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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   33795 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Given that hyper-progressive/leftist children of hyper-conservative/rightist parents is common enough to be a stereotype and cliche unto itself, and that these types of people are rather well represented on Reddit

I suspect less-well-represented than you might think. After a while hearing the same stories over and over again, you realize they really are just that -- the same stories. Sure, there's leftist children of Red Tribe rightist parents. But there's even more leftist children of Blue Tribe center-left parents, and many will tell the other story because it's higher-status with their in-group.

My experience is that most of the real "left-wing kid from religious conservative home" stories involve a kid who is non-gender-conforming in some way (in my generation, mostly gay guys and tomboyish girls).

IME the girls were mostly talked into a different lifestyle by a boyfriend. Some of the guys were also talked into a different lifestyle by a boyfriend, as you note, but most of them are just party-hearty and sociable guys that wanted to do drugs and hook up. There seems to be more of the latter.

This is hypo-agency for women and hyper-agency for men.

Yes, thats the way people are.

Not really, its the bias about how people think people are. I exist in a blue bubble surrounded by red. I have met many men and women who have conservative parents and are now progs, and your biased heuristic is pretty inaccurate.

Funnily enough, nowadays it seems like the tomboyish girls from conservative homes tend to swing right (I knew one who showed up for a coffee date holding Maps of Meaning, didn't own a single skirt), because if they go left they, uh, stop being tomboyish girls.

I suspect a ton of it is genuine over representation- kids from conservative backgrounds becoming progressive are just going to spend a lot of time on the internet.

I suspect it is a little of column A, a little of column B.

I could easily believe that progressive children from high TFR, socially conservative groups that historically reliably swing Democrat like Hispanics or Blacks outnumber many others on the left. That would still lead to a lot of "burned by conservative parents" stories, but would code as "Blue to Bluer" instead of "Red to Blue."

That said, I know a strangely high amount of ex-Mormons, and many of them seem to be in the "Red to Blue" category, so it does happen. But Pew Research definitely supports the view that a majority of kids end up following their parents. Although even their numbers have a slightly lower retention rate among Republicans (81% of teen children of Republican/leans-Republican parents are also Rep./lean-Rep, while 89% of teen children of Dem/lean-Dem parents are also Dem/lean-Dem.)

Yes, almost certainly, a majority of children of rightist Red Tribe parents are rightist Red Tribers, and the mirror image is true too. Both intuition and my memory of the stats says this, and so, from a naive Bayesian perspective, if all we knew about someone was the politics/Tribe of their parents, we should probably default to presuming it's the same or very similar. Conditional on [having so much antipathy towards Kirk that he had a desire to see him assassinated], having Christian conservative MAGA parents, I'd wager, is more indicative of the person falling into that leftist-child-of-rightist-parents stereotype. And even moreso conditional on [carrying out that desire].

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