at the local library or something like that. What is your attitude generally toward that cohort of the conservative intellectual conversation that essentially says the West had its time, that time has passed, and

And it's now going to either become something different or be truly destroyed by an alternative.

I'm very sceptical. I can see where they're coming from. There is a divergence in conservative opinion at the moment over whether or not liberalism, which is essentially the West's political tradition, whether or not liberalism has just taken a wrong turn so it can be rowed back and it can be returned to the state of what it was like in, say, the 50s, pre the 60s madness, or if that political tradition of liberalism

itself is bad if it has an original sin, if it is impossible to reform it, and that where we are now is where liberalism ends up. And I am sympathetic towards that view, but I'm also terrified of it. Because if that's true, what is the alternative? Either the alternative is a system which is imposed on us from without, like Chinese communism,

Either it's imposed from without, or we're talking about tearing everything up and start all over again. And I'm not sure we have the intellectual resources to do that. I don't know what the alternative is. And I'm struck by the post-liberal speakers and by those who are most critical of liberalism. I'm struck by a lack of policy. They very rarely talk about economics.

They usually raise legitimate complaints about culture. They often come up against a brick wall of the Constitution. It's unclear what you can do about many of the problems they identify because of the Constitution. And I think that the absence in particular of economic policy speaks to the lack of an alternative.

I don't think you can escape that the West is liberal. That is what we are. Now, one has to be clear that I don't mean in the American political sense of left wing. I mean, liberal in terms of strong institutions, democratic equality, individualism, etc. That's who we are. It has inbuilt flaws. I don't know how to fix them.

I'm just saying through this book that we need to perhaps look back to when it worked a bit better and revive some of that. But I'm not sure what the alternative is to it. And in fact, the alternative could be quite frightening. The conversation that you're having throughout this book involves a number of different players.

But at its core, a lot of it has to do with these questions of what we are obliged to do that we might not otherwise do, a conservative response to the liberal Enlightenment tradition. Tell me, as you see it, what is fundamental to that obligation idea? It's one thing to say tradition in America is

But in America, tradition can amount to just the things that we're used to doing. It can be eating turkey on Thanksgiving. It doesn't necessarily have connectivity beyond those types of performative acts. What are you talking about and what do you view as fundamental to that understanding of what we are obliged to do as opposed to what we are simply free to do?

Some of those things like eating turkey, attending baseball games, etc., they're really customs and rituals, and they're usually located within a bigger tradition. So let's say the custom or ritual of a jury trial is part of a bigger tradition of justice.

So you'll often find that's the case. You can usually follow these things back with a piece of string through the maze, back to the origin of what is the big tradition that you're really talking about. And those traditions usually have durability and depth. They are usually measured by how long they've been around and also by the way in which they shape and inform a life.

So a good example would be the family. It is a very, very old tradition which defines identity. And crucially, I mean, it is about obligations. Very often what traditions do is they locate you within a web of relationships to other people. So if you go back to the family again, you inherit this thing.

You don't choose it. You can, of course, choose to join another one. Traditions can be surprisingly flexible that way. But either way, when you either are born into a family or you choose to join it,

you are then redefined as an individual in your relationship to other people and your responsibilities to them. If you're a child that you will be looked after and you have a right to expect to be looked after well by a parent, and later when you are a parent that you have a responsibility to look after your children well, and then in the long run, those children will then have a responsibility to look after you. So in other words, a really good tradition locates the individual within a pattern of responsibilities and also within a history.

Because usually, as I say, it's not just depth, it's durability. That by being part of that family, you inherit its memories and you inherit the identity that's been passed down through the years. So therefore, you have an identity that's beyond just me, myself living in this minute. You are now defined by other people and by an entire history. I'll have more with Tim Stanley right after this.

You argue within this book that populist conservatives represent not a revolution, but a counter-revolution. Tell me what you mean by that. Some people feel that populists are not very conservative at all, because like Donald Trump, they actually tear things up.

Donald Trump, for instance, is critical of free trade or Donald Trump is not terribly good when it comes to behaving constitutionally and things like that. But what I would argue is that he represents a radical form of conservatism, which seeks not just to preserve the status quo, the thing which he's inherited, not just to make the current system work well.

but to actually acknowledge that things are broken about that system and go back to a point before in time. I mean, another historical example of that was Margaret Thatcher. Many people said that Thatcher was not conservative because she privatized industry, she cut taxes, she deregulated.

