They thought they got more conservative as they got older, turns out they just got more conservative as they got richer.
I got older and richer, and I'm still just as socialist as I was then. Perhaps moreso, even.
I think the idea is that they have more wealth, and are terrified of losing that wealth. It comes down to greed and fear of change, rather than the actual amount of wealth itself.
Same here. I got older and richer and became even more left wing than I used to be.
But what is true, is that society is becoming more progressive faster than I am, so by the time I am 70, I'll probably be a relative relic.
I mean.. they were right.. i am more conservative as i got older. I now put more money in my 401k. I save more. I eat at home more.
However, i still think other races and sexual preferences are human, and billionaires dont need to exist. Social welfare is still a good thing and probably more important than ever.
I did buy a gun though. Target shooting is fun. But, we need a hell of alot more gun control than there is now. If anything, my experience buying a gun made me more scared due to how easy it was.
I don't think saving money and eating at home are conservative values.
Lots of liberals and progressives do those things, too.
Heck, poor minorities do that to an extreme.
Political conservatism is distinctly NOT about IRL conservatism.
What they conserve is the "social order". They want to preserve the social stratification, not forests.
As the saying goes, it's hard to be a capitalist without the capital.
Yes but there is more to it. Formally progressive ideas (like mixed race marriage) are no-brainers today while today's progressive ideas (like same sex marriage) were beyond the scope for the moderate left back than. So you can keep your opinions and still move to the right while the left adopts new ideas.
The version I always heard when I was young was, "If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain."
Here I am in my mid 40s, and I'm pretty sure the conservatives are the ones with no brains.
That's because by 40 you were supposed to be rich enough that you'd be fearful that 'those' people are going to take it away.
I think we are those people... Aren't we?
Arguably, conservatives used to have more brain than today. But maybe they just had slightly more decorum.
looks up from reading "The Conquest of Bread"
Reaally? O_o
My mom did assure me of that, 10-20 years ago.
By age 40, I trans'd my gender and now I'm ready to smash capitalism and seize the means of production. Let's gooooooo
I'm actually more conservative in my 30s, as in conserving the very limited energy i have and not arguing with idiots and use that on those who worth it.
Ahh. Conservation of Energy. I’d like to see the modern party of “law and order” refute the foundational laws of physics!
Im actually more conservative as im approaching my 30s.
I used to have this overly inclusive bleeding heart "everyone is equal" kind of attitude which I now see isnt really true. When you actually get past the narrative and look at the reality and statistics, its undeniable that certain "types" of people are just more pre-disposed to violence and thuggery than most normal people. Like you might not like what im saying, but you cant disagree with the actual data that shows how much more naturally violent those low-lifes are. So thats why now im not ashamed to be vocally prejudiced against cops.
The reverse happened. But I'm GenX so that might be normal?
I was given the full American Exceptionalism battery of civics propaganda in my public schooling, and I believed it all even more than my peers. It might be a neurodivergent thing, being credulous and actually believing what my teachers taught me.
I also took economics 1A and 1B in my early college career, which was all capitalism centric. (They talked about command economics, usually as a counter example, highlighting the problems it has.)
I was kind of an asshole, but I was young.
Then SCOTUS gave Bush the presidency, and that was weird. He was creepy even before 9/11 but then that happened and, well, all the conservatives went full evil. When my dad was telling me that yes, Donald Rumsfeld is right that waterboarding is not really torture (Narrator: Waterboarding is, in fact, commonly classified as torture by the scholarly consensus) and that extrajudicially detaining and torturing people because they're Arab and Muslim is entirely acceptable, I had a reckoning and an internal identity crisis. I knew that torture was what Darth Vader did to Leia to show that the Galactic Empire was evil through and through, and Vader didn't flinch at the grisly tasks.
In the next decade civil rights, including ones established in the Constitution of the United States, started getting massive carve-outs. The bill of rights didn't apply whenever national security was invoked. FBI was sending NSLs left and right telling people they're now FBI informants, yet were obligated to keep that secret on threat of being disappeared. (NSLs are still a thing, BTW.)
