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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 believe the mechanism underlying that generalization was that people trend leftward who haven’t had to work for a living yet (in school on loans) or whose only jobs have been entry-level jobs where they’re treated as fungible, replaceable components. When someone has to actually interact with the economy with agency, or find people relying on them to be responsible, they end up conservative because they have things at stake and have to game out their future choices in the world they find themselves in.

This theory suggests that something is massively altering the employment landscape, keeping Millennials in entry-level or fungible job positions longer than previous generations, or otherwise keeping them from being economically agentic.

I believe the silent killer of conservatism is young people not moving out of their parents’ homes. Taking out a mortgage on a home was considered a turning point in the American Dream, and even moving in with roommates to share costs was a Big Deal.

People always propose explanations like this without considering if they have any predictive power. So going by this, I should be able to look up the countries with the lowest rates of home ownership and highest youth unrmployment and find the wokest population, right? Do you think that will be true?

Remember, we’re talking about American conservatism: market economics, high freedoms, granular locality of political decisionmaking. Try looking up the counties in America with the lowest rates of home ownership and highest youth unemployment.

I think that’s Spain, which is hurtling leftwards in a vaguely woke way, although their narrative is different for obvious historical reasons.

The bigger test is France- declining real incomes, an extremely Trumpy right that’s doing better with the young than the old, and large ethnic tensions.

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