But what she would say was that she inherited an order that was revolutionary, the socialist economy of Britain in the 1970s. So what she was doing was radically conservative in that she was turning the clock back. And to return to Donald Trump, that's what he's done to the Republican Party, right? The Republican Party that is free trade,

is a Republican Party really of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. But if you went back to the 1920s and 30s, the Republican Party is nationalist, protectionist, even nativist. So I see Donald Trump and his brand of populism not as an aberration, but actually as a return to and a restoration of the historical norm.

There is a feeling among the populist conservatives, but not alone among them, that the institutions central to American life have become dominated by leftist authoritarians who have very different values than many Americans.

Included among this number, I would say, are the institutions of academia. And while most of the time conservatives have referred to those targeting the higher education institutions, in recent years, a lot more attention has been paid to public schools that are indoctrinating, from their perspective, a lot of young Americans with a racialist narrative about America's past.

Now, conservatives, as I think of them in America, are typically people who want to make those institutions at the center of American life much stronger. They want them to be

to mitigate a lot of the bad things that they view as being possible within a democracy. They want to have them, you know, inform, create informed citizens operating within a republic. They want them to do all of these beneficial things. What do you do though, if you believe that those institutions are

have become completely and thoroughly corrupted, that they no longer in any way represent the mission that they were initially assigned when it came to teaching children, for instance, about the values of the West.

This is the paradox. Conservatives love institutions and conservatives respect authority. And one institution they should love a great deal, therefore, is the university, because it combines those two things. It is an institution, but obviously teaching is rooted in the idea of authority, that you need to respect me and what I have to say so that I can transmit learning, because you want to be able to trust that I know what I'm talking about.

So teacher must teach and student must absorb. So conservatives ought to love universities, but they don't. And they haven't done for a very long time, by the way. At the very least, this goes back to the 1960s, the conservatives being critical of universities. But something they love has been captured. And in fact, very conservative principles have been used in order to transmit very revolutionary ideas. And therefore, the paradox is that conservatives end up becoming critical of the very institutions they want to save.

Most conservatives want to save those institutions and revere them. I mean, I'm always struck that by conservatives. They are, by psychology, joiners of things, and they like to preserve things, and they like to donate to things.

But at the same time, as I say, they're excluded from the very things they love and they feel they have to go to war with them in order to save them. And you sort of saw Trump do that on steroids. This man clearly loved the military. That's probably the one group that Trump had the closest sort of personal affection for. But he also realized that the military didn't like him and didn't agree with what he wanted to do. So he had to go to war with it.

What can conservatives do? Well, they have a range of choices. One is to literally destroy those institutions. And there is a move in Britain among some people to say, let's let certain universities go bankrupt, that actually they need to go under because they're not just transmitting bad ideas. They're also ripping off their students. Another approach is to try to capture the institutions and to win them back. But that's very difficult to do when you feel you won't be allowed in or you have no stake and you can't see a way in.

So what you end up with then is you end up with a sort of theater, a theater of conflict between conservatives elected to reform an institution, failing, and simply going to war with it. And in many ways, that's been the story of American conservative administration since Reagan. Conservatives have achieved some things, but they're usually limited to the realm of economics. Culturally, they failed pretty much. And instead, they just, every time they get elected,

They then fight a theater of conflict with those institutions, but they don't actually change them or take them over. They just have a vote-winning war with Hollywood, which is sort of a waste of everyone's time. But I don't see how conservatives change that. The natural answer for some time among certain corners of the right is,

has been to build up alternative sources of information or institutions of their own. But there are certain necessary restrictions that come into place there. One is simply a lack of donor interest. For instance, while there are numerous universities and colleges in America that have and espouse pro-Western values,

many of them are religious, others like Hillsdale are not. And they have a handful of these that advocate for an alternative, but those will always be dwarfed by the gigantic funding that flows through both private, but especially public institutions of higher learning. You're never going to have something as big as the University of Texas. But at the same time,

The restrictions that are put in place on many of these alternative institutions that would compete with the big houses of culture, education, and the like are very frustrating for a lot of people. You might have the cultural content, for instance,

is time and again, the exception that proves the rule where you might have a very successful right of center director or creator who's able to have a very popular show that is, you know, an American Western, you know, for instance, the most popular show on cable today is a dramatic Western that's, you know, written and created by someone who is right of center.

