Translation: you'll become more conservative when you have children and own a home
Millennials: 😆
Zoomers: 😂
Alpha: 🤣
Whateverthefuckcomesnext: 💀
own a home
Too bad boomers ruined my best chance at that.
I have a child and own a home, and am a member of the lost generation. Fuck the Republican Party and any conservative who believes their selfish bullshit should outweigh the greater good of others.
Republicans are fascists, not conservatives.
Democrats are the conservative party.
I have heard this my entire life and now that I recently have kids and a home, I find it to be an insane take. If anything, the greater my knowledge of the world becomes the MORE liberal I am. I'm significantly more aware of rigged systems and injustice as I age.
Reality has a liberal bias.
My old man has told me this my whole life and I always tell him no, because I'm not a cunt. 42yo so far and still going strong.
Boomers got more conservative as they grew older because they've been eating shovels of propaganda since reagan and never learned how to fact check like younger generations
Don’t forget the leaded gas fumes and rampant racism!
I was actually more right wing as a kid. Now that I've learned some things about the world that's when I became a left leaning liberal.
Went from voting far right in 2017 (fucking welfare abusers ) to far left in 2022 (fuckibg corporations costing three times more than welfare) kek
I remember a high school friend's father saying something to me like, "You'll get more conservative when you start paying taxes." This was around 1993-1994 or so.
I'm 45 now, modestly wealthy, and pay plenty of taxes. I can't envision ever voting for a Republican for any public office ever again...and the current circus of bullshit around TFG just seals that deal for me.
The older I get, the more liberal I get.
Just turned 38 and from an ultra conservative household, every since I broke the indoctrination I've just gotten more and more liberal
I hate it when boomers, specifically, say this. My grandfather, who is Silent Generation, will tell you that he’s gotten more liberal as he’s gotten older. Whenever I hear a boomer say this, it’s used as a shaming, like “you don’t understand now but you will when you’re older”. Turns out I haven’t gotten more conservative. I listened to minority populations and then came out and it’s turned me more leftist.
Boomers, in general, are a generation of spoiled children that, for the most part, have never seen the true hardships of any other generation. "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times." Boomers are the weak men that created hard times for the following generations, yet they keep living and consuming as if our world wasn't dying. "Fuck you, got mine" I guess.
GenXer. I've gotten more progressive. I used to consider myself a moderate dem back in the 90s. On the other hand, the 90s moderate dem is now considered a commie woke libtard, so shrug? Shocking that I want justice for all, fair wages, end systemic racism, end homophobia, etc. So librul! I'm destroying Western society! Oh wait, I'm a POC immigrant woman, course I'm destroying America!
I've gained empathy as I've gotten older. The literal opposite of conservatives
Young people tend to be more persuadable before 30, and tend to bake in their political views around that age. So big events in one's 20's tend to lead to lasting partisan affiliations for life after that.
FDR's presidency won over a lot of people to the Democrats in the 30's and 40's. Eisenhower's presidency shifted people over to Republicans in the 50's. Nixon pushed people away from Republicans. But by the 70's Democrats were losing a lot of voters, and then Reagan won a bunch of people over to the GOP. Then 9/11 won people over to Republicans, while the Iraq war pushed them away.
But each of these things had an outsized effect on those under 30. So Boomers who remember getting fed up with Democrats in the 70s and crossing over for Reagan (and then voting Republican in every election since) just thought it was the effect of age, rather than the effect of that particular political moment in 1980.
And even though this data and the analysis is mainly for Americans, it's probably reflective of how people shape their own political beliefs everywhere.
Eat the rich at any age
That might have been true decades ago, but now people have:
People in their mid to late thirties nowadays might have a fancier job title, but many of them are still struggling like they were before. It's hard to be protectionist when you have nothing but your life to protect...
Add Less Lead Exposure. Empathy is a function of the brain and lead damages it.
I think it's your third point, mostly. Maybe even as sharply stated as: boomers became more conservative as the system and status quo brought them wealth, comfort, and security, so naturally they wanted to keep that going. For the generations that have followed, the system and status quo have only continued to bring those benefits to the boomers, not to them, so they're less likely to trend conservative to perpetuate a system that has failed them.
Additionally, in the years since the boomers came of age, the political right has moved away from a traditional conservative platform to a very extreme and hateful version of itself. Even if many millennials had shifted slightly to the right as they aged, the party typically associated with conservatism has moved so much farther to the right that even with their gradual shift, these millennials are still far closer to the left, or at least to "not whatever the right is saying".
The older phrase used to be "You become more right wing when you get older", whereas it's quite likely it was missing the specific cause, which was "You become more right wing when you stop learning". [Edit] Typo
41, stable finances, kid, decent job, and still BETTER DEAD THAN RED!
And just to be 100% clear, since I know that phrase meant something completely different 50 years ago, Republicans can get ass-fucked with a spoon
You become conservative when you lose ability to adapt and learn, thereby yearning for the days when you were you were younger and, as you mostly falsely remember, "times were simpler", which is a delusion caused by the different lifestyle and world perception you used to have. Now you're just older and scared because you forgot to keep up with the times.
The older I get, the more socialist I become.
My afternoons at 18: sips tea reading Noam Chomsky’s Failed State
My afternoons at 30: sips vodka reading Unabomber’s Manifesto
51, still not a conservative
My friends who have kids now did become more conservative. But most of them are very religious and grew up going to church every Sunday. So... I think they might have had a certain influence.
After I had kids I found Satanism and became a communist. I have no idea what your friends are doing but they're doing it wrong.
People become more conservative once they actually accumulate wealth that they can use, and don't want policies passed that will reduce that wealth.
Millennials and younger generations have not the opportunity to generate the same amount of wealth by their 30's or even their 40's as Boomers had.
Therefore leftism and liberalism will be more predominant in these younger generations.
I don't believe this is going to be the case currently... the trend towards conservative was a fiscal phenomenon, as young kids who didn't have a lot of money and wanted a welfare state grew up and became financially independent, they wanted to keep what they were working to get. This would cause a self centric migration from trending democrat to trending republican.
That isn't how the partisan tribes currently work... They've become more of a "morality" enterprise, on both sides.
The choice is now if you think it's appropriate to ban huck finn and Tom Sawyer for the n word, or ban homosexual references. It's a question of do we spend taxes on blacks and the poor, or do we spend it on cluster bombs for Ukraine.
I don't think people will evolve from one side to the other the way boomers did. I think they're evolving farther from center, on both sides.
I don't like book bans period. I don't like the budget growing exponentially period. I don't like that 99% of the population increasingly wants the other half to be completely discounted... I'm essentially evolving towards not liking anybody at all.
I don't think "liberals" are going to become more "conservative" as they age, because that scale is divorced from party politics. Liberal is no longer a democrat trait, and conservative isn't purely republican. Both have adopted the entire con/lib scale in their own way. Democrats have conservative values, republicans have liberal values (the latter to a far greater degree, but I don't think it matters tbh). Just depends on what issue you're talking about.
I'm 43. I keep moving further left.
