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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
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'm going to go back to my theory that Conservatism is returning to what things were like in your lifetime or your parents lifetime, and Reaction is pushing back before living memory. I've argued it extensively here before.
The net result is that where before you turned 40 and got comfortable and started to say "Gee, I'd like the world not to change too much, I like it the way it is..." there was a party you voted for. Nixon, Reagan, Dubya all won elections in the US promising less change, keep things the same. I'm not sure that much of the modern Right Wing today promises keeping things the same, keeping them how they were when I grew up. Many seem to urge us on towards change, towards tearing up the social contract I grew up with, towards Retvrn to something I don't know, something new and scary. When I was a kid abortion was legal, my elementary school principle was Black, my dad's best friend on the charity board was gay. If you try to abolish the policies that allowed those things, or if I am convinced that you will even if you won't, my natural conservatism won't help you, it will hurt you. At times, there is no conservative option on the ballot in American politics.
I think this jibes with your Brexit theory of young Brits: traveling the EU and working or partying as they pleased was their birthright, it's what they grew up with. You can't sell conservative to them and say, oh we're going to destroy the world you grew up in. That's a contradiction in terms.
Millennials won't, can't!, become conservative if you don't put conservatism on the ballot.
Abortion is still legal in the majority of states
You think the GOP hates black principals? Wha
Gays can’t work for charities either?
I’m not sure what your arguing here. Do most millennials think republicans are the worst version MSNBC portrays them as? That’s depressing but would explain a lot
I've written extensively on the recent gubernatorial election in my home state, the state in which three generations of my family have been born and where my wife and I own a house up the street from where I grew up, where I've been registered as a Republican since the day I turned 18. Between Mastriano and Shapiro Shapiro, the Democrat, was the one who would conserve the state I grew up in.
Mastriano planned to cut public school staffing by 2/3. I attended public schools throughout, and got a great education in my local school district, I graduated with 30 college credits and my classmates wound up at a variety of ivy league schools. Houses in my school district, like mine, routinely demand a 20+% premium for the schools. Mastriano and his plan would have reduced my largest assets value, and destroyed a local institution I loved. Not conservative. Shapiro pledged to introduce vouchers for those who wanted them in failing school districts. Great! Compromise!
Mastriano stated repeatedly and clearly that abortion should be banned with no exceptions. So while, yes, abortion is under no immediate threat in my state, that is a result of the R candidate losing last November. If he had won, he would be seeking legislation banning abortion while doing everything in his executive power to make it difficult. My dating life would have been different had it been as high stakes as Mastriano desired. Shapiro wanted to keep things the same.
Mastriano stated that gay marriage should be illegal in all cases, and hinted at sodomy laws being reintroduced. Once again, on the ballot, do uncle James and uncle Craig get to stay legitimately married in their home state, a wedding I went to in Jersey when I was 12.
So, explain to me why the GOP can't be identified with their candidate for the highest office in the fifth most populous state? A purple state with a deep Republican bench in the state Senate and local executives, a state where moderates should do well everywhere but inner city Phillie and Pittsburgh.
I desperately want to vote for competent conservative candidates! I don't want a single day in my kid's school wasted on trans ideology! But my life is basically pretty good, I don't want to turn the world upside down. If all the R on the ballot offers is revolution, it's gonna be tough to vote for him.
Sounds like you have a very red democrat in your state, who had to go far to the right to ensure victory, whereas the GOP felt secure enough to take more extreme positions. I’m not sure if Pennsylvania can really representative or not, I’m not American, but a democrat being in favour of school vouchers seems extremely unrepresentative of a what your typical dem politician is like
It was moreso that we had an extremely smart and intellectually consistent Right wing republican happen to win the primary (Jan 6th attendee who calls himself a Christian Nationalist) and the centrist Dem saw an opportunity to curb stomp him by getting a lot of R state level endorsements. As a result of those smart politics, Dems might get control of the state house for the first time in a long time; it almost certainly saved a US Senate seat for the Ds.
PA is more representative than any state in the union. It has both rural and urban areas, and was the likely flip state in the electoral college for 16 and 20 according to 538. Nowhere else is more representative. Keystone state, baby.
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Problem is, you want social liberalisation (access to abortion in case you knocked up that temporary girlfriend; gay marriage for your uncles) and that doesn't just stop at the step of the ladder you are on. The next step up is the trans ideology, just as the step below that was the gay rights, and the step below that was the contraception and abortion access.
Fiscally conservative, socially liberal gives you the guy who conserved the state you grew up in, but his party is the one waving the Pride flags (some out of convenience, some out of conviction) and by the time your kid grows up, then "trans ideology in school" will be "conserving the state I grew up in".
Sure, but I think we're (including my learned friend @Syo above) going afield from the original argument in OP and my response to it.
OP states that Americans are not voting conservative as they get older. A number of other commenters made the point that young people aren't achieving the kinds of lifetime milestones that they'd want to conserve; I'm making the point that even among the subset of 30-40 year olds in America that have achieved those milestones, the Republican party is failing to field candidates or a platform that wish to conserve the world that helped them achieve those milestones.
If the traditional mechanism is young poor 20 year old liberal becomes fat happy married rich homeowner and thus conservative because he wants to preserve the things that made them happy for their (biological or constructive) children; well I'm 31 and I'm a fat, happy, rich, married, homeowner and in my most recent gubernatorial election the Republican party failed to field a candidate that wanted to protect the way I grew up, the things that made me fat, happy, rich, married.
