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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Let's start off (unless someone fires a link earlier) with this one: Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics

“If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” So said Winston Churchill. Or US president John Adams. Or perhaps King Oscar II of Sweden. Variations of this aphorism have circulated since the 18th century, underscoring the well-established rule that as people grow older, they tend to become more conservative.

The pattern has held remarkably firm. By my calculations, members of Britain’s “silent generation”, born between 1928 and 1945, were five percentage points less conservative than the national average at age 35, but around five points more conservative by age 70. The “baby boomer” generation traced the same path, and “Gen X”, born between 1965 and 1980, are now following suit.

Millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — started out on the same trajectory, but then something changed. The shift has striking implications for the UK’s Conservatives and US Republicans, who can no longer simply rely on their base being replenished as the years pass.

The article goes on to show that previous generations in UK and US have indeed formed a remarkably similar pattern of starting out voting for left side main parties (Labour/Dems) and moving rightwards (to Tories/GOP) with age, but Millennials aren't doing that, and are if anything sticking firmer with the left side parties with age.

When it comes to Britain, in particular, I suspect that Brexit may have a lot to do with this. For Millennial Remainers, in particular, the whole thing has evidently been a horrorshow; from following various FBPE types and hearing from friends who have lived in the UK, the thinking basically goes; for your entire life your country has belonged to the EU, which has given you ease of travel and has seemed to be without issues, and suddenly a bunch of (mostly) Tory-voting boomers decides to take the country out of the Union, and no-one still has managed to explained to you exactly how Britain has benefitted from this, or what fundamental reason for this there even was for the whole Brexit, beyond "Well, it's not as big a disaster as Remoaners are claiming when you look into it" (or, possibly, "Fuck you, Remoaner! Elitist! Take back control!")

With the Tories then increasingly becoming the party of Brexit, it would be little wonder if such types would continue to give Tories the wide berth, even if they start getting to the age where traditionally Tories start becoming more and more attractive, as an option.

Of course, US and UK are a bit expectional in how strongly there's an age-related left/right split with young voting for left parties and the old voting for right parties. It would be interesting to see if this replicates in other countries where Millennials and younger voters have recently been trending rightwards and where centre-left parties have for some time been more popular among the old than the youth, like Sweden. (Indeed, I already saw on Twitter that the effect is not replicating in non-Anglophone West.)

I’ve long had a pet theory that the future of politics would look like a young vs old war for the spoils, but that’s not what’s happening in non-anglosphere countries with similar demographic trends.

So it seems to me like there’s something distinctive about the Anglo sphere causing it, and well, millennials are largely worse off than their parents were at their age while having a strong feeling that it isn’t their fault. I’m sure that’s universal outside of economies that are growing fast, but one of the distinguishing features of the Anglo sphere, politically, seems to me to be this idea that bad outcomes are somehow your fault- for using substances, dropping out of school too early, not working hard enough, having kids out of wedlock, whatever- on the right. Whereas anglosphere left wingers see it as a systemic problem- of course things aren’t working out for you, you’re black/gay/a woman/whatever. Obviously liberals have a concept of what comes around goes around, but it’s more like karma where evil people get their comeuppance, not a conservative idea where people who make bad decisions out of laziness or stupidity get bad results. And obviously one of those comports with the millennial narrative better than the other, and the demographic of millennials excluded from the second narrative- white men- voted Republican at every age.

Relatedly, one ideological gap between both most US/UK conservatives and Continental European/Asian/Latin American conservatives is said to be individualism. US conservativism in particular has long been low tax individualism: my choice, my way, my freedom. UK conservativism has always had that element and it came increasingly important from Thatcher onwards. At least in Continental Europe, which I know relatively well, conservativism has more of a "conform, do your duty, and adopt our Culture (with a capital C)" tendency, with a tendency towards caution and rules. These are rare things that Merkel and Le Pen have in common with each other, but not Trump or Johnson.

Personally, I prefer individualistic conservativism, but I'm a libertarian not a conservative. And in uncertain times, I can see why most people would prefer various types of cautious collectivism over daring individualism. To some extent, the older I get and the more I want to "settle down", the more I feel the same way.

One might argue that even individualistic US conservatism has often worked the best when its individualistic themes have successfully been recast as safety issues. Ie. opposition to gun control takes off once the argument becomes that widespread easy gun ownership actually makes the society safer (at an individual level - you can own a gun to keep your house safe from criminals - and at a societal level in a more-guns-less-crime way). Low taxes are, of course, always popular in their own way among individuals who pay a lot (or at least a fair amount) of taxes, but a low-tax policy can also be portrayed as an economically irresponsible economy-destabilizing budget-buster, especially if it is not coupled with also-unpopular cuts; however, this dilemma was momentarily solved once the argument was found that it was possible to cut taxes and increase revenues (whether that actually happened or not). And so on.

One might argue that even individualistic US conservatism has often worked the best when its individualistic themes have successfully been recast as safety issues. Ie. opposition to gun control takes off once the argument becomes that widespread easy gun ownership actually makes the society safer (at an individual level - you can own a gun to keep your house safe from criminals - and at a societal level in a more-guns-less-crime way).

This definitely would make the argument for guns easier if it were true but then you're depending on something that may or more not be true for your coalition to hold together. And people like me who don't really care at all whether guns increase or decrease near term safety are stuck watching the policy hinge on a debate that seems entirely orthogonal to the actual reason 2A was put in the constitution.

And, as usual in the USA, terminal values partisans have hijacked the public debate and are now feuding with each other about who’s side benefits are more important.

You saw this in the school funding debate as well, where Youngkin promised large pay raises to teachers(what the public actually wanted) without also enacting the rest of the progressive education agenda(which is what the people writing education funding requests that talk about poor teacher pay actually want).

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