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There’s something to this, I think- the young are much more extreme in both directions than their elders- but the ‘where’s the dividing line?’ Aspect is possibly relevant and it’s less than universal. Like let’s take the turn to the right for young men; they’re disproportionately extremely moderate conservatives. On the other hand the leftward turn for young women seems genuinely left of ‘normal’ leftism.
Even my boomercon father notes regularly that ‘the old dinosaurs like Nancy pelosi are keeping the squad and AOC in check- apres lui, la deluge’. But at the same time, Jared Golden is influential within the democrats, is not currently undergoing fossilization while still alive, and is fairly moderate and normal. For some reason the weirdos are the younger people in a position to take over when our current leadership inevitably dies even in the presence of relatively normal ones.
Populism vs donor class politics.
A lot of younger Americans think health care is too expensive and has to become substantially cheaper. A lot of young people aren't enthusiastic about forever wars. A lot of young people think housing costs are unsustainable. A lot of young people would be skeptical of NSA spying. These issues cut across the left/right divide. Both a rightwinger and a leftwinger can agree that wall street is becoming parasitical and is sucking money out of the real economy. The boomer elite believe in the system, the younger party members see the system as broken and want to change it.
The situation is a bit like the situation in France in the 1780s. Older members of the elite believed in the system, a lot of young people didn't. That doesn't mean the youngsters agreed at all on how the situation was to be fixed.
I strongly agree with your point and this is something that I've been thinking about for a while. That said I think I go a bit further - I think Left/right as a meaningful political divide is going to either go away or simply transform into pro/anti regime/establishment, because neither of them can offer anything which actually helps people deal with the problems they're facing in their daily lives. Trump is just the early foreshadowing of that realignment.
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This sounds correct to me, as I'm a younger right-winger and those are points of agreement for me with the left wing. I think with health care, with social order, with institutional trust, with dating and relationships, I think young lefties and righties both see the same problems. They just often disagree profoundly on how to fix them.
Though I do wonder how much the NSA weighs on your average zoomer normie, who seems to treat spying by the government and corporations as a fact of nature because they've grown up surrounded by it.
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