TEHRAN — In their early 30s, married, and with prospects for successful careers, Bita and Sherag could be contemplating the logical next step in their lives: becoming parents. But for them and an increasing number of young, middle-class Iranians who are deeply pessimistic over their country’s future, raising a child is one of the last things on their minds. – HT: New York Times

You can tell when a civilization is tidying up for the dirt nap. You can look at its economy. You can look at its marquee cultural institutions. You can look at the level of belief people have in their leaders. Finally, perhaps closest to where the rubber meets the road; you can look at whether anyone in their right mind would want to raise kids in that particular society. All of these indicators suggest that America has lost her way badly.

Yet on initial inspection, there are no two countries less alike than the United States of America and Iran. Iran is a Theocracy. They have elections the way they used to be held in The People’s Democracy of Bulgaria. The United States smugly considers itself the democracy that is the envy of the world. We perceive such a chasm between the US and Iran that The Reverend Joel Hunter has been dispatched to Iran to examine issues of religious tolerance the way Dian Fossey studied gorillas in the mist. He will report back to Presidential Department of Baronial Arrogance after he’s slept, shaved and cleaned up from the field.

Yet we live in an America that is increasingly ruled by its own set of intolerant mullahs. Joel Kotkin describes it from the Right.

An alliance of upper level bureaucrats and cultural elite, the Clerisy, for all their concerns about inequality, have thrived, unlike most Americans, in recent years. They also enjoy strong relations with the power structure in Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street. As the modern clerisy has seen its own power grow, even while the middle class shrinks, it has used its influence to enforce a prescribed set of acceptable ideas. On everything from gender and sexual preference to climate change, those who dissent from the official pieties risk punishment. (HT: The New Geography)

Avowed socialist, Frederick deBoer describes the Dictatorship of Smug from the Left.

In the past year, liberalism as an elite social phenomenon has abandoned first rights of the accused and second the right to free expression. The Jameis Winston and Woody Allen sexual assault cases saw the rise of resistance to any discussion whatsoever of due process and rights of the accused, and in the way of their culture, online progressives moved quickly to a place where anyone mentioning those rights at all were immediately and angrily denounced, and accused of insufficient resistance to (if not outright support for) rape and rape culture. Similarly, the Brandon Eich situation, and now the Donald Sterling fiasco, have prompted this social cohort to change liberalism such that its traditional staunch defense of free speech rights has become instead an assumed disgust with those who talk about free speech rights at all.(HT: Frederick deBoer.com)

The Purificationist work of The American Progressive isn’t yet done. The American Left has not quite succeeded in their zealous purge of the heretics, infidels and Climate Science Denialists. It is not yet accurate to say that the average American has pretty much the same set of Civil Rights as the typical citizen in Tehran. Yet like Cotton Mather the average Liberal sees the United States as a grubby town in need of an enema. As we say here often on Redstate.com – “You will be MADE to care.”

So just why do I believe the idiots in charge are ruining America by the day? Enter recent American demographics. Like that funny, funny lady from Rutgers who announced that people who had large families were littering the Earth, American adults no longer favor of having children. From the standpoint of population biology, America is in the process of mathematically dying off.

The fertility rate fell to a record low 62.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2013, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The total number of births, at 3.96 million, inched up by a mere 4,000 from 2012, the first increase since the financial crisis. But the total fertility rate, or TFR, the average number of children a woman would have during her child-bearing years, fell to just 1.86, the lowest rate in 27 years. TFR is considered the best metric of fertility. A TFR of 2.1 represents a stable population, with children replacing parents as they die off. (HT: The Washington Examiner)

But all of this is all just Cray-Cray talk on a wet, rain-sodden Monday. America’s sensitive and humane Progressive leadership is nothing like the Allah-Boys oppressing Iran. You will NEVER accuse them of suppressing openness and diversity. The !SCIENCE IS SETTLED! !YOU WILL COMPLY! We are the most open, most creative, most free, most sensitive, most diverse and open-minded place EVER. You will admit this or you will face the Gestapo. Is it any wonder why fewer and fewer people consider our nation any more preferable than Iran as a place to produce and raise their children?