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Additional possible data point that the current US conservative movement isn’t all that motivated by economic issues and is spending most of its time talking about social stuff like “groomers,” woke culture, abortion, CRT, etc.
They are losing ground with suburban voters and gaining with non-college educated voters because of these issues. So those factors are probably working against the traditional trend of “make it in your career, move to the suburbs and then start voting with your pocket-book”
(In addition to the whole you’re-never-going-to-own-a-house thing others have already pointed out)
I would give this more upvotes, because I’m feeling exactly this.
“Just wait till you’re my age…” is the dumbest bs I will ever hear from older people. As if everyone will inevitably turn into an old, bitter, narrow minded, conservative person some day.
Maybe it’ll happen the same time we all forget how to use any technology as complicated as a tv remote.
Maybe 🤔
Boomers say that because historically, with increasing age people usually also managed to have some things they might want to conserve, like a home and some financial assets to cover their retirement. I’m in my mid thirties and the only feasible way for me to ever own a home is inheriting one. My retirement plan is to die in the revolution. I have nothing to be conservative about
even if you do inherit one you will lose it quickly if you get some medical thing that keeps you from working while concurrently giving you large bills.
Yeah, I have zero desire to conserve a system that is actively destroying my future. I’m fortunate that I work in an in-demand field, but even as a member of the professional class earning a professional salary, the cost of housing is insane, and the climate crisis is going to deeply impact the state of the world I live in for the rest of my life.
The main thing I’m out here trying to conserve is the environment before we go past the point of no return, which in all honesty we might have already passed.
Im 100% here. By being massively successful I can afford a working class quality of life from yesteryear and mostly just try to enjoy as much local nature as I can while I still can.
We’ve passed the point of no return for many things, but not everything. We could still improve this world’s standards if we started taking climate change seriously, but unfortunately our system is designed to react as the last moment instead of being proactive about literally anything.
In my case it has been the exact opposite tbh. The more I have to deal with reality there more I wander to the left. I’m kinda ashamed for my edgy centrist years as a teenager. Fuck that guy.
Yeah overall I have become more liberal. I would still say im a bit left of center but of course by modern skewed standards that makes me way liberal. I have seen many of my peers though fall to nutter right levels.
Damn, I feel that in my soul. Edgy centrist 13 year-old me and edgy nihilist 15 year-old me would be aghast at the bleeding-heart liberal I became.
Satan. You were into politics at 13!
I was into politics at 11, but I was a libertarian then (mega-cringe).
I mean you were eleven. I breifly flirted with it in college and thought it might be a the way to go. This was the long ago libertarian though that would go with legalization of drugs and a citizens income. Even then the philosophy ultimately falls apart. This might be one reason its gotten to where it has as the liberal types realized it won’t work and left but the right side of it hung around.
I would rather be ashamed of my past self than to have grown so little as a person that I cannot experience such shame.
Everyone who’s a conservative right now, is either:
A: completely forgotton their live before turning 25-30
B: Is a massive asshole who actively wants others to suffer for their own gain
C: Is a completely brainwashed morons who legitimately can’t see the problems they’re causing.
The majority of folks 30-60 can look at their current lives. I love the older ones who are conservative except when it comes to social security and medicare.
On point, but just a slight clarification on point B. They enjoy watching others suffer even when they don’t gain, and often even if they will be hurt too. Conservatives are all about pyrrhic victorories. There’s an expression I’ve always remembered: a conservative will shit their own pants if their enemies have to smell it.
They see the suffering of others as it’s own victory out of a combination of zero sum mindset, that the pie cannot grow and that others have to lose for anyone to win, and schadenfreude, a German term that really should but doesn’t have an English version as it’s one of the darkest traits of the human condition and American culture gets drunk on it more than most.
A and B can be combined, it’s pretty much two halves of the same mindset
That advice always did sound like bullshit to me. Now that I’m older, my analysis holds.
If you were a boomer, I can see it making sense. They got a radically subsidized upbringing, decently strong economic protections when starting to work, and generally did ok in that economic system.
Then, when in a position to pay it forward, they said no.
No, no, no, they “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps” and made it where they are through “hard work” [read: government provided ladders of socialist policies] and so should we [because they pulled up all the ladders behind them while screaming about socialism being evil, despite the huge amount of benefit they personally enjoyed].