And openly so, you know, you have openly right of center comedians, for instance, who might become quite popular, but they are the exceptions. They are not, you know, the rule. And even if they are able to gain some kind of foothold,

It's nothing in comparison to the vast swath of cultural influence that has been established by and is directly run by many people who are interested in advancing the narrative about gender, about history, about capitalism, about liberal values, Christianity, you name it.

Given that, you know, what is the point of building your alternate institutions if you if in doing so, you know, you will be fighting a Sisyphean uphill battle that is never going to actually result in you commanding the heights?

And one other problem that I would throw in is that culturally, most conservatives don't want to mix politics and culture. Yes. But the moment that you go out of your way to say, right, because I've been excluded, I'm going to create something that is culturally conservative,

you've kind of defeated the very object. The conservative ideal is to culturally go back 50 or 60 years to when culture was just happily patriotic or religious, but not necessarily self-consciously politically conservative. But you can never recreate that. And every attempt to do it ends up just coming across as gratingly political.

such that whenever you do have right-wing comedians or a right-wing show or a right-wing drama, it's quite often bad because it breaks the conservative rules of don't mix politics and culture.

And so it just doesn't work. There are exceptions to that, by the way. But although even there, I still see some people like Dave Chappelle dangerously starting to turn into polemicists rather than comedians. And that's the mistake the left made. You don't need right wing Stephen Colbert. You need just good comedians. That's just what we really want to end up with. So the answer to all of that is it's very difficult. But I think the key thing is that one has to try.

And I finish the book by saying that a frustrating thing about conservatives is they spend a lot of time complaining and not a lot of time doing. And that actually the doing might be a question of not going away and doing something that's self-consciously conservative, but just doing something cultural well in the hope that that sort of resets, reboots the entire cultural system such that people can see something being done well and think, well, I like that. I'd like more of that, please, rather than the left-wing liberal stuff.

So I would just encourage conservatives to go and write good books, paint good art, make good comedy, rather than trying to do something self-consciously political. You have a quote in here from Chautaubriand, which, "Morality is the foundation of society."

but if we are nothing more than material there truly can exist neither vice nor virtue and accordingly no morality either our laws always relative and changing cannot provide any basis for morality which is always absolute and unchanging morality then must have its origins in a world that is more stable than this one and consequences more certain than precarious rewards or transitory punishments

So much, it seems to me, of the culture war dynamics of the past couple of decades in the United States seems to have been the decay of a commonly held sense of right and wrong, and instead an outsourcing of that concept to various other institutions within American society, particularly the Supreme Court.

And the corporate powers that be, meaning most prominently big tech, you know, essentially the corporations that come in and espouse various things, endorse them as being good and representative of society. Use the example of the pride parade in London that happened.

that went from being, you have some line in there about how it went from being something that was sort of counter-cultural and failing to being something that was, you know, enormously supported by corporations brought to you by Tesco and that had more middle-class heterosexuals in attendance than people who were actually fighting for gay pride and the like. I don't have the passage mark, but that's a...

That, to me, is something that has been happening a thousand times over in America, over and over and over again in every aspect of our life. It seems very difficult to stop something that is trending along those lines, though, where if the Supreme Court says it, then that is an indication of what is right and what is wrong, not just what is legal and what is illegal.

The very idea that a group of human beings could sit down and provide a definitive judgment on a moral question, free from the traditional concepts of God, right and wrong, is in and of itself daunting.

I mean, to go back to that quote by Chateaubriand about if you don't have, basically what he's saying is if you don't have God, then you're making reality up as you go along. And you can come up with good and evil, and you could end up doing the right thing. But the point is that because mankind has decided what's right and what's wrong, you can then change your mind at a later date. And really, this is what the Enlightenment's all about. From Immanuel Kant onwards, it's an attempt to ask the question, can we do good and evil without God?

