This is good article to read:
On Immunity in the Cultural Swamp
anarchonomicon.substack.com
Only two groups have been able to keep reproduction rate up and survive modernity. It attempts to answer why.
Excellent read. However, too much credit is directed Trump's way. I don't doubt that the Mormons reacted negatively to Trump, but the graph points directly to what is probably the largest influence on the birth rate, which itself is an indirect indicator of the mainstreaming of Mormon culture. The article correctly notes that mainstream LDS long ago caved to the federal government's insistence that they outlaw polygamy if they wanted Utah to get statehood, but Starbucks is actually the proximate cause.
In recent years, Salt Lake City has won awards for being the most up-and-coming hip place to live in the United States. Starbucks is also the proximate cause for that trend.
Modern Mormons are famous for two things: social conservatism and refusing to drink coffee (all hot liquids, actually). My father the coffee-addict rocket scientist was on some kind of classified assignment n the early 1960s and had to pack up bottles of instant coffee with him, because back then it was
illegal for coffee to be sold in either restaurants or grocery stores in Salt Lake City. Somewhere along the line, that restriction was ended. In 2008 (and look at the graph), Howard Schulz returned as CEO, and one of his first acts after doing some housekeeping to avert effects of the 2007/8 recession was to declare war on Salt Lake City. He had long been perturbed that such a beautiful place for both winter and summer recreation was dominated by the rigid Mormons, and he set about building so many Starbucks locations that eventually SLC had both the most Starbucks per square mile and the most Starbucks per capita of any city in the world, surpassing Starbucks' headquarters city of Seattle. In many locations Salt Lake City, multiple Starbucks are on multiple corners of the same intersection; two intersections have
a Starbucks on all four corners. Starbucks also purposefully bought up as much property bordering on LDS-owned property. By 2016 when my sons and I visited Salt Lake City while we were considering moving there, the tension between the Mormons and the rapidly-increasing yuppie hipster and woke feminist culture was achingly palpable, with the newspapers I bought actively chronicling it: wishing Starbucks would ultimately drive the Mormon church out of SLC but begrudgingly acknowledging that the Mormons would win the long war.
But I could see even then that, while the power structure of the church wasn't going anywhere, the hipsterization and thumb-in-the-noseism of Howard Schulz's Starbucks campaign had already tremendously affected young Mormons, who had become in almost all ways indistinguishable from their non-Mormon contemporaries.
Many lessons can be learned from this.
notthebee.com
