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.
Formally progressive ideas (like mixed race marriage) are no-brainers today
One thing I have definitely observed over the years.
It seems only the left comes up with new ideas and so, even when they don't have political power, they still move society forward.
And yes, there are backlash and temporary regressions, but overall, no free country seems to be moving towards old, conservative ideas.
For humanity, the only way seems forward. Towards the newer and better ideas.
Countries don't always stay free, though. Look at Hong Kong, Russia and Hungary.
Russia wasn't free for very long.
But it was. Yeah, it's more likely to happen to a country that's only been more-or-less free for about 15 years, but hardly impossible in older democracies.
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.
Arguably, conservatives used to have more brain than today. But maybe they just had slightly more decorum.
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!
Please no gravity deniers 💀
I dunno, man. Gravity denial seems like a self-correcting problem, so maybe we'd be better off if there were more of them.
It’s just a theory.
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.
Got me in the first half, not gonna lie
First 95%
I agree that we shouldn’t treat everyone equally. Some people need special care, and denying that is being an asshole.
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.)
Yeah, it's super evident when the RIAA and MPAA sent ICE to New Zealand to raid the Kim Dotcom estate on grounds of media piracy. They actually used other ambiguous charges like conspiracy and espionage which are what the US legal system uses when they don't like what you're doing but don't have a specific crime against it. It's been over a decade and its still in court.
ICE also was raiding Florida repair shops for servicing Apple products without an Apple license, one of the events that drove the current right-to-repair movement.
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.
Yes, starting with 2S is part of Canada's move toward Truth & Reconciliation with our local First Nations, to recognize how the intersectionality of racism further marginalizes Two Spirit First Nations people.
Two spirit ig?
Hot take, 2slgbtqia+ is cringe. I vote we should keep it at lgbt+ or lgbtq+ stop making the community sound unapproachable and weird.
I get that, but 2SLGBTQ+ is the most politically acceptable term in Canada. It's used by politicians and in education, and the 2S being at the start is a conscious act of reconciliation with our First Nations.
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.
The only morons who go that way think they're next to make 10 million a year.
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.
One of my few lucky moments was buy a home in the mid 2010’s. I feel so bad for people now, but rather than some ridiculous “let’s pull up the ladder” mentality that Boomers and most older Gen X seem to have, I try to vote for politicians who want to return us to a sensible housing market.
In no way should banks and their LLC shadow corps be allowed to own hundreds of thousands of residential houses.
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:
Conservative politicians and voters have played a big part in that realization
Even shitty people still should get medical care and such
Even if you don't care from a moral perspective, it's a net good for society if people have housing and healthcare and are able to contribute, rather than being forced out into the streets to die.
Also if we don't apply things like rights and medical care to everyone, then someone has the power to choose who gets them and who doesn't. And that's a complete nonstarter
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?
Liberals are right wing outside of USA. And in some places in some time conservatives are left. Conservative and liberal is like warm amd soft - they are not opposites. Opposite of conservative are reformists and revolutioners.
Ok, call it whatever you want, I'm not really into labels. For context I believe in universal basic income, socialized healthcare, prison as a tool for rehabilitation instead of punishment, strong government regulations for corporations, high speed Internet access as a state run utility, and a bunch of other stuff that I don't feel like listing out.
I would argue conservatism is mostly driven by fear. I would also argue older people tend to be more fearful since they have more to lose than most.
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).)
The funny part is that conservatism has been on the losing of human progress for thousands of years. Over and over and over again, the same political, social and economic patterns play out. Something disruptive happens, conservatives recoil from it, progressives embrace it, conservatives eventually get pulled along kicking and screaming, often violently.
I just don't understand how people can read even a little bit of history and not see that conservatism is doomed to lose every battle it fights until it finally destroys everything for good.
You're ignoring the times when the conservatives do succeed in killing everyone they hate.
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
You feel like you stuck your head in the sand?
No, just raised in the suburbs
Therefore, you're not who I described in my comment.
I was just trying to offer the perspective to others that not all people in suburbs were like that. I wasn't trying to offend or come at you or anything.
