The difference between you and others your age that didn’t move left is likely material conditions. Those that got it reasonably good likely feel like capitalism worked for them so it should work for everyone. Property inheritance also plays a significant role.
Thats actually opposite for me. I remember being more conservative in my 20. I remember watching people like Amazing atheist, armored sceptic, shoe on head and some others that I dont remember. Now in my 30, I have actually softened up a lot and got more liberal views now.
I remember a high school friend’s father saying something to me like, “You’ll get more conservative when you start paying taxes.” This was around 1993-1994 or so.
I’m 45 now, modestly wealthy, and pay plenty of taxes. I can’t envision ever voting for a Republican for any public office ever again…and the current circus of bullshit around TFG just seals that deal for me.
They only became more conservative because the party used to be somewhat sensible but also used a bit of nostalgia in their campaigning. Now they just use hatred and nostalgia for times where you could openly be hateful. More flies with honey and all that.
Also as someone who is in a not great position, thanks for voting and caring. Selfishly I ask that you especially listen to help for disabled folks. I am in a really bad position and its hard to get out of it because so few people care. When people don’t care then they don’t think about it when voting and we end up in worse positions. Disability benefits, where I am anyway, are stagnated and haven’t risen alongside inflation in 30 years while rent/food costs have exploded. Minimum wage isn’t a livable wage and disability here gets less than minimum wage.
Same (though not American). I did the opposite. I started off conservative cause that’s what my family and community was. Then found out that was hateful bullshit and am now extremely progressive. I’m happy to pay my taxes (and I pay waaaay more than average). I do sometimes wish they went to better things and weren’t squandered as often (especially on MPs paying for $16 glasses of orange juice), but overall Canada does a decent job at using its taxes. It’s impossible for taxes to go to 100% agreeable things, since there’s no satisfying everyone. They’re ultimately a net benefit.
I also don’t have kids but am happy to see kids get the benefits of my taxes (and many other things taxes go to that don’t directly benefit me). People who expect tax dollars to always benefit them are selfish and narrow-minded, which I think is the root reason some people don’t like taxes.
Even if conservatives go back to being about “small government”, I can’t see myself voting Republican. I don’t think I’m anything. I can see “small government” working. But I can also see the democrats vision of “government should do things” working too. I can see either technique working. The problem is, back when Republicans used to promote “small government”, I noticed after a while, they never made government smaller. When I confronted some of them on that, they used to say at least its not as big as what the democrats want. What the fuck does that even mean? Democrats, on the other hand, actually try to do stuff.
You made a weird joke about terroristically murdering people. I don’t think the secret service has jurisdiction, but yeah you honestly could be contacted by the FBI after this. Hope it was worth glorifying a psycho.
Also, ingenuity isn’t an applicable word when addressing an audience who did not find you funny/clever
I’m not even going to copy paste what you wrote. Suffice it to say you can pretend I’m crazy but federal agencies ain’t coming for me. Good luck with the interviews…
Ted started off as a smart guy, but the MKULTRA abuse he experienced left him with a broken ideology.
Many parts of his manifesto are problematic, and I hope people don’t think it’s good theory.
Some excerpts:
The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.
The leftist seeks to satisfy his feeling of inferiority by cultivating attitudes of superiority. He is not the only one to do this, but he is the one who goes furthest in this direction.
Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good, and successful.
The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor. This kind of person is too eager to seize the initiative and too insensitive to feel guilty for his aggression. The leftist is as prone to manipulating others as the more right-wing person, but his main goal is to avoid straining his own conscience.
Ted also has some jabs at reactionaries, but he’s not a leftist for sure. There’s better literature out there, from an actual leftist perspective that people could be reading instead.
I think he committed the error of giving a political attribute to a certain cathegory of people.
In those excerpt, if you switch “leftist” with “twitter social justice warrior” you can feel who really he is mad at.
