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Notes -
To be fair, this is, what, three examples? I want to at least venture another hypothesis, which is that America is a very large country and there's always going to be, in most demographics, some small percentage of people who are crazy. As populations have increased, the absolute number of crazies has also increased, but the amount of space in the media spotlight has stayed the same. (In fact it may have shrunk, due to media consolidation, and the increasing nationalisation of politics.) This makes competition for attention more intense. In times of elevated public interest in this or that issue, the number of crazies trying to get attention by exploiting that issue will be high, and the existence of YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, etc., allows for rapid dissemination of memes, as well as a kind of survival of the fittest optimising for the most shareable.
So it may be that nothing in particular is wrong with women in their 50s, but that nonetheless the spectacle of entitled older women yelling at poor service workers is very memetically successful. There could be plenty of reasons for that - I suggest that the power differential is a big one, with older middle-class people with money holding power over younger and poorer frontline workers - but I suspect you can colour in those blanks yourself.
It may be worth, after all, the reminder that both white women and over-50s are demographics Trump won all three times. The specific intersection of women over 50 just barely favoured Harris, 50-49 in 2024, and if you restricted that to white women over 50, you'd get a win for Trump. So white women in their 50s are not, by national standards, a particularly Democratic demographic. What's going on with 50 year old women right now? Plausibly the answer is - nothing special.
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