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.
It's the whole "I was with it" thing from Simpsons.
Boomers: why are you bringing politics into this???
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.
That's why so many americans want gas station in walking distance!
Maybe in the future it is short-circuited car batteries.
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.
This is right where I am. The funny (and ofren annoying) part is, if I talk with someone from either side they automatically assume I'm the polar opposite of them. People on the far left thing I'm a trump loving maga hat wearing Republican because I don't love Biden or a lot of the democratic policies. People on the right think I'm left wing extremist that wants to abort all babies and murder Jesus Christ with the LGBTQ+ militia because I don't love everything Republican. You simply cannot exist in the middle with most people. I can't get these people to realize I just hate all of them lol
People who assume you're MAGA because you don't like Biden aren't the far left. Most of the far left doesn't like Biden either. Dude is a centrist placator. I will say he's better than the alternative, but that's only because the alternative is a demented ultra-grifter and his cult of fascist rubes.
I saw a video of some dude fermenting mountain dew, and he said the end result was surprisingly good. If fermentation can make mountain dew drinkable, I wouldn't be surprised if it had the same effect on the blood of the rich.
If we actually got the ability to eat the rich, I would be okay with eating meat again.
I am over 40 and I just keep going further left
Right?
The older I get, the more I realize how much I've been screwed by the older generations, and because of that, my positions on issues have sort of "forked", having both a "what I think should reasonably be our course of action as a democratic republic" and "what I'd do if I were supreme overlord"...but both of those forks skew further left now than they did when I was in my teens.
Grim acceptance of the reality of our current sad state of affairs has led some of my "do what's feasible and don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good" positions to be fairly moderate...but for every one of those positions, there's a "supreme overlord" opinion that basically consists of "they're a blight upon mankind and should be dragged through the streets to a public place where they're thrown in a pillory for a day or two then hanged, with their assets liquidated and the funds used to undo their damages".
Me at 20 "I think we can improve things a bit by making some adjustments"
me at 30, much more privileged in general "Ok so I think we should probably start by offering everyone with an investment property execution or voluntary collectivisation of everything they own"
Haven't hit the moltov throwing antifa stage but yeah.
Give it some time
I hope I’ll never become like my bigot father
I have grown more progressive in my 30's and 40's, but looking around me, I feel like I have no choice but to acknowledge that, at least here in the US, conservatism has won for at least the next generation.
The strategy of buying up both ruling parties worked exceedingly well for the 1%.
Any yet we are past the post of neo-feudalism which I find infuriating. This should be the political jihad being fought for votes in a democracy.
I was ultra conservative, born in Alabama to religious nutters, and don't believe there is any representation for the Left in the USA.
At least we can suffer together :)
Solidarity
It's a tough call. I was as liberal as it gets on my 20s, now I'm in my 40s. I see a lot of people bitching about inequality, injustice etc. that acquired a ton of student loan debt to major in subjects that would very clearly not land them a job.
Socially, still very liberal. Fiscally? Stop wasting my tax dollars on anything that's not defense or legit scientific research.
counterpoint: broad educations and different perspectives enrich society and keep culture alive.
I studied physics and still ended up not getting a job in it, but in a world of people educated only like me I'd have learned so much less about all the things that bring me joy. People contribute in more ways than working for dollars. They give you insight in conversations, expose you to new ideas/experiences, make the world interesting with their own styles and interpretation, challenge dogmatic practices or cultural norms.
Also just like using your brain on stuff helps you grow and develop, and people ought to be allowed to do that even if their interests are a bit strange or less "useful", it's part of growing up. It's not like we're strapped for resources, it's just that like 100 people own half the world.
Believe it or not, I have several degrees in physics. I worked in the field for a bit then left for industry. I don't disagree with the premise that diverse educational backgrounds can be a good thing, they are more often than not a fine pathway to being a very interesting bartender buried in crippling student debt. Why not double major in something useful on top of Art History?
what is useful? Did I use my knowledge of polaritons when working for an insurance company? Perhaps the details of etching -OH terminated diamond under esem helped me when I was maintaining servers, no no it must have been linear alg that enabled me to tutor kids in ochem.
like my degree hasn't helped me to much explicitly, but it was fun. sometimes answering peoples' questions about physics is fulfilling to them, and the act of learning crap helped fill me out (including realising how utterly naive I was at assuming scientific knowledge was more valueable than other kinds).