Officials were openly engaging in war profiteering. Halliburton was getting fantastically rich. Also Texas, by way of Enron was fleecing California. The rolling blackouts were featured in Monsters Inc. ...as was the scream extractor, possibly the best representation of late-stage capitalism at its most extreme.
We talked a lot of enhanced interrogation and extraordinary rendition and black sites. Signs of the surveillance state started manifesting even before Edward Snowden dumped a ton of data to news agencies.
Obama got elected. There was tons of talk about Hope and Change. Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize just for not being George W. Bush. Neither hope nor change were forthcoming. In fact, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis starting in 2007 resulted in some massive bailouts (about $1 Trillion) to some really big companies. If your company collapses, I had learned according to Capitalism 101, it means your business model is bad and it deserves to collapse, so this bailout didn't make sense from the ideological perspective. A lot of other people noticed it and formed OWS and protested until New York City turned off all its cameras and sent the police in to anti-riot them.
Then in 2014, Michael Brown was shot in dubious circumstances, triggering the Ferguson unrest. Police uniforms lined up pointing their assault rifles like they were at a firing squad, what I remember was poor weapon discipline, and the sort of thing Red Goons from the Soviet Union did in movies starring Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris. Troops and troops of police officers pointing their guns like they're ready to start shooting into the crowd. Then when the policing hour happened at night, they gathered up in their MRAP and started tearing up the streets (literally) firing their tear-gas grenade launcher willy-nilly, just gassing the whole neighborhood for no peacekeeping purpose. It was terrifying.
I learned in the 1970s a congressional order required FBI to catalog all officer-involved homicides and report annually to the BJS. They hadn't. Only civilian volunteer groups had been tracking killings and brutality by law enforcement. Several news agencies started after Ferguson. One of the beats on Techdirt already was about police being stupid or drawing their guns early, or SWATTING the wrong house and rendering it unlivable. Oh yeah, social engineers discovered they could get a house raided by police with big guns anytime they wanted to, and it became an occasional tactic in COD PvP.
In 2015, I was long read about the faults of capitalism, the failures of government, the rise of regulatory capture, the police state, the surveillance state and rising wealth disparity (which was a big deal in my college Macroeconomics class -- this is how you get your civilization to collapse to social unrest). I'd also taken a deep dive into moral philosophy so I understood why torture is generally frowned upon, and I didn't have to take my cues from George Lucas.
From there, I was a few breadtube videos away from going totally Pinko Commie, but I less adhere to any given ideology so much as specific ideals (e.g. Everyone gets fed. )
Strangely, a Bolshevik chorus follows me around everywhere I go.
A lot of other people noticed it and formed OWS and protested until New York City turned off all its cameras and sent the police in to anti-riot them.
Don't forget the best part: It wasn't just NYPD. It was a violent crackdown on OWS protests all across the nation, complete with torture and other unconstitutional methods, coordinated in secret by the Obama administration in collusion with the big banks. (For those who have forgotten, integration of government and corporate power is one of the hallmarks of fascism.)
Fuck. Yes.
I've copied and pasted your post into a cloud-based note app for posterity.
If anything, I've gotten even more progressive over time.
Yeah, agreed. I've learned a lot about gender minorities and issues affecting the 2SLGBTQ+ population in the last decade.
As I have gotten older I have become more angry and cynical. But I'm very much more anti-conservative now than I was before, which in the US would be more left leaning, but honestly I never thought of myself as that, I just thought that I was being rational.
But being rational these days is literally being anti-conservative, because of how conservatives are banning books, attacking LGBTQ+ people for just wanting to be themselves, denying global warming even exists, and yes, letting the rich get richer by being corrupt and cutting taxes for them.
Though I also have some views that might make someone very left leaning think I'm against them (for example I do believe that some words shouldn't be viewed as bad when not meant as personal attack against disabled people, like retard or fat or obese; and I also think people are allowed to choose their pronouns and in most cases I will respect it, but some people are just doing it for shits and giggles, not seriously actually considering themselves as what they choose). It's easy to think someone who disagrees with those views as I do that they might be conservative, but I am far, far from it.
