Cottle: Yeah, I did find the approach to women in this book sort of fascinating. One area that I thought was particularly interesting was his handling of his marriage. He’s taken a lot of criticism, in office, for not standing up for his wife. She’s been criticized as overly ambitious. He goes out of his way, in this book, to say that Usha has actually never been the kind of ambitious that he’s criticizing, and that, you know, he didn’t love her at all for that. And he talks about his complete dependence on her and how fantastic she is. And I have no doubt he loves his wife.

I am not questioning whether they have a great marriage or not. But it is clearly also serving a political purpose, in terms of trying to walk back some of his kind of jerky, bro reputation and his snottiness about women. Although, you know, he is a genuine natalist. He really, really wants everybody to go out there and have some babies.

And no matter how hard he tries to soften the whole childless cat lady stuff, or things like that, he can’t help overstating his case. And you see where he comes from, politically, in that even when he’s trying to soft-pedal stuff and be gracious, he can’t. So, at one point he’s like, well, of course babies are downstream of romantic love, and a society without children is a society that loses that too, or whatever.

And I’m like, well, one, the idea that romantic love is the basis of marriage is a very modern one, so, you know, like, step back. And two, no, that’s also not true. Now, you can get into the difference in how parents behave versus nonparents, and the family ties and stuff like that, but he’s not content to do that. Dionne: Well, in fact, I think that is central to his argument, and I’m glad you brought up natalism, because that’s really another important theme of this book, and he links this so closely to Christianity and religion. In the book, he says that the more religious a country is, the better it fares in family formation.

And then there’s this really interesting sentence: “Our abandonment of Christian culture has coincided with an apparent decline in our collective will to live.” Because we’re not having babies, we’re not procreating, we’re not creating the next generation. Now, I’m sure intellectuals and conservative intellectuals can argue about that, and they would probably agree with that, but that’s a really remarkable statement for someone to make. And again, I think this is central to who he is.