You see a problem in our society: that we only reward a very narrow subset of kinds of labour and grossly unevenly at that and you blame people for studying something that interested them. Why? Would we be better off if they were buying up apartments and renting them to an underclass? that's something that pays highly. Maybe we need more gunsmiths! afterall inventing the machine gun reduced death and destruction during war. Perhaps instead they should have studied finance, because we have far too few insurance brokers?
I'm not blaming anyone for studying anything. I'm simply stating that the bill for that education will come due and it might be a good idea to have acquired a skill to help pay it if the projected return on investment is non-existent.
Ever have a conversation with people in your local service industry? I live in a major US city and this is a common story:
liked art
got into art institute of ___
now have 200k of student debt
didn't finish, now work at this bar and another to pay off the debt
still dabbles in art but can't get anything off the ground
Do you think they'd have advised a younger version of themselves to do something else?
A nice thing about Physics: quantitative reasoning is a highly valued skill in many paying jobs and something you have to acquire along the way to learning things like QED. The end result of knowing, say, if a neutrino has mass isnt terribly useful.
Quite a naive (and also stereotypically American) perspective, really. Just ignoring major parts of the economy, like the music, film, book publishing industries etc. They are all based on people doing anything that's not "legit" according to this guy. Also a smell of a very naive concept of "legit science" lurks behind this. Clearly someone who has no clue about how science works.
How many successful filmmakers, authors and musicians do you know personally? Let's keep the bar real low: ones that can feed themselves and retire without supplemental income from a spouse that does something more pragmatic?
I was a Physicist before leaving for industry. What would you like to know about how science works and how it is funded?
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.
I mean, you say that, but...
I have seen alot but that comes as a shock to me
One thing I have definitely observed over the years.
It seems only the left comes up with new ideas and so, even when they don't have political power, they still move society forward.
And yes, there are backlash and temporary regressions, but overall, no free country seems to be moving towards old, conservative ideas.
For humanity, the only way seems forward. Towards the newer and better ideas.
Countries don't always stay free, though. Look at Hong Kong, Russia and Hungary.
Russia wasn't free for very long.
But it was. Yeah, it's more likely to happen to a country that's only been more-or-less free for about 15 years, but hardly impossible in older democracies.
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.
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!
Please no gravity deniers 💀
I dunno, man. Gravity denial seems like a self-correcting problem, so maybe we'd be better off if there were more of them.
It’s just a theory.
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.
Got me in the first half, not gonna lie
First 95%
I agree that we shouldn’t treat everyone equally. Some people need special care, and denying that is being an asshole.
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.
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.)
Yeah, it's super evident when the RIAA and MPAA sent ICE to New Zealand to raid the Kim Dotcom estate on grounds of media piracy. They actually used other ambiguous charges like conspiracy and espionage which are what the US legal system uses when they don't like what you're doing but don't have a specific crime against it. It's been over a decade and its still in court.
ICE also was raiding Florida repair shops for servicing Apple products without an Apple license, one of the events that drove the current right-to-repair movement.
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.
What's the "2S" for?
Two Spirit
Yes, starting with 2S is part of Canada's move toward Truth & Reconciliation with our local First Nations, to recognize how the intersectionality of racism further marginalizes Two Spirit First Nations people.
Two spirit ig?
Hot take, 2slgbtqia+ is cringe. I vote we should keep it at lgbt+ or lgbtq+ stop making the community sound unapproachable and weird.
I get that, but 2SLGBTQ+ is the most politically acceptable term in Canada. It's used by politicians and in education, and the 2S being at the start is a conscious act of reconciliation with our First Nations.
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.
The only morons who go that way think they're next to make 10 million a year.
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.
