DougJ wrote earlier:
If I were a conservative, I’d be pretty fucking scared by the fact that, not only do young people vote overwhelming Democratic in general elections, they also just voted overwhelmingly for a Democratic socialist in the primary.
They are too stupid to recognize it, but they should actually be overjoyed by this. It means that when these conservatives are elderly, they will probably be treated far more compassionately than the conservatives have been treating the poor.
jon
Nah. They’ll resent it anyway, because the wifi in the old-folks home won’t be good enough.
cmorenc
Remember however that many seemingly open-minded progressive-leaning youth evolve over their lifetimes into tight-assed angry conservative-leaning old codgers. For example, look what happened to too many WASP baby boomers of the Woodstock generation. Who now have lawns those kids of today had damn well better stay off of.
Calouste
Haven’t read anything here yet about Erick bin Erick’s conversion:
peach flavored shampoo
Depends….gotta believe that Bernie supporter that broke down and had her tow truck driver decline to help based on politics, I’m guessing she may be a bit less than helpful to conservatives that begin to drool and forget their names. Can’t say I’d blame her at all.
MattF
@Calouste: And Jen Rubin says some sensible things in her latest WaPo post. Assuming, of course, that ‘fixing’ conservative politics is a desirable goal.
Bob2
Keep Your Goddamn Government Hands Off My Medicare!
Mnemosyne
@cmorenc:
Having met those allegedly liberal Woodstock-goers, though, their “liberalism” always seemed skin-deep and was immediately discarded as soon as it ran into some kind of racial issue. My friend’s Woodstock-attending parents were ginormous assholes to our mutual friend who is Indian-American.
I do wonder if the “natural” conservatism of older people will stop happening as the generation that grew up during the Civil Rights Era dies off. Gen X (my generation) will probably be the last one that still clings to the racism of their youth, and even that’s less true for people younger than me (I was born in 1969).
Jeffro
@cmorenc:
Yeah, I don’t know about that…it’s no more ‘data’ than your statement, but everyone I know (even right-leaning family/friends) seem to be getting more open minded on a host of social issues, and many seem to have a bigger-picture perspective on politics than when we were in our 20s.
I do know I’m not happy with my GenXer cohort and its tendency (again, this is not data but based on a number of FB friends and others) towards IGMFY air-quote “libertarianism”. I attribute it to spending our formative years during the Ray-gun era, but still…that’s no excuse for turning off their brains.
gwangung
@Mnemosyne: *shrug* from experience, I know a fair number of liberal and progressive types have some decidedly racial animus lurking underneath. Never take a person’s politics at face value—it’s just a survival technique.
Anoniminous
@cmorenc:
That’s the old self-servicing Conservative Myth. The reality is much more complex and interesting.
The politics of American generations: How age affects attitudes and voting behavior:
TL;DR: “Pew Research Center surveys over the past two decades also have found compelling evidence that generations carry with them the imprint of early political experiences.”
Chris
@cmorenc:
I thought the Woodstockers were always a minority even in their own generation.
The image of the anti-war hippie of 1970 turning into the Reagan-voting yuppie of 1980 is a popular one, but I’m not sure it was really all that widespread.
Luthe
@jon: You assume they will know how to use the wi-fi.
currants
@Mnemosyne: Maybe, but I have a feeling that for certain geographic areas, or in areas that are still completely segregated because there are only people of one color in the whole county (or 99.8%–think rural white), that die-off is going to take a lot longer.
Anoniminous
Woodstock was a rock concert. It was a Counter-Culture event – if you want to put a label on it – and had zippo to do with politics. And if everybody who now claims to have been at Woodstock was at Woodstock they would have been packed in, three deep, like sardines in a tin.
Chris
@Anoniminous:
Anecdotally, my own family suggests this is true.
