Here is the tough truth: modern countries have pretty similar family policy profiles. Marriage is weakened everywhere. Most countries allow obscenity and divorce. Contraception is legal, as is abortion in the majority of countries. Many have same-sex marriage and anti-sex discrimination laws. Nearly all have family subsidies of one kind or another, and most subsidize care outside the home.

The differences that do exist do not always support social conservative expectations. What modern country has the lowest out-of-wedlock birth rate? Here’s a hint: it also has no same-sex marriage and arguably the tightest regulation of obscenity. This country has a strong family culture in a sense. But that country is South Korea, which features the world’s lowest birth rate and is the only country where fewer than 50% of adults are married. The institution of marriage is strong in South Korea; it’s just that relatively few enter it. The industrial-scale familial indifference makes South Korea the basement for family life in the modern world.

Perhaps Italy or Spain are basements in Western modernity. The average age of first marriage in both countries is around 37 for men and nearly 35 for women, who are already past peak fertility. Both countries have fertility rates in the low 1s, and both have pretty high percentages of kids born to unmarried parents, between 40 and 50%.

Perhaps surprisingly, Italy and Spain have nearly the same family policy profile as Israel. The country is the ceiling for modern countries. Its total fertility rate is nearly 3 children per woman, while the next highest modern country is Mexico at 1.89. Israel is at the top (or near the top) in the percentage of people over 18 who are currently married (72%) and in early marriage (women marry at an average age under 25). Few children in Israel are born outside of wedlock. Israel’s relative health is not due to distinctive policies.

Two things stand out. First, Israel’s religious observance rates are higher than most countries, but not extraordinary. Second, interestingly, secular women in Israel marry and have children at rates much higher than secular women in other countries. Secular Israelis resemble practicing Christians in America, more or less.

The reasons for Israeli exceptionalism must be understood. My guess is that its state of emergency and religious observance point Israeli men and women toward marriage and children. Israeli sexes seem less suspicious of one another. Sex role realism is much more deeply accepted in Israel. No country can have a fruitful marriage system without clearly defined roles for men and women in the family and in society generally. There simply must be more Israeli manliness and motherliness. I’m reliably told that the Jewish mother of ancient provenance has not disappeared. Israel’s men either have a military bearing or a religious patriarchalism. I have noticed both kinds of manliness during my travels this week in Israel.

Here is the question for Israel: If the emergency disappeared, would the family culture be as good? However we resolve this question, let’s congratulate Israel for being a modern outlier.

Even in Israel, however, the ceiling for family life is pretty low. Family decline seems a providential fact of modernity. It is universal and enduring, and largely escapes the ability of human beings to reverse it. Efforts to reverse the decline often end up accelerating it.

What is it about modernity that puts a low ceiling on family life and a seemingly ever-lower basement?

Novelists and political philosophers saw family decline coming. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Tolstoy, and Oswald Spengler all worried that the move from a more natural, rustic way of life to a technological, urban one would coincide with declines in fertility, marriage, and human vitality. This transition is best understood as the move from “culture” to “civilization.” What Spengler says in his Decline of the West distills the reality. For “cultures,” family life is natural, unreflective, and almost instinctual. Tolstoy’s peasants just did it. Fathers worry that the family name may be extinguished, and both fathers and mothers act on a duty to perpetuate their families.

But as civilization arises, people cease caring about their family name being extinguished. “World-cities” arise, less fit for human habitation, isolated from ancestors, continually abstracted from nature. People weigh having children, litigating the pros and cons, instead of consulting duties. The rise of great nations therefore coincides with the decline of family duties and sentiment. With the rise of “world-cities” comes an “appalling depopulation” lasting centuries, as Spengler wrote. Rousseau imagined the corruption in Paris in Julie. Tolstoy depicted the barrenness, decadence, and unfaithful marriages in Petersburg. Spengler described the “sterility of civilized man.”

Our post-civilized era makes family decline the object of policy, not just an indirect product of modernity. I call state-directed family decline the “Rolling Revolution.” The Rolling Revolution turns numbness toward familial destiny into a moral duty. This acceleration in the move from “culture” to “civilization” is present everywhere in the modern world. It is what I mean when I say that most countries in the Western world have roughly similar policy profiles.

Modernity begins with the fading of duty, where people no longer sense the extinction of a family line as a doom. It culminates with the state and economy promoting the Rolling Revolution. Laws cannot restore a duty souls no longer feel. The state now dismantles remaining duties as vestiges of cultural oppression, and it puts its thumb on the scales of calculation. This Rolling Revolution is the basis for the Left’s continual mobilization.

How does the Rolling Revolution work?

Men and women must be officially thought of as interchangeable and androgynous. But since men and women are different, the promised world of androgyny never arrives. Women can always think of themselves as less than or different from men. The grievance industry, fueled by highly credentialed female college graduates, is organized around goals that can never be reached.

The Rolling Revolution seeks to break the bonds between parents and young children, replacing them with experiences that can be regulated and mediated. Since the most fundamental human bonds are built around natural differences and natural hierarchies, the state’s work can never be completed.

The revolution also attacks and stigmatizes biological expressions like mother and child and man and woman. Mother is recruited to work in megacorps or as a government bureaucrat instead of slaving away in the nursery. The tired, old feminist complaints about motherhood have been largely relieved. Legal subordination has ended, and chores are split. Many women work for wages. Still, husbands are thought of as oppressors, and now children are oppressors, and murdering them is no longer universally seen as reprehensible. More women think of themselves as oppressed and discriminated against today than in the 1970s. The revolution never reaches its end point.

Still, as Spengler notes, no situation is permanent. Civilizations cycle. Rome and China had their decadence. And modern countries now have theirs. Family decline will break modern countries. At some point, the compulsive campaign leading to neuroses and nihilism culminates in collapse. Perhaps it will happen with a whimper, perhaps with a bang. Governmental and financial structures probably cannot survive two or three generations of absolute population decline. Immigration crises continue too. These crises will keep getting more acute until countries can no longer print enough money, pass on their debt to generations of decreasing numbers, or import enough foreigners.

Our freedom of action is real, but limited. Providence traces a fatal circle around each man and each country that none can leave, but within its vast limits, man and peoples are free and powerful. Israel is a country of national conservatism in a sense, just as South Korea is. Both mind their borders. Both face existential threats and daily reminders of them. Yet one is the ceiling for the modern world, and one is the basement—and the ceiling is a lot lower than it used to be.

National conservatism, united with religious believers, is the only force in the modern world opposing this Rolling Revolution. Only the covenantal are reproducing at decent rates today. Only they are marrying. Only they manifest the virtues associated with family life. They are the basis for a future, better national conservatism, but they are not exactly products of our current order. The counter-revolution will have to exist on fundamentally different ground than the Rolling Revolution.