And you may well believe in God, but the question is, can you separate God out? And can you reach good and evil through pure reason?

And to a certain extent, that's what America is an experiment in trying to do. And that's what the Supreme Court is trying to do. And sometimes they come up with good propositions. Sometimes they do, like abolition of slavery, for instance, civil rights, for instance. And they get there through an evolution and through a debate, undeniably. But equally, if you're coming to morality through reason, it

it is perfectly possible for society to go down a blind alley and come up with a conclusion that's wholly wrong, so that you could, in the 1920s, come to the conclusion that eugenics is moral because it weeds out the weak and the feeble from society.

And in the modern era, you could be convinced that abortion is purely a question of bodily autonomy and women's rights. So you could draw very, very strong positions and conclude that they are thoroughly moral. And then if you step back and look at the historical record, you see that people have changed their mind before and after, that human societies just change their mind all the time. And that what in that moment seems obviously right or wrong

Actually, you're on shifting sands and the society could change its mind again. This is why you don't want a morality that's wholly rooted in that group of judges deciding things, because they could change their minds in 10 or 20 years time, as the Supreme Court routinely did on matters of civil rights. So that's the really worrying thing for me is when I'm not against gay marriage as a civil proposition.

But the fact that in my lifetime, it has gone from something that was seen as transgressive to tolerated, to accepted, to promoted in such an extraordinarily short space of time makes me suspect that it could swing the other way. And that relying purely upon human reason to come up with moral propositions is not enough. I wonder what your take is on this.

The these developing tensions as it relates to the dominant forces of the left, obviously, the progressive cause within America is one that is on a generational upswing. It is more powerful now.

at the moment in terms of its representation in Congress than gatherings like the Freedom Caucus on the right ever were in terms of just the sheer number of members who are within this progressive affiliated caucus. They have tugged the Biden presidency to the left significantly on policy to the point that he is losing members who are in the middle essential to advancing his policy agenda.

It has all the hallmarks of a movement that is on the upswing. And unlike many of the current leaders of the Democratic Party, they are not aged. They are not in their 70s and 80s. They are not, as it seems, headed toward the exits anytime soon. They seem quite unified.

lockstep in their belief about not just the nature of the corrupt America that they are citizens of, but also the woke agenda that they seek to advance on the people of

Given that the left seems so unified while the right is squabbling about these intellectual pursuits, do you view that as being a weakness for the conservative libertarian conversation versus a unified left that seems to have their priorities very much in order?

I think there are divisions within the left. And I think there are tensions within this administration with some progressives. And in fact, certainly in Britain, the cleavages seem to be more dramatic on the left than they are on the right, particularly over things like trans rights, where I don't think there is a settled position at all. You have older generations of feminists

still arguing for some strict relationship, stricter relationship between sex and gender. And you have younger people who seem to want to tear up the rules altogether. So I think there are some divisions among the left. And as for the right, I think the real problem with the right is it has undergone an intellectual revolution that it's catching up

It's catching up with. Trump came out of the blue. He destroyed every... It feels like he destroyed almost every consensus that existed before, except perhaps social conservatism, interestingly. And the Republican Party's had to catch up. It's in the process of inventing a theory to explain Donald Trump, even though he's an entirely personal phenomenon. And...

And out of that revolution, you get a lot of new philosophy and a lot of new approaches, which I think are to be welcomed and encouraged because the Republican Party has to find some new way of speaking to the voters. The downside is, as I say, that as of yet, there isn't really a new economic agenda that's emerging.

And ultimately, conservatives have got to be able to make a link between the theoretical and the material to explain why national conservatism or whatever populism is going to be will make people richer. Ultimately, you've got to sell yourself to the electorate. And the left right now is doing that.

through offering people more money, although it's going to create an inflationary cycle very probably. The Conservatives have got to come up with their own version of that, their own version of the right-wing New Deal. That seems to me to be a gigantic challenge. I'm not sure that today's Conservatives are up for it. One more question before we close out. You have embarked on a defence strategy

of tradition as a relatively young person. This seems at various points in this book, it seems as if I'm listening to a much older person than I know wrote this. And I'm fond of the argument, but I wonder...