Dad was born in the early fifties, the first political struggle that he really paid attention to was civil rights. He turned out liberal and admits that this is still his make-or-break issue. (Voted for both parties for much of his life, but straight ticket Democrat from 2000 onwards as the Repubs drifted further and further out of reality). His brother, on the other hand, is nearly a decade younger and your archetypical fucking right winger. Never heard what caused his political development, but it’s not hard to guess that watching the chaos of the late sixties and early seventies had the same effect on him that the civil rights struggle did on Dad, and that he reacted the same way most other white people did.
There’s a similar disparity with me and my sister, I think. Both Democrats, but she’s a much more centrist one than I am especially on economics (I’m basically a socialist, though I’m happy to vote straight ticket Dem) and was even McCain-curious in 2000 (if emphatically not in 2008). But again, there’s a near-decade gap between us. She grew to adulthood in the nineties, got out of college at the very end of Clinton’s presidency. I grew up in the 2000s and was part of the very first graduating class to leave college during the Great Recession. I think that’s probably done a lot to shape our differences.
And then if you go back in time in the other direction, there’s my recently departed grandma, who was probably the most left-wing member of the family (on just about every issue from war to economics to civil rights) even by the time of her death. I don’t know exactly why, but I suspect that having grown to adulthood in the New Deal years may have contributed.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Calouste:
What the holy hell is happening over there? I’ve heard from commenters here that Red State’s been a tsunami of wingnut tears, but is it about to turn into the new Little Green Footballs? Because that sounds… rational.
Chris
@Anoniminous:
Vampire # 1: “When I kill the Slayer, it’ll be the greatest thing since the Crucifixion! And I’d know… I was there.”
Spike: “You were there? Please! If every vampire who said they were at the Crucifixion was actually there, it would’ve been like Woodstock!”
/obligatoryBuffyquote
Villago Delenda Est
John, remember how the 1% paid back FDR for saving them all from the gallows during the 30’s.
These people cannot be gracious, they cannot have perspective. They are so filed with the most foul bile imaginable.
Calouste
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: I only follow RedState second or third hand, but it seems that, just like our esteemed bloghost a little over a decade ago, they realize they have been taken for marks all along.
As far as I can see it’s the open racism that opened their eyes.
Frankensteinbeck
@Calouste:
Great is the desperation of a wingnut who has to resort to the TRUTH to defend his dogma. Worry not, my friends. Whence Erick of Erick goeth, it ain’t the Democratic Party. ‘I am shocked! SHOCKED! That racism is going on in this establishment!’ has been part of his schtick for years.
Mnemosyne
@Chris:
It’s so hard to say. I graduated from college a couple of years into Bill Clinton’s first term, and most of the people around me are liberals who stayed liberal. Some of them (including me) have become even more liberal. So I think we’re talking about microclimates and general trends.
I do think the whole “people naturally get more conservative as they get older” thing is either bullshit or depended heavily on the Republicans not losing their damn minds and going all-in on tax cutting and racism.
NonyNony
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Erick son of Erick has spent his entire adult life believing that he was part of the elite of the GOP and that he was climbing to power by fleecing the racist rubes.
Turns out he was wrong – the racist rubes are in the drivers seat and have been using guys like him as the dupes. That’s got to sting.
sunny raines
one of THE salient features of conservatives is the total absence of empathy in their character makeup. So their being overjoyed at the prospect of society ensuring a minimally decent life for them would never occur to them, nor would they ever recognize that they personally are receiving support form society even though generally they’re the biggest recipients of society’s care.
Soylent Green
People who hold views at the extreme ends of the curve can be prone to flipping to the other extreme. In college my brother was a Marxist antiwar radical and today is a belligerent Trump-loving wingnut.
Enhanced Voting Techinques
@Calouste:
and it should be noted that Cruz dropped out of the race right after that. Like Cruz was worried that some proof was about to come out about Cruz’s father and the JFK assassination.
Baud’s parents have never been involved in a conspiracy to murder a sitting US president. Just saying
EDIT: “Successful conspiracy”, forgot about that, sorry.