Honestly it just feels like he projects a lot of stuff that overlaps with fascist ideology as well as having a horrid concept of actual leftism, then again Ted having a fried brain makes sense given he decided to just randomly send out bombs to harm workers.
So far score wise I feel the kid that did in Abe via the the-doohickey had the best consciousness not to turn into a reactionary bent on harming innocents and instead applied his suffering to a target that has materially contributed to that situation (Abe family and the moonies). i.e. Ted is an example of a mfer with no class consciousness deciding to “solve the problem”.
spongebob-i-fucking-lovespeech-l If YoU aRe NoT a LiBeRaL wHeN yOu ArE 30 yOu HaVe No HeArT, aNd If YoU aRe NoT a CoNsErVaTiVe WhEn YoU aRe 40 YoU hAvE nO bRaIn
Oh god, my parents’ piece of shit neighbor said this to me once. He also hit on me while I was underage, cheated on his wife, and finally died of COVID.
That might have been true decades ago, but now people have:
Greater access to knowledge, and are forced to think more critically about what they consume.
More extreme views, which picks off the weak.
Most importantly, older people had stuff. They owned houses, had stable, life-long careers, and had settled down before they hit their thirties.
People in their mid to late thirties nowadays might have a fancier job title, but many of them are still struggling like they were before. It’s hard to be protectionist when you have nothing but your life to protect…
while the last point is perhaps the main determinant theory behind why many older people are not being owing more right wing, I’m a little confused by your first two points.
especially the fact that people have greater access to knowledge and are forced to think more critically. if anything, with the advent of the internet, echo chambers have never been easier, preventing critical thinking. this leads to a growing of extreme positions which further reinforces such views due to tribalistic fallacies in our thinking and the need for these tribal identities to distinguish themselves.
I think it also depends on whether or not they were provided the education to use the internet well. If all people get is a vague “have at 'er!”, of course we would have more echo chambers. Ever hear the saying “don’t believe everything you read online?”
Properly teaching people how to verify their information sources and how to reflect on things would probably result in fewer echo chambers. “Huh. I don’t want to keep looking like a fool who spreads obviously false things around.”
There’s also internal bias to think about here. If someone is already dead-set in believing only their current mindset, they’re likely not going to be open to other sources. Instead, they’re probably going to search for whatever will back up their claim. People don’t usually try to prove themselves wrong in an argument.
This means that part of getting rid of echo chambers will also be teaching people to accept and acknowledge their own errors. We should be teaching people to go for the best answer, not to just prove themselves right. In this way, this problem also preceeds the internet. That mindset has hindered science for literal centuries. It even goes back to the first days of science in Greece. (Thanks for that attempted halt of progress, religion.)
It’s easier to blame the internet than the people doing these things. Sadly though, it’s in human nature.
My kids made me more liberal…our conservative government cut property taxes to starve our public education system, I donated most of the rebate to my kids school, some of it went into their education fund.
People who aren’t as fortunate as we are, deserve the same opportunities we have when it comes to public services.
A lot of people get caught up in finding the best local district for education or sports here. I think that mentality prolly says something about them.
I think it’s your third point, mostly. Maybe even as sharply stated as: boomers became more conservative as the system and status quo brought them wealth, comfort, and security, so naturally they wanted to keep that going. For the generations that have followed, the system and status quo have only continued to bring those benefits to the boomers, not to them, so they’re less likely to trend conservative to perpetuate a system that has failed them.
Additionally, in the years since the boomers came of age, the political right has moved away from a traditional conservative platform to a very extreme and hateful version of itself. Even if many millennials had shifted slightly to the right as they aged, the party typically associated with conservatism has moved so much farther to the right that even with their gradual shift, these millennials are still far closer to the left, or at least to “not whatever the right is saying”.
More people become conservative when they have something to lose. Why would you want to conserve a status quo where you don’t own anything of substance and probably never will?
The older phrase used to be “You become more right wing when you get older”, whereas it’s quite likely it was missing the specific cause, which was “You become more right wing when you stop learning”. [Edit] Typo
