Boomers started out progressive then sold out. They project this onto everyone else as if it’s the natural order of things.
Same with the whole “social experiment” thing they accuse everyone of.
In fact, their childhoods were the biggest social experiment ever. Suburbs, nuclear families with mothers who needed uppers to do everything expected of them, easy access to free and cheap education and loans, etc. They act like it’s the way things always were, and that it’s the only way things should ever be.
It was all a fluke of the post war economy. Not normal, not sustainable, and trying to appease their fantasy is killing the world.
If you want to dive into the utter failure that is/was the suburban experiment, I highly recommend the book Strong Towns published by the nonprofit of the same name. Not Just Bikes has a good overview series on it, which how I found it.
The very, very oversimplified tldr is that suburbia is a giant ponzi scheme that’s on the verge (relatively speaking, within the next couple decades) of collapsing in on itself.
There’s data on this: https://d6c748xw2pzm8.cloudfront.net/prod/42800fa0-876c-11ed-b4ef-3dee38a55a6d-standard.png
Millenials, and presumably gen z, are getting less conservative with age, a complete reversal of the traditional trend. We’re also the first generation that’s poorer than our parents.
They kept the money flowing in the post-war economy, and kept propping it up with increasing globalisation, pushing the poverty onto poorer nations, but it looks like that’s stopped working and now the economy is cannibalising its own young.
I hope this sparks revolution, and I see our job right now as building the structures that will make a better world afterwards.
I think it’s less that people get more conservative as they age and more that they get more conservative as they get wealthier. Previous generations typically could get wealthier as they get older, but younger generations are being screwed over, hence the reversal.
I had more money in my savings account at 18 and made more money per hour than I have in savings and make per hour now in my 30s. I’m also driving the same car, the car I bought with my own money from working when I was 17, now that I think about it, because I can’t afford a nicer one. I literally have nothing to conserve, I own nothing, nothing was ever given to me, and it’s all being taken from me.
I can’t tell you how dismaying it is to see Gen X trending conservative even faster than previous generations.
They got to be lazy and still had enough scraps from the boomers to not have to worry about too much. They have been apathetic to most issues as a voting block and hidden under the answer of their parents and older peers wouldn’t let them do anything. And now a group of them are poorer than ever and will happily and lazily blame whoever they are told to and the other side are finally getting the positions and wealth they were locked out of and either way it leads to a conservative shit group.
You can actually see some of that angry hard swing conservativism in a group of gen Z that either got transitioned unimaginable wealth or poverty early and have turned to fascism as well to protect or try to claim that wealth.
I used to be conservative up to my mid 20s because I didn’t know enough about the world and all I had was my parents’ influence.
Now in my mid 40s I’m as progressive as they come, and I believe there are absolutely no redeeming qualities of being a “conservative” and it’s ruining society.
That’s pretty much what conservatism is. Conservativism tries to conserve something a country has and when that country males.progress they must regress to go back to what the country has.
Yeah, conservatism means protecting a society’s institutions and allowing only slow and gradual change to prevent disruption.
The Democratic Party is conservative.
Progressivism means embracing the possibilities of change and working powerfully to change society for the better.
We don’t have a progressive party.
The Republican Party isn’t even “regressive” - what it wants to “regress” to never even existed.
The Republican Party are refounders. Revolutionaries. They want to tear down American institutions to remake them in the image of an imaginary ultralibertarian “American golden age” that will eliminate democracy and ensconce themselves and their descendants as a new American robber baron oligarchy. And they don’t care what they destroy in the process.
Boomers to me in my teens: “Don’t believe anything on the internet, find actual trust worthy verifiable sources.”
Boomers to me in my 30’s: “Don’t trust the LameStream media! I found this guy on Facebook who made a real compelling video about how all Hollywood stars are transgender!”
A real compelling video about how all Hollywood stars are transgender!
Well, that’s news to me.
I know this is probably exaggerated for comedic purposes, but I’d like to see a video that actually argues that because it sounds really funny. In a completely unhinged way, of course.
I actually used that example because some old guy at a thrift store said it to me. There are actually videos of people comparing unflattering photos of celebrities saying they have an Adam’s apple, or “too broad of shoulders to be a woman”. I didn’t believe it either, but it was a big thing in small circles called transvestigation. I don’t know if it’s still being spread anymore though.
Yeah there was a whole movement back in 2008 that tried really hard to prove that Michelle Obama is a man. It’s really weird even by conspiracy standards.
People who know the truth already know that Hollywood stars can’t be trans, because they’re not real. Hollywood stars don’t exist, they’re actually all just crises actors pretending to be Hollywood stars.
Hollywood stars are all… actors? And their job is to pretend to be someone else?
I think you might be onto something here.
It’s because they don’t have the skills to assess content critically enough to avoid being taken in by nonsense and projected that onto younger people. From their perspective somehow it’s just ok now to expose yourself to media you can’t safely navigate. From the younger perspective we were being told we mustn’t consume media we had the skillset to safely navigate.
It also needs to be noted that a lot of “conservatism” is straight up fascism, mask on and mask off. If you undermine social programs while shouting about how you are protecting kids and families, you are conserving jack shit.
Right? There is a lack of values held dearly by most conservativesband just the ideas of morality they end up selling without putting in effort for it.
I actually agree we probably need a limit to imported items and imported labor because Democrats actually use both as a way to undercut the American lower working classes and keep wages low but I don’t see a Republican ever running on actually that without secretly under the table also hiring immigrant labor and not doing anything real in office.
Politics has become about grandstanding and then changing nothing to protect an economic system that made both sides rich except one side enjoys hitting people they view as “not the good ones” which means not white Christian Male.
we probably need a limit to imported items and imported labor because Democrats actually use both as a way to undercut the American lower working classes and keep wages low
Democrats favor increasing the minimum wage and are supported by most unions, so your statement doesn’t make sense. Democrats passed the “Inflation Reduction Act” added funds for the IRS to tax rich people and allows Medicare to reduce costs for expensive drugs.
Reducing America’s access to international markets will probably cause a minor recession. Just raising the minimum wage will help more directly.
Raising the minimum wage does nothing to bring back labor to the country where we see large amounts of service sector jobs we deemed as good work just a decade ago being moved overseas to areas like panama, South Africa, and Philippines.
The transportation of goods such long distances as well also causes huge pollution and cost issues with transportation costs and logistics being a nightmare to touch.
Yes I understand that a shoring up of global economics would likely cause issues but it doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
Democrats are the better party for sure but the neo-liberalism and focus on imported labor and goods is absolutely directly hurting the lower class Americans. So unless we can generate a huge increase in service jobs while increasing the pay and the amount the ultra wealthy pay towards it without impacting the lower and middle classes we need to have some push to labor as a backup.