One of my few lucky moments was buy a home in the mid 2010’s. I feel so bad for people now, but rather than some ridiculous “let’s pull up the ladder” mentality that Boomers and most older Gen X seem to have, I try to vote for politicians who want to return us to a sensible housing market.
In no way should banks and their LLC shadow corps be allowed to own hundreds of thousands of residential houses.
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:
Also if we don't apply things like rights and medical care to everyone, then someone has the power to choose who gets them and who doesn't. And that's a complete nonstarter
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?
Liberals are right wing outside of USA. And in some places in some time conservatives are left. Conservative and liberal is like warm amd soft - they are not opposites. Opposite of conservative are reformists and revolutioners.
Ok, call it whatever you want, I'm not really into labels. For context I believe in universal basic income, socialized healthcare, prison as a tool for rehabilitation instead of punishment, strong government regulations for corporations, high speed Internet access as a state run utility, and a bunch of other stuff that I don't feel like listing out.
I would argue conservatism is mostly driven by fear. I would also argue older people tend to be more fearful since they have more to lose than most.
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).)
The funny part is that conservatism has been on the losing of human progress for thousands of years. Over and over and over again, the same political, social and economic patterns play out. Something disruptive happens, conservatives recoil from it, progressives embrace it, conservatives eventually get pulled along kicking and screaming, often violently.
I just don't understand how people can read even a little bit of history and not see that conservatism is doomed to lose every battle it fights until it finally destroys everything for good.
You're ignoring the times when the conservatives do succeed in killing everyone they hate.
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
You feel like you stuck your head in the sand?
No, just raised in the suburbs
Therefore, you're not who I described in my comment.
I was just trying to offer the perspective to others that not all people in suburbs were like that. I wasn't trying to offend or come at you or anything.
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.
It's the whole "I was with it" thing from Simpsons.
Boomers: why are you bringing politics into this???
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.
That's why so many americans want gas station in walking distance!
Maybe in the future it is short-circuited car batteries.
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.
This is right where I am. The funny (and ofren annoying) part is, if I talk with someone from either side they automatically assume I'm the polar opposite of them. People on the far left thing I'm a trump loving maga hat wearing Republican because I don't love Biden or a lot of the democratic policies. People on the right think I'm left wing extremist that wants to abort all babies and murder Jesus Christ with the LGBTQ+ militia because I don't love everything Republican. You simply cannot exist in the middle with most people. I can't get these people to realize I just hate all of them lol
People who assume you're MAGA because you don't like Biden aren't the far left. Most of the far left doesn't like Biden either. Dude is a centrist placator. I will say he's better than the alternative, but that's only because the alternative is a demented ultra-grifter and his cult of fascist rubes.
I'm in this picture, and i like it.
I have become more conservative over the years...
Ferment the rich!
I saw a video of some dude fermenting mountain dew, and he said the end result was surprisingly good. If fermentation can make mountain dew drinkable, I wouldn't be surprised if it had the same effect on the blood of the rich.
If we actually got the ability to eat the rich, I would be okay with eating meat again.
I am over 40 and I just keep going further left
Right?
The older I get, the more I realize how much I've been screwed by the older generations, and because of that, my positions on issues have sort of "forked", having both a "what I think should reasonably be our course of action as a democratic republic" and "what I'd do if I were supreme overlord"...but both of those forks skew further left now than they did when I was in my teens.
Grim acceptance of the reality of our current sad state of affairs has led some of my "do what's feasible and don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good" positions to be fairly moderate...but for every one of those positions, there's a "supreme overlord" opinion that basically consists of "they're a blight upon mankind and should be dragged through the streets to a public place where they're thrown in a pillory for a day or two then hanged, with their assets liquidated and the funds used to undo their damages".
Me at 20 "I think we can improve things a bit by making some adjustments"
me at 30, much more privileged in general "Ok so I think we should probably start by offering everyone with an investment property execution or voluntary collectivisation of everything they own"
Haven't hit the moltov throwing antifa stage but yeah.