And then went and set the roof on fire.
And started selling us bottled water to fight the fire with, all while gaslighting us and asking “why would you do this to your own house?”.
Keep drifting left and I’ve gotta say, that sweet sweet Libertarian Anarchism/Communalism seems pretty level headed to me. Vertical hierarchy inevitably leads to abuses/corruption and representative democracy infantilizes and negates the will of the people. Direct democracy and horizontal organizing structures keep everyone accountable and makes every voice heard. A world of contemporaries working towards our common goals sounds like the kind of thing you build a future (that’s not on fire) out of.
The people keep voting for representatives like Donald Trump and Marjorie Greene, so I’m not sure that infantilization is unjustified.
I’ve battled with the idea that people as the whole perhaps can’t see the picture that others can, but lately I’ve come to see it differently. Both of those people you mentioned are products of a highly corrupt system nearing it’s later stages. People vote for them, or their opposites mostly due to a system of binary politic (red or blue) that is largely influenced beyond them and has been radicalized in an effort to establish brand difference and deflect from realistic policy agenda. It’s a system that often rewards some of the worst traits in leadership and then builds on the grift over successive cycles by moving expectations of what these representatives look like. Alternatively, something like Digital Direct Democracy would allow us to defuse so much of the pageantry and tension relatively quickly, because it let’s people have a greater say in their life’s direction from city to state and can remove so much of the negativity and vitriol that our modern politics uses to divide and conquer the lower-middle class. It’s when you remove the binary choice that people very well may take more initiative to educate themselves on the world and people around them. And maybe by lending a more nuanced vision to the rest of our country folk we can all have more of what we want, while increasing the liberties and rights of the individual in ways that no longer seemed possible.
Could you provide an example of horizontal organizing structures? Im interested in learning more.
Just piping in that agile is pretty horizontal.
This is a business example. A wildly successful one at that.
https://www.managementexchange.com/story/innovation-democracy-wl-gores-original-management-model
hey thanks! Just read through it. It’s definitely a refreshing take on running a company.
Wow, thanks for the information! This is a really cool example I’d not heard of. There’s a lot in that business philosophy that mirrors the ideas that are floating around in the spaces I’ve been in. It’s interesting to see these things pop up, arising from different areas, but highlighting the same structural failings of systems and organization. The more I’m learning, the more I tend to believe that instances like this are indicative of something less akin to parallel thought and more so convergent thought.
Wow this was an interesting read. Got any book recommendations along the same lines?
Same here. I became even more left leaning, the longer I had to partake in the shit Show called economy.
When a Boomer complained to me, that our generation never got anything done and I reminder him which generation was responsible for our low incomes and our inability to move upwards in our carrers thanks to there being to much of them and bl9cking the opportunity, he got really pissed.
Funny enough, the youth vote used to be hotly disputed between liberal and conservative candidates. Nixon won the youth vote in 72, Reagan in 80 and 84, before the “Fuck everyone not alive right now” effects of his administration kicked in for the incoming generations. The 20 years of neoliberalism in the 80s and 90s erased all incentive for the youth to support the status quo, and now conservatives are wondering why they’re unpopular with the kids.
Yeah look at our infrastructure and it was massively built from the new deal onward through the silent generation and then in the 80’s hit the breaks nationally. the best stuff we have had since is from liberal states and cities.
I’m european, so I have a slightly different view on who is responsible for this, but as a whole it’s the same result for us as for you americans when it come to infrastructure. For example our railway networks, which are only maintained at the lowest possible level that the companys can get away with. And I don’t want to even talk about thing like streets, bridges, parks and other public infrastructure. Or that more and more youth centres and other such things are closed by the same politicians that then can’t shut up about that the youth has to hang around in the streets.
That always pissed me off. They were basically telling me “You’re going to become a selfish fuckwad by the time you’re my age. You’ll stop caring about civil rights. You’ll stop caring about the environment.” Etc.
Actually I went from moderate liberal to pinko-tree-hugging-anarchist-commie-radical thing.
Some folks did the math For me, it was watching shit go down in Ferguson 2014 and then realizing this what America looks like a bit too often. Next thing I knew, I was outraged and reading Das Kapital and singing glorious Bolshevik anthems.