You can argue that the way I grew up was fundamentally disordered and unsustainable, but that's a very different argument, and it's not an argument to conserve it's an argument for change. It's not protecting the real, it is advocating for the hypothetical. That might be the future of the Republican party or the Right more broadly, but that means tactics will need to change: you cannot count on the Coalition of the Comfortable if your plan is to make everyone who likes the world as it is deeply uncomfortable.
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Do you have data showing the number of such employees when you attended school vs today? Also what fraction of them are actual teachers and how many are bureaucrats that have their job due to the needs of other bureaucrats?
I don't see anything "conservative", at least as understood in America, in widespread premarital sex, with people with whom you intend to part ways in the morning. Thinking this is lifestyle for which the state should permit the sacrifice of unborn children, doubly so.
Well, the words 'as understood in America' are the words doing the real work here, aren't they? A 60-year-old can look at abortion and see it has been legal since he was twelve. He can look at people having sex less, he can see people turn out basically fine, and he can conclude that it's kinda whatever, society seems fine. Conservatism is just that: don't fix what isn't broken. Judging by the failed efforts of some states to ban abortion in their legislature, and the success of most to keep it legal, I'd say 'it's basically fine' is even the median normal person's position.
But yes, the definition of 'Conservatism in America' is the real crux of the issue here. It is increasingly not a movement of stable normal people, and moreso a strange alliance of the ancient, the fervently religious, the fabulously wealthy. Good for them - let them have their movement - but not particularly small-c conservative.
By your definition, I'm a progressive, a revolutionary even.
I support overturning the antiquated Roe v Wade and Civil Right Acts, and beyond that the antediluvian 19th Amendment...
I support getting rid of outdated institutions such as the CDC, the FDA, the AMA, the IRS, the Fed, HUD...
And of course oppressive agencies such as the FBI, CIA, ATF...
Those viewpoints aren't conservative, nor are they progressive. They might be anarchist or reactionary or found among any number of other people, but conservative they are not.
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The major issue with this ratcheted model of progress is that anything that takes more than a generation or two to lead to ruin is able to avoid the political immune system that is supposed to catch such things. All citizens disarming might be locally beneficial even for some time, and many generations of people correctly pointing out that it's a tremendous risk will look like lunatics right up until the tyranny starts and by then no one will even know when the mistake started.
Natural conservatism will favor gun ownership up to and until the point of disarmament. I basically own guns because I've always owned guns, back as far as I've known my family. The rest might just be rationalization backfilling preferences. This is why my most urgent 2a issue is to spreading gun ownership more widely. I'd happily trade a ten year universal background check bill for a decade of nationally funded high school rifle shooting teams at every American school. Get more kids shooting, more kids will become attached and open to gun ownership.
It's not the only way to argue a right wing point. But it's a natural status quo advantage historically enjoyed by the right, which the right forfeits when it fails to represent the world as it is. Once the status quo is lost, the right and the left are on an even footing arguing hypothetical utopias instead of factual reality.
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That's an argument you could levy against any change. I swear, you guys, within a century the nation will be doomed if we don't slightly adjust tax policy. You can also levy it for any change: if we don't immediately do this one thing, we'll be gone in a couple generations yet.
Now, some of that may even be right. It very well may be! But we can look at people's prediction posts and see how easy it is for them to get anything wrong for the one lousy year. For smart, conscientious people, making predictions they have no stakes in. Doing it one, two, three generations in advance? Madness. Predicting those sorts of future means making thoroughly unfalsifiable claims, and I'd prefer we treat people who claim to know what'll happen in ages beyond the one we live in accordingly.
It takes exactly one issue of this type that I'm right on to lead the entire country to ruin.
This of course also applies to the suggested changes as well. If we're going to claim to be unable to predict what will come from our meddling I'd quite prefer us not to meddle until we do. There is a much to lose.
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If you take the conservatives one is likely to see without searching them out[Media personalities (Tucker), influencers (shapiro), controversial politicians (trump/boeburt)] at their word: Absolutely yes.
Eg, Global warming isn't real, non-hetero's are all groomers, mexicans caravans 10000 strong are coming over the border to rape your dog, etc.
Trump waved a rainbow flag. Shapiro has never denied climate change, just that it isn’t an emergency. Mexican caravans do exist and come across the border and are worse than ever, why is that upsetting to find out for a millennial? Do millennials think borders are oppression?
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Can you point any big commentator saying anything resembling that? I know progressives love too pretend "ok, groomer" is a slur against all non-straights, but you explicitly mentioned "taking them at their word".
I only seem to remember one drama about a caravan. It was years ago, don't know about 10K but it was pretty big, and some "paper of record" was explicitly taking the other side of the issue, writing articles about how awesome the caravan is, and how evil the Trumpists are for not wanting to let it in. Is the official progressive position now that it never happened?
There’s pretty regular caravan drama, actually, but taking Republican public figures at their word is not exactly ‘they’re coming over to rape your dog’, nor is it that they’re Mexican(although if the median American has less understanding of the distinction than politicians and pundits I can’t blame them). It’s usually a narrative of ‘their are too many crossing all at once’.
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