Lonely Woke Nation. By Daniel Greenfield.

America’s population has been declining for a while, but the pandemic was particularly catastrophic with [legal] international migration easily topping excess births at 244,622 to 148,043. [Illegal immigration in 2021 was about 2 million.]

The demographic snapshot of a society coming apart, the familial, civic, and cultural bonds between Americans dissolving even as growth comes from mass migration is a familiar story from Europe. Internally and externally, we are becoming a society in name only, linked by the legal technicalities of a vast bureaucracy and a disposable multinational consumer culture.

To understand the wave of wokeness and other political cults consuming our civic culture, we need only observe that a third of Americans now have no religion: a number that has doubled in under 15 years. Growing numbers have no family, no children, and little more than their jobs.

And that is why we have open borders. Someone has to fill all those jobs. Generations of Republican leaders defined America as a place where people came to work. …

Free enterprise is vital to a free society, but it isn’t, for most people, the thing that gives them meaning and purpose. …

A nation cannot exist as nothing more than a series of workplaces and stores in which tokens earned at the former are then spent at the latter. …

What happens to a society whose people have no reason to go on beyond their set routines interspersed with bouts of hedonism? What happens to a nation that loses its soul?

Europe had answered that question a generation or two before we did. Unfortunately we did not pay attention to the answer. America lasted longer because we retained our convictions of exceptionalism, our faith and our family ties longer than Europe did. But with every passing year the cities of the New World with their hipster elites and multicultural labor forces, and subsidized dying rural areas, resemble the decadence of the Old World that their ancestors once escaped. …

A nation needs vertical and horizontal connections, people to other people, and to something above them, a sense of awe and destiny, and without them it withers and dies. The pandemic reaffirmed to many elites their conviction that there are no meaningful connections, that other people are threats and irritants, and that man is just an intelligent ape existing on the random sufferance of a cruel universe that can blot all of us out in a single instant.

It is not at all irrational for anyone living with the conviction of fragility and meaninglessness to panic at the pandemic, global warming, or the threat of nuclear war. … The only way to contain the catastrophe is by imposing a totalitarian order.

There is little room in this gloomy universe for the future. That’s why the hipster elites, in between Uber trips to bars and eateries, avoid human connections, escape into digital carpe diems, and reject the idea of having children because they don’t expect mankind to survive global warming, or of whatever crisis comes next to justify their lack of faith in the future.

Their needs, for clean floors, for customer service, or takeout, can be met by a disposable labor force in America or in China. Natural population growth just hastens the apocalypse anyway. …

In this generation, for the first time in our nation’s history, most Americans have abandoned hope that the future will be better. The low birth rates, the lack of relationships, and the social collapse are all the fruits of the same poisoned tree. …

Globalization atomizes us. It breaks us up into discrete and isolated groups in the name of diversity, in the name of progress, and in the name of making us more manageable. Fragmented people have less to aspire to beyond their creature comforts. They are easier to soothe with an expansion of the welfare state, a new hate object and smartphone model.

The alternative is to rebuild those connections that make life meaningful, national and familial, and without which nations turn childless and are easily swamped by mass migration.

The Left didn’t just open up the borders around the body of our nation, it hollowed out its soul. A lonely nation of isolates wrapped in their digital cocoons is easy prey for technocratic globalism.

Our dumb woke future beckons. Or we can do something else.