On the right there is a branch of demography especial to the calculation of the futility of everything. Western civilization's wane is much easier to assert when data shows a half-century of cultural, economic and procreative stagnation, and such has inspired predictions that are often judged according to their dreariness.
Some forecasters are more serious than others, like Theodore Dalrymple and Mark Steyn. The two have raised to erudition the task of rousing the free world from complacency — but even they are pretty well inclined to chart a vector from Point A, a few decades of the modern era in which historical trends saw sharp reverses; to Point B, doom. A central factor is the shrinking average birthrate of the democratic world as observed until, it seems, just recently: Michael Barone of US News & World Report announced that the United States is fecund again. Barone, a sanguine skeptic, took care to qualify apperception: "The lesson of the past is that America keeps changing and growing, often in ways we fail to anticipate."
It doesn't convince to assume population growth to be the only variable not accounted for or, too, that this country, despite capitalistic and libertarian advantages, is the only one capable of restitution. Not that Dalrymple and Steyn don't recognize that the world changes: Steyn himself rebukes European statists for "think[ing] of the present as a kind of a permanent state." But Barone's observation illustrates an open society's corrective strengths that the demography branch overlooks. We are left with the irony of members of a generation that seized iconoclasm as a birthright coming close to saying that just what can be seen is all there is.