L&DinSLT
@cmorenc: Oh for crying out loud. Today is my 64th birthday. My husband is 69. In our minds we’re still 28, although when he’s in a mood he can act +/- 18. Not all boomers are the stereotype!
Keith G
@Mnemosyne:
Are you generalizing that one incident to an entire generational subgroup? Is that fair? What if the parents were African American or a Lesbian couple? Would you be so quick to pull out that broad brush? Your use of ‘those’ and ‘their’ implicates a lot of folks.
The group in question had some social and intellectual diversity; some were righteously liberal and some were as stupidly bigoted as individuals could be.
L&DinSLT
ETA: My husband has been smoking pot for 50 years!
Tom Q
I think people’s DEGREE of liberalism may fade as adulthood/offspring/mortgages come into play, but most of the people I still know from college (’69-73) have been loyally Democratic all the way. The truth is, as noted above, the Woodstock generation was bifurcated — the college crowd definitely leaned liberal if not yippie, but the actual majority of that age cohort voted for Nixon in ’72/Ford in ’76 etc.
The fact that younger voters skew so heavily Democratic is very encouraging for the near future (especially as they’ll be replacing the most right-wing part of the electorate, the Fox-adoring old white crowd). These young folk may be less Bernie/more Hillary the older they get, but the idea they’ll ever go full-on Cruz is very hard to swallow.
Tom Q
@Soylent Green: A great Robert Frost quote I heard back around 1970:
I never dared be radical when young for fear I’d turn conservative when old.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@L&DinSLT:
LOL. I salute him!
Enhanced Voting Techinques
@Tom Q:
Truth to that. The people I have know who went left to right were radicals who turned into wingnuts. Sort of like the most strident Atheists were former fundementalists.
burnspbesq
@Anoniminous:
That would explain why the Berniacs piss me off. I was a McGovern Kid; I’ve seen what happens to Glorious Crusades.
schrodinger's cat
@Enhanced Voting Techinques: That description fits husband kitteh’s uncle in India who has become a total Modi bhakt. Some people just side with the biggest bully on the block.
Chris
@Enhanced Voting Techinques:
There’s a category of converts for whom the conversion simply consists of taking the exact same degree of zealotry and intolerance and realigning it to what they now understand is the real truth.
feebog
It is a myth that people grow more conservative as they grow older. Yes, some people change their views over time, but it goes in both directions. It is much more common for folks to form party loyalties early and stick with them throughout their life. Case in point, my dad, gone a year and a half now. He was always a Democrat and always held liberal views. How liberal? Well he changed his birthday because he shared it with Richard Nixon, that’s how liberal.
SiubhanDuinne
@L&DinSLT:
Today you are the cube of four,
The square of eight, and so much more!
Power six of number two,
With black and white, a chessboard, you.
The cube of four, the square of eight,
A number fit to celebrate!
Perfect cube and perfect square:
Such perfection’s rather rare.
A million, you, in binary;
In Roman terms, LXIV.
Are you feeling rather keen?
Quadruple, then, the sweet sixteen.
In 64 A.D., I learned,
Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
North latitude of 64°
Knocks upon the Arctic door.
McCartney (music), Lennon (sage)
Wrote famously about your age.
Play sixty-four fast notes as favours:
Hemidemisemiquavers.
L&DinSLT,
Sincere congrats, to you from me.
satby
@Soylent Green: @Tom Q: @Enhanced Voting Techinques: That the extremes of the far right and far left actually share the same needs for belonging and affirmation and are closer to each other in authoritarian groupthink is the premise of Eric Hoffer’ s book The True Believer
john fremont
@Tom Q: Oh, so that explains David Horowitz going from Ramparts to editor of Front Page.
Calliope Jane
To honor my grandfather, who died only last month at 95, I have to share that he was a lifelong Republican, who finally changed his registration to Dem in 2006 b/c of how awful the republicans were being on education, etc. And he was an elected official (county), still. And he was a big Hillary Clinton supporter, too. I have to think he’s irritated that he’s not going to have the chance to vote for her.