I hear a lot about the need for an embrace of tradition from people who I would say are in my age cohort and in this period of understanding tradition.

adulthood and the things that kind of went wrong in our analyses in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War and how conservatism worked through what was coming next. But I do wonder why you think it is that this is happening now and whether it has anything to do with the kind of white knuckle,

holding on to power that we have seen from the most influential generation within the last century and a half culturally, which is of course the baby boomers. The sheer fact that we have seen them hold on to power for so much longer, you know, even to the point perhaps of eliminating any true

Gen X participant from ever holding the office of the presidency, we'll have to say, you know, that that that has to have had some kind of impact on this embrace of tradition that is essentially another reaction. This is simplistic, of course.

to the outcome of that generation and its priorities. Yeah. Ben, you put your finger on it. That's exactly what this is about. And the irony is, is I'm pro-old people and I'm pro-tradition, but there's one cohort of old people who need to get out of the way. And it's the boomers. It's the people for whom life begins and ends with Robert F. Kennedy.

And they impose that psychology and that historical experience upon every single thing they do. Everything is about their experience of being young and their attempt to realize the dreams and ambitions of the late 1960s in everything they do. And of course, they have benefited from a massive medical and technological advance, which is that in previous generations,

revolutionaries would eventually die out and die relatively young. Now they live on into their 70s and 80s and they become president. They also become pope. There's a really interesting dynamic within the Catholic Church that you have an older pope

who very much embodies the 1960s and 70s and its dreams and ambitions. And I'm not saying it's an illegitimate form of Catholicism. It's certainly not. It's built upon a particular historical experience and it sees itself as developing organically from tradition. But it is very much of Vatican II in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, you have all these younger people like me who just have no connection to that time, no sense of what the politics of it were. And there are aspects of life in the church before the 1960s that we like the look of in terms of liturgy. And so people like Pope Francis are astonished to discover that there's this cohort of young people who want what it is he spent his life trying to wipe away.

And so you have this fascinating generational tension between those two groups. And you see it play out in so many different spheres in life. You have the boomers who are trying to encourage young people to be left wing. You have young people who want what the boomers had and which the boomers tried to get rid of. It's bizarre. But I definitely think that this is partly a generational tension. There's no escaping that.

Tim Stanley, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Really great to talk to you. Pleasure. I read with interest in the Wall Street Journal a piece by Leon Key who writes about the challenge confronting China today. The piece is entitled China is haunted by its one-child policy as it tries to encourage couples to conceive.

When China put in place its one-child policy four decades ago, policymakers said they would simply switch gears if births dropped too much. That has turned out to be not so easy. In 30 years, the current problem of especially dreadful population growth may be alleviated and then we can adopt different population policies, the Communist Party said in a 1980 open letter to members and young people.

With the number of births declining year after year, China is now racing in the opposite direction, closing abortion clinics and expanding services to help its couples conceive.

But a legacy of the one-child policy scrapped in 2016 is a dwindling number of women of childbearing age, as well as a generation of only children who are less eager to marry and start a family. In addition, infertility appears to be a bigger problem in China than in many other countries. According to a survey by Peking University researchers, it affects about 18% of couples of reproductive age compared with a global average of around 15%.

For years, the government called on women to postpone marriage to encourage smaller families. Researchers say the higher age at which Chinese women are trying to have children might partly account for its comparatively high infertility rate. And some researchers say widespread use of abortions over the years to heed birth restrictions may also play a role.

Multiple abortions impact women's bodies and infertility is a possible consequence, said Ayo Wahlberg, an anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen, who has written a book about fertility research in China. Decades of policies to keep births low have left not just deep wounds, but also financial obligations for many local governments, which cut into what they can devote to encouraging births.

Shandong Province is known in China for sometimes extreme enforcement of birth restrictions, including a 1991 campaign in parts of the city of Laocheng dubbed 100 Days No Child. A 2012 documentary by Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television details how local officials, to make their birth data look better, forced women found to be pregnant to abortion centers, even if the baby was there first and allowed under the one-child policy.