Maybe GIVE ME SOMETHING WORTH FUCKING CONSERVING YOU GREEDY FUCKS
I want to conserve the fucking planet, but they won’t even let me have that.
I feel like this often.
hey it me
I’m 31, I was most conservative in my teens when I was in a private Christian high school in the south. Then I went to college, worked at a jail, went to law school, and in the process learned about the world and the people in it.
I am still astonished at the people who have done similar things and still don’t have an ounce of compassion for the poor and struggling. Conservative values only make sense when your sense of self only encompasses you, your family, and your religion. Once you realize that you are a part of something bigger, and the gay Hindu man and the black Muslim woman has the same consciousness and feelings as you it’s a lot harder to think of them as enemies or pitiful souls who need to be saved.
When you realize that people are people, and we are all the same, but for our circumstances, then it’s impossible to be conservative.
All it needs is a little self reflection on your actions in the current world. If you never question yourself and always assume your choices will lead you forward, you will never get even a hint of what’s realistic and what’s just egotistic bs.
Therein lies the disconnect. Religious zealots regard people like that as abominations to be destroyed in the name of their god, not people to be loved.
“private christian high school” That sounds really bad…
Yeah, imagine church on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday night in addition to once a week chapel, a mandatory Bible class, and most of the other curriculum incorporating biblical teachings (Christian books in literature, young earth creationism, etc) Oh and the church is Southern Baptist and the school is non-denominational (which means they can’t teach conflicting dogmas or the parents will pull their kids out.) So there is no church history other than the creation of protestantism, but we had Catholics so that couldn’t go into detail either.
On the positive side, we had small classes and I got educated enough to get into undergrad and go on to get my JD.
I really have to thank the science educators on YouTube and similar for filling in the gaps of grade school level biology and history that I missed out on. And undergrad for breaking my dogmatic ideologies.
I’m really glad to see the current wave of deconstruction, it seems a lot healthier than the militant atheism that was popular when I was deconverting.
Hey, I went to one of those, too. I eventually went to public school and it was so much better.
I think some people have trouble conceptualizing those around them as human. From what I can tell it’s not intentional cruelty, at least at first, they just struggle to conceptualize and understand the idea that all of the people around them have just as dynamic and complex inner worlds as they do. When it’s a struggle to make that connection, it’s easy to go through life ignoring the plight of those around you, disregarding them with the same ease most people dismiss a warning on a computer.
As someone formerly in the same boat, I think belief in the Abrahamic religions makes it hard to identify with the plights of others, because if you believe in a just, loving god, then “those people” have the religion and hardships that they do for a reason (and the reason is usually either “it’s part of God’s plan” or “they made bad decisions”).
When you base your entire worldview on a faulty premise, you can use sound logic to get all the way to libertarianism without a problem. Once I reexamined and discarded my belief in the Christian god, it was like flipping a switch; I went from douchey religious Libertarian to bleeding-heart socialist almost literally overnight.
Indeed. That’s one of my biggest problems with religion and why it makes me uncomfortable even though I ostensibly believe that people have their right to spirituality. Ultimately, with spiritual premises, people can come to faulty or unpredictable conclusions even with sound logic, and that somewhat unnerves me.
Definitely.
Although, to be completely fair, as toxic as I believe theistic religions to be, religion and politics are far from the only areas with this problem. Cosmologists, trained philosophers, mathematicians, engineers, and physicists all suffer from this same issue. Something as basic as assuming the universe is finite vs. infinite leads to drastically different conclusions in a wide variety of fields, and there’s a decent argument to be made for each contradictory assumption
Defining your initial and boundary conditions properly has a huge impact on your results, even if you do everything else right. Edit: so it’s even trickier in areas where we don’t know what the initial or boundary conditions are
The huge difference with the professions you mention is that in all of them successful participants don’t wed themselves to any premise. They can allow for the possibility of two competing premises, or even usefully imagine a world with a counterfactual premise, and accurately communicate the uncertainty or incongruence of their views (it is technically possible for political science to work this way too, but rare to find someone who hasn’t picked a “team” outside of academia).
The irrationality and intellectual danger lies not in adopting hypothesis but in granting them the status of dogma.