Give it some time
I hope I’ll never become like my bigot father
I have grown more progressive in my 30's and 40's, but looking around me, I feel like I have no choice but to acknowledge that, at least here in the US, conservatism has won for at least the next generation.
The strategy of buying up both ruling parties worked exceedingly well for the 1%.
Screw that, I've got empathy unlike conservatives.
53 year old me.
I'm 60 now and lean WAY over to the left
I like the pic, anybody has a link?
A reverse google image search gave me this: https://www.deviantart.com/suddenlyabird/art/Molly-Tov-Eat-The-Rich-Red-Black-617071486 Seems to be the original, but I don't know for sure.
https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/12b65822-2b40-4752-9f05-ed18d5e32fc1.jpeg
Any yet we are past the post of neo-feudalism which I find infuriating. This should be the political jihad being fought for votes in a democracy.
I was ultra conservative, born in Alabama to religious nutters, and don't believe there is any representation for the Left in the USA.
At least we can suffer together :)
Solidarity
It's a tough call. I was as liberal as it gets on my 20s, now I'm in my 40s. I see a lot of people bitching about inequality, injustice etc. that acquired a ton of student loan debt to major in subjects that would very clearly not land them a job.
Socially, still very liberal. Fiscally? Stop wasting my tax dollars on anything that's not defense or legit scientific research.
counterpoint: broad educations and different perspectives enrich society and keep culture alive.
I studied physics and still ended up not getting a job in it, but in a world of people educated only like me I'd have learned so much less about all the things that bring me joy. People contribute in more ways than working for dollars. They give you insight in conversations, expose you to new ideas/experiences, make the world interesting with their own styles and interpretation, challenge dogmatic practices or cultural norms.
Also just like using your brain on stuff helps you grow and develop, and people ought to be allowed to do that even if their interests are a bit strange or less "useful", it's part of growing up. It's not like we're strapped for resources, it's just that like 100 people own half the world.
Believe it or not, I have several degrees in physics. I worked in the field for a bit then left for industry. I don't disagree with the premise that diverse educational backgrounds can be a good thing, they are more often than not a fine pathway to being a very interesting bartender buried in crippling student debt. Why not double major in something useful on top of Art History?
what is useful? Did I use my knowledge of polaritons when working for an insurance company? Perhaps the details of etching -OH terminated diamond under esem helped me when I was maintaining servers, no no it must have been linear alg that enabled me to tutor kids in ochem.
like my degree hasn't helped me to much explicitly, but it was fun. sometimes answering peoples' questions about physics is fulfilling to them, and the act of learning crap helped fill me out (including realising how utterly naive I was at assuming scientific knowledge was more valueable than other kinds).
You see a problem in our society: that we only reward a very narrow subset of kinds of labour and grossly unevenly at that and you blame people for studying something that interested them. Why? Would we be better off if they were buying up apartments and renting them to an underclass? that's something that pays highly. Maybe we need more gunsmiths! afterall inventing the machine gun reduced death and destruction during war. Perhaps instead they should have studied finance, because we have far too few insurance brokers?
I'm not blaming anyone for studying anything. I'm simply stating that the bill for that education will come due and it might be a good idea to have acquired a skill to help pay it if the projected return on investment is non-existent.
Ever have a conversation with people in your local service industry? I live in a major US city and this is a common story:
Do you think they'd have advised a younger version of themselves to do something else?
A nice thing about Physics: quantitative reasoning is a highly valued skill in many paying jobs and something you have to acquire along the way to learning things like QED. The end result of knowing, say, if a neutrino has mass isnt terribly useful.
Quite a naive (and also stereotypically American) perspective, really. Just ignoring major parts of the economy, like the music, film, book publishing industries etc. They are all based on people doing anything that's not "legit" according to this guy. Also a smell of a very naive concept of "legit science" lurks behind this. Clearly someone who has no clue about how science works.
How many successful filmmakers, authors and musicians do you know personally? Let's keep the bar real low: ones that can feed themselves and retire without supplemental income from a spouse that does something more pragmatic?
I was a Physicist before leaving for industry. What would you like to know about how science works and how it is funded?
What is legit science?