Almost everyone old enough here has heard something about what they did, said a 45-year-old college teacher in Laocheng, though he added, it's something you can never find anywhere in written history. Beijing, years later, banned birth control enforcement deemed as too cruel, including imprisonment or beating of couples, violating the one-child policy, and destruction of their property. The National Health Commission didn't reply to a request for comment.

An official with the Shandong Provincial Health Commission declined to comment beyond saying that Shandong is revising its family planning laws to encourage births. Today, Shandong pays compensation or subsidies to millions of couples who lived by the rules, including retirees who now don't have support because their only child died or became disabled, or women who suffered injuries in connection with abortions or other birth control methods.

In 2019, such outlays totaled more than 5 billion yuan, equivalent to $780 million, according to the Provincial Health Commission. That corresponds to more than one-fifth of that year's biggest budget item, education spending. The use of abortions hasn't fallen off a cliff. In 1991, the year of the 100-day campaign, around 14 million abortions were performed in China, according to National Health Commission data. The number was just below 9 million in 2020.

More striking is that the number of family planning centers primarily used for abortion sterilizations and insertions of intrauterine devices has dwindled to 2,810 across China in 2020, less than 10% of the number in 2014.

Meanwhile, rounds of in vitro fertilization, or IVF, each round being a multi-step process over four to six weeks, have more than doubled, from about 485,000 in 2013 to more than 1 million in 2018. In the U.S., a little over 300,000 rounds were performed at 456 reported clinics in 2018, according to the CDC.

What is so mind-boggling for me is that after all these years of birth restrictions, maybe fertility clinics will become more important than abortion clinics, Professor Wahlberg said. According to his research, assisted reproduction has a surprisingly long history in China. In March 1988, a decade after the world's first test tube baby was born in Britain, Zhang Liju, a Beijing gynecologist, delivered China's first baby conceived through IVF.

Another followed three months later in Changsha under the guidance of Lu Jingzhu, a geneticist. Both doctors had to conduct their research mostly in secret. With the one-child policy defining the demographic agenda, infertility services didn't become legal until the early 2000s. Now, the methods Dr. Zhang and Lu pioneered are among measures the government is counting on to shift the demographic trajectory.

The number of Chinese newborns fell 18% in 2020 from the year before, and data expected in January is likely to show another steep drop in 2021. China's fertility rate, the number of children a woman has over her lifetime, already dropped below replacement levels in the early 1990s and in 2020 came in at 1.3, below even Japan's 1.34.

After dipping to a record low of 1.26 in 2005, Japan's fertility rate, among the world's lowest, began to recover with the help of support measures by the government, though in recent years, the rate has started falling again.

China currently has 536 infertility centers, according to the Health Commission, but most are clustered in wealthy metropolitan areas like Beijing and Shanghai and vary widely in their quality. Major hospitals have added fertility services to family planning clinics, and China is also trying to get such services to smaller cities. The Health Commission has set a goal of at least one institution offering IVF for every 2.3 million to 3 million people by 2025.

Nationwide, China isn't far from the goal, but less economically developed provinces say existing services can't meet rising demand. There are only three fertility institutions in the western province of Gansu, all in Lanzhou, the provincial capital. Gansu aims to have seven by 2025. The article goes on to detail some of the more specific stories regarding a number of different people who are going through these processes.

But it is very interesting to me to see how difficult it is for the government to just flip the switch and obtain the kind of results that they want to when it comes to fertility problems. This is an ongoing problem when it comes to a number of different nations around the world, particularly given the fact that we see in America an aging group of potential parents who are getting married and having kids, if they have any at all, at much older ages than they were in the past.

This is going to be something that is a dogged problem in the coming years. And while we certainly can expect that the pandemic has resulted in the shifts of priorities for a lot of people, it's going to be difficult to get back to the point where people feel so optimistic about the future that they're willing to bring a child into it. If we do not achieve that, though, that's going to be a very difficult thing to deal with.

that are optimistic about the future tend to have more children. They tend to be more thriving economically and they tend to be more ambitious when it comes to the kind of goals that they set for themselves. Historically, this has turned out to be the case most of the time and it's sad to see a situation where

So many people, only because of the fault of where they were born, were subject to such egregious government policies in China. And now the policymakers are basically discovering that they made a huge mistake. I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Domenech Podcast. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.

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