I would also argue that the potential for real world harm of adopting a wrong premise is way less for a cosmologist or mathematician than for a religious leader or politician. Relevant SMBC: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/purity-3
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think they should be in equal footing. I’m just saying that it’s worth remembering that a healthy dose of skepticism and analysis of the baked-in assumptions is valuable in many fields, and pointing out how otherwise reasonable people can end up voting conservative based purely on a single unexamined assumption.
Edit: and I always appreciate a relevant SMBC link, especially one that properly recognizes the power of chemistry ;)
You’re completely correct. Ultimately this is a problem we suffer from in general with a multitude of topics, and I think the only way to really get around it is by trying to be respectful to people who have different beliefs from your own, as long as that respect goes both ways of course. Important to mention though is that it can be a little harder also to argue with spirituality because while we could theoretically eventually come to a solid proof of whether or not the universe is finite, I am unable to disprove the existence of any given deity and I am also unable to prove or disprove any of the specific tenets of that deity.
Well said.
Absolutely. This brings me to my favorite philosophical topic in recent times, The Paradox of Tolerance, described by Wikipedia as:
Really, you’ve probably already heard this before, and I only bring this up because it seems like it’s always relevant these days and because it was first described by Karl Popper, who was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century.
Absolutely, I’m familiar with the paradox of tolerance but I think it’s always good to spread it around a bit more. How I conceive of it is that tolerance is not a principle but a social contract, and when one side breaks that social contract the other side is no longer beholden to it either.
My favorite part of Libertarianism is that Saint Rand collected Social Security.
It exemplifies the shameless selfishness of the libertarian philosophy and really links well with the conservative mindset of “I got mine, fuck you”.
I’m skeptical that many conservatives have dynamic and complex inner worlds … I don’t see much evidence that they think much about anything, but rather offload as much as possible onto others. My mother, as she gets older, appears to actively avoid thinking for herself and has begun the decline into right-wing thinking. She likes the Daily Mail to do her thinking for her.
It took me years around that sort to realize the common denominators: it’s a fundamental lack of curiosity about the world combined with a legitimate inability to see the world through any perspective but their own.
Throw in some ill-defined fear, insecurity, and anger at their situation in life.
Indeed, I guess as any of us gets truly elderly it’s harder to keep curiosity going - our brains aren’t as flexible, so we try and go with that we know. I think that a lot of right-wing media purposefully courts nostalgia so they can get their hooks in.
I think that all people and many non-person animals have dynamic and complex inner worlds, but Conservatives definitely have a blind spot when it comes to political evaluation. Unfortunately, it’s our nature as our species to seek out shortcuts. One of the ways we do this is by finding trusted sources to do some level of evaluation for us, that way we don’t have to think about as much. With Conservatives, many of them learned to trust certain sources from their parents, religion, or their own misguided fear. These sources are conspiratorial and hate-mongering, and they usually don’t apply any critical analysis to them. This leads to a self-perpetuating cycle where their sources tell them to trust no one and to be hateful and from that they don’t pick up any new sources, causing them to enter an echo chamber they can’t escape. It’s honestly kinda sad and I somewhat pity them, but I still will do what it takes to defeat them politically.
I agree, and I honestly think its the push for individualism over community that causes people to unknowingly become solipsistic like this. I think a lot of people don’t even realize how much trouble they have conceptualizing those around them as human, let alone having empathy for them
That definitely doesn’t help. In an atomized society there are fewer incentives to work with other people which causes people to either not develop proper social skills or to develop malformed ones.
This post is wild to me, where I live it’s certainly true people are becoming more conservative as they age, and they’re the most kind generous people I know.
Conservatives can be friendly as long as you look and act exactly how they think you should.
Have you seen the kind of people they vote for?
The kind of laws they get enacted?
Not very nice.
Would they still be kind and generous if your skin color was different? Your religion? Your pregnancy status?
Conservatives are, at best, selectively nice.
Where are you living? This post I’m fairly sure is true in most Western countries and many non-Western ones.
When I was 18 I was a right wing libertarian. When I became a software engineer and started making good money I became a progressive democrat. Now that I make 6 figures I’m an Anarchist Communist. Question: when does my career of the last decade become a “real job” and make me a conservative asshole? Because I’m still waiting.