Obviously, I am not in an optimistic mood today, but there are still at least theoretical hopes for the future, if there is a future. For example, there are the young people.
Women are more Democratic than men, and younger voters are more Democratic than older ones. The former has been true for decades, and the latter is a trend that’s at least 10 or 15 years old. But a new Pew survey using a huge sample to allow for insight into demographic details shows that the intersection of these two trends is staggeringly large.
Among millennials, which Pew identifies as people born between 1981 and 1996, men lean toward Democrats by 8 percentage points — far and away a bigger tilt toward Democrats than older cohorts of men. But millennial women favor Democrats by a staggeringly large 70-23 margin.
Fewer than one in four women born after 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president, prefer the Republicans to the Democrats. And even the men show a significant preference for the Democrats. Now, it’s often said with some justification that people grow more conservative with age. Simple tax aversion would tend to move people in that direction. Studies that show fear is a common component in conservative views probably explain the rest of the drift. People in their teens and twenties often feel invulnerable, especially when compared to people suffering the ravages of middle and old age.
But, on the other hand, there are studies that show that most people never abandon the political views of their youth, especially if we’re not talking about political views they’ve simply inherited from their parents. There will no doubt be plenty of churn in how individual millennials view the world, but it looks locked in now that this will be a generation that strongly rejects conservative views on a host of issues.
Eventually I think we’ll get to some inflection point, much like we did on gay marriage. The Republican Party is a vehicle that can carry any kind of passengers. For a long time now, it has been kicking moderates out of the doors and taking on more conservative riders, but eventually they’ll stop this practice and reverse it. Either that, or they’ll grow weaker and weaker until they resemble the GOP of the early 1960s.
Just as the GOP made a comeback after Barry Goldwater, largely by sticking with his conservatism and adding a large dose of law and order segregationist racism, the GOP will make a comeback from their next nadir. But I don’t think it will be as a conservative party.
But if any of this is going to happen, we have to survive to get there.
…with age.
For the most part, you are what you are from about 25. Obviously, that is only the general pattern.
People think that folks get more conservative because the world has gotten more progressive, making people feel conservative relative to the Overton window.
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The GOP will recover from the nadir? Right now, I’m just hoping against hope for the nadir. Unless our electorate smartens up fast, we’re fucked. It may be too late; we may be fucked regardless.
My husband and I raised three male “millenials” and all three are staunch Democrats. They’re informed and well-read guys and they will continue to vote for the D ticket.
I won’t say I would disown any of them for voting R, but my disappointment would be obvious.
I don’t know about growing more conservative; I’m nearing retirement age (although not nearing retirement, which is a different subject) and if anything I’ve gotten more liberal.
Based on introspection I think there is something to it that you grow more conservative with age – it just has nothing to do with the political label, but the original meaning of the word. With experience you tend to become somewhat more risk aware and the position ‘let us burn it down to the ground, probably it will be better afterwards’ is not so attractive any more.
The Republicans claim the label ‘conservative’ but they are actually hell-bent on damaging the ecosystems, female and minority rights, and democracy, not to put to fine a point on it. Whatever that is, it certainly is not conserving ecosystems, female and minority rights, and democracy, so obviously not conservative.
Currently the Democrats try to conserve progress made, so they are the conservatives in the original meaning of the word.
Hopefully, you have started a trend.
I’m just hoping we make it to another presidential election… Demographics becomes kind of irrelevant once your cities have become radioactive wastelands or the price of gas hits $20 a gallon because the Mideast is in flames.
And really, I don’t think that the Republican end game is democratic elections anyways, at least not how we would think of them- they are much more comfortable disenfranchising voters than changing the direction of their right wing death cult in the slightest. And that’s actually the scariest change of all- they appear to no longer believe in a functional democracy.
Our Repubs have as much commitment to democracy as their Nazi forebears had in Weimar Germany. They instead seize upon and exploit every anti-democratic mechanism in the system.
The mask dropped decisively with Bush v Gore and they cannot change now, they are in far too deep to reform themselves in the slightest.
. . . in a functional democracy”.
THEY DON’T WANT a functional democracy!
They understand that a functional democracy consigns them to permanent minority status.
But they want power!
So they cheat.
“THEY DON’T WANT a functional democracy!”
So, a Potemkin democracy?
Sounds plausible, on SO many levels.
