(By Giulio Meotti) At the end of the film “The Decline of the American Empire” (1986), the Canadian director Denys Arcand inserted this monologue of a university professor: “The symptoms of the fall can be seen everywhere: the civilian population that despises its own institutions, the fall of the birth rates, the reluctance of males to do military service, an uncontrollable national debt, the steady decrease in working hours, the proliferation of bureaucrats, the degeneration of the élite. What we live is a generalized process of disintegration of existence.”

Mr. Arcand understood that the plummeting birth rate was linked to hedonism. Then it was that of the baby boomers, now it is that of the millennials. It is now confirmed by the dramatic report by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention: in 2015 births in America hit an historical low starting from 1909, when these were first analyzed. Today it is even worse than during the Great Depression of 1929, when there was the greatest economic calamity and the biggest social upheaval of modern American history. CONTINUE