I am the same way. Making a decent income and having kids has made me nothing if not more liberal. At this point, the Republican Party has absolutely nothing to offer my life that would in any way improve it.
As a GWoT, twice deployed veteran, the GOP runs a draft dodging coward who mocks Gold Star families and POWs.
As a father, the GOP is trying to dismantle schools and higher education as well as make like worse for all future generations.
As a taxpayer, the GOP has increased my taxes so that wealthy people can have a nice tax break. They have also cut social services and things that make my life better on a day to day basis like roads.
They do nothing but make life worse. No idea how anyone can support the GOP without making 10m a year, as those are the only people whose interests are actively represented.
It might be true that you get more conservative after you e.g. own property, have a lot of money, or a bunch of other things that happened to boomers in their 30s.
Now that those things are far less accessible, people aren't moving conservative with nearly the same frequency. The fact that boomers did is a symptom of the easier time they had, but there's nothing intrinsic about aging that should make one more conservative.
Nah, I bought a house 3 years ago. I still hate how inaccessible the housing market is, how shitty conservatives are towards other people and how much they deny science. Owning property doesn't magically make one conservative. Fuck conservatives, fuck the rich.
It was probably easier to become conservative with age when conservative politicians weren't so blatantly evil. They had their moments, but they sure as hell didn't stage a literal insurrection when they lost an election.
I'm more conservative than my teenage self, in that I believe now that people, as a whole, are much shittier than I suspected before. This has failed to translate into voting for conservatives because:
Anecdotally this hasn't been true for me. I spent my 20s barely getting by. In my 30s and early 40s I've had a series of lucky breaks that have enabled me to move into a much higher paying job resulting in luxuries like home ownership, retirement money etc. and if anything I've become more liberal.
I also don't have or want children so maybe that factors in?
the whole notion of "people growing more conservative as they grow older" is a relic from the time before conservatism started becoming the party of gamergate edgelords and identity politics.
I'm not sure it was ever accurate for people who weren't already conservative.
It makes a lot more sense that, as you get older, you stop growing and learning, so as society progresses, your formerly progressive views become commonplace and eventually anachronistic.
(That's 100% what happened to my mother, who was a hippie, literally flowers in her hair, and now "just doesn't really get the whole trans thing")
And, if a person was progressive, but had some secret conservative or regressive values, those values come into sharper relief when their other views become commonplace -- and, as you get older, you're less interested in hiding your flaws and/or shameful values, so they come out more.
(That's what happened with my dad, he was in folk music groups in the 70s and then became a doctor and didn't like the idea of poor people getting some of his money (even though it was those same programs that kept his mother afloat after his father didn't come back from Korea).)
44 here. Fuck Billionaires. Give equal rights to ALL people. Kill Citizen United. Also, fuck cops. They are all bad unless they see some unjust and does something about it.
I become more disillusioned of our system and therefore increasingly more radical as I grow older.
Granted, I've never lived in a protective suburban bubble where I can stick my head in the sand and pretend that the world's biggest problem is charcoal or propane.
I was raised in that environment and still relate to the first part of your comment
Boomers: why are you bringing politics into this???
I can't recall the study right now, but there have been more than one, so it shouldn't be too hard to look this up: people typically get more liberal as they age, but society becomes even more progressive than that, so they fall behind and feel like they are becoming more conservative.
This does not include the regressive types who are trying to create Gilead, however.
The longer I live, the more injustice I see
I'm 45, and the older I get the more socialist I am.
PSA: the second amendment protects molotov cocktails.
The unspoken part about people growing more conservative as they grow older is the assumption that they're growing wealthier as they grow older. If everyone under 50 has lived paycheck to paycheck their entire lives they're not very likely to buy into trickle down Reganomics bullshit.
I lean waaaaaay more left now than ever. I used to think democrats were evil (mostly because of growing in a far right household), now I think both parties suck, but I will never vote republican again.
I'm in this picture, and i like it.
If we actually got the ability to eat the rich, I would be okay with eating meat again.
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