. . . the pretense of legitimacy they can claim from having “won” rigged elections, even though they have to cheat to do it.
(cf. Putin’s recent “win” with, I think, 75ish% — making the Potemkin reference extra apropos.)
I don’t think we will be reduced to a radioactive wasteland by the Cheetolini and his enablers but I do think the GOP has been and will continue to be dead serious about disenfranchising as many Americans as they can who are not white, male, heterosexual conservatives. They understand that they have painted themselves into an existential corner and this is their Last Hurrah as the party of racist reaction.
Sure, It will be probably be awhile before the Norks can accurately deliver an ICBM warhead to the continental U.S. Still, like they say, close counts with hand grenades and nuclear weapons. And don’t underestimate how quickly things can go south both militarily and economically.
Unfortunately, current US policy allows the president to launch a nuclear strike on his say so. Some in congress are trying to put in place additional safeguards, but most of the party-before-country Republicans won’t do anything to change this situation. You can hope that our military would push back on a disastrous and questionably legal order from the the president, but right now I’d say there would be a non zero chance of them carrying out a nuclear first strike if ordered and essentially a 100% chance of them carrying out a non-nuclear first strike. Once there is war, it is chaos and then who knows what would happen after that. And just look at the Iraq war for an example of how easy it is for the executive to manufacture consent for military action.
If there is one thing that should be obvious about Trump, is that he will escalate and unfortunately there is more than enough nuclear weapons around the world to bring us back to the stone age.
E.g., to the pre-human age.
Which I find increasingly hard to view as an injustice, except for the many innocent species we’d be taking down with us.
Gas won’t top $10. There are too many other non-ME sources.
Anything that disrupts the market that much will disrupt everything.
And then gas prices are the least of your problems. Getting enough to eat will be.
Now if they would just vote in every election.
That is, when the Repugnicans allow elections to be held.
And then of course there are the real “young people”, the generation following the Millenials, who have been described as “IGen” (1997–date) for having come into sentience holding an IPhone. As we sit on the eve of their simply incredible March For Our Lives, it is hard not to feel great pride and sentimentality towards them. They are the ones on the cusp of their voting lives.
Watching their reaction to the snuffing of their hopes and desires by the criminal Repub party will be instructive. While they currently proclaim that protecting schoolkids from gun-nuttery “isn’t a political issue” (since they hope to accomplish something sooner rather than later), there’s no doubt the morally bankrupt “conservative” movement (and its wholly-owned party) will not give the kids the smallest crumb. The FL Repubs were forced to actually pass some gun reforms, but the NRA-controlled national party surely will not.
Will the issue then become seen by IGen as “political” and partisan (as it most surely is)? Or will they be bamboozled into befuddlement, much as Der Trumper is now doing with his Goebbelsian blaming of the Dems for (his!) DACA derailing? (Which, BTW, the corrupt corporate media makes no attempt to explain and instead parrots verbatim.)
One hopes that the kids will see that “conservatives” cannot be reasoned with, ever, on any issue. The question is what steps the anti-democratic “conservative” movement will take to suppress a youth vote that implacably opposes them…..
Answer’s not likely to be pretty.
Yes, we do.
We have been at war in Afghanistan for more than half of my entire life. We saw our friends die in Iraq. We graduated high school and college in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The college debt burden is crushing and out of sync with the wages expected to pay them back — and yet you’d be a fool to not take on the debt burden because that’s where the jobs are. The rent is too high. Health care costs are too high. Child care is too high. Mix all that in with house prices being too high to purchase to escape the high rents.
Then there’s the gun massacres, and in response our politicians just shrug their shoulders (I was a freshmen at Virginia Tech during the massacre). There’s climate change and not just a lack of a response but an active denial it exists. There’s the homophobia when being gay was relatively normal by the time I was in college. There’s the transphobia that seems to be increasing rather than abating.
The women clearly had a big shift that happened before Trump, though. I’d be curious to know what set that divergence off. Men are trash.
In the end, what the fuck do they have to offer? Racism, war, greed, and in the end, death.
Oh look, right as I was typing, fuckstick over here issues a trans ban:
link
They tell their base that they are “true Americans”, and imply that while they may never become rich like they are, they’ll be a favored social class as long as they have the votes to run the government.
Right-wing authoritarians respond to this appropriately. I.E. right-wing authoritarians seek those politicians out and support them. The details don’t matter.