This looks more like a tankie cat.
Honestly, if your goals include conserving an inhabitable environment for the human race in the future, conserving a semblance of wealth for everyone but the top, like, dozen people on Earth, conserving the rights of workers and consumers against an overwhelming opposition, conserving democracy for future generations (and all that against the best efforts of a supposedly “conservative” party), your parents may have been right.
I’ve only gone further Left.
How is it that some of us get further left and some people go right? Even poors and immigrants go right and vote against their own interests. I really don’t get it.
Broadly speaking, I’d say it’s done out of fear. Voting conservative feels like staying the course and not challenging the status quo, even if it’s not ideal. Voting change could be seen as a threat to “stability” even when it’s a false narrative.
To add to what you said I’d also argue it comes with finding financial success while lacking the awareness of how lucky one had to be to achieve that kind of success in life.
– although lately I have also seen a lot of people that lack the imagination to consider a reality different from what’s presented to them by the status quo.
On second thought, that latter point just sounds a lot like Indoctrination.
Yep this. It’s a combination of becoming more financially well-off, combined with loss aversion, combined with a sense that the culture starts to alienate you. It’s like grandpa simpson said: “I used to be with it. But what was ‘it’ changed. And now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’, and what is ‘it’ is scary and strange.”
Whenever people say that you grow more conservative when you get older, they’re working from the premise that you’ll grow more affluent and comfortable later in life. For Americans, that just isn’t true anymore. Wages are mostly stagnant, home ownership is much less attainable, and cost of living is at an all time high. Yet for some reason, pundits just can’t figure out why millenials aren’t getting more conservative as they age, or why zoomers appear to be following this trend.
yup it applies only to the privileged class, and of course only people in that class would think that is the general experience.
Yeah, though there’s also the phenomena of older folks generally being more against change and clinging in the past more, the idea being that you have less future to look forward to (since you’re closer to death than your birth) so instead you look towards the past and become nostalgic about it.
Oh yeah, that’s definitely why older folks are socially conservative, although usually when I hear people say this (and definitely in the context of this meme) they’re talking about becoming fiscally conservative.
All of that is the same here in Germany. Check out the stats on home ownership here… But oh man are the kids flipping to the AfD (far right nazi party) quick and in huge numbers. It’s scary to see.
Honestly, that makes sense to me. It seems like when economic systems start breaking down for people, they turn to populism. It’s either left-wing populism, which argues for reigning in the excesses of capitalism, or right-wing populism, which scapegoats minority or immigrant groups. Right now, the youth in the U.S. are interested in left-wing populism, but right-wing populism (AKA Trumpism) is the only thing making it into the political mainstream.
German government should just ban the AfD and end with it.
While that sounds like a good idea, it’s not really a solution. You can’t just ban a political party because you don’t agree with it, that wouldn’t be democratic.
Fuck this “goody two-shoes” bullshit, ban and repress.
Eventually, it will overflow and you will become fascist
Straight up I was conservative as a young teen, because that’s what EVERYONE was here in Utah when I was in the LDS church.
Now I just keep floating more and more left as time goes on.
Same homie. I can’t even imagine what it was like to be a leftist after 9/11. The whole fucking country was blood thirsty. Heard my friends say some of the most abhorrent shit, and just brushed it off as patriotism.
So fucking glad I found my way out.
I went from “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” in high school to liberal to communist to anarchist back to communist now I think I’m democratic socialist in my 30s? Just basic safety nets and unions, please.
You can only get more conservative when you have things to protect like a house and a pension.
Most millennials retirement plan atm is die of heatstroke in 150 degree weather in a 8 person shared apartment in Alaska.
You can only get more conservative when you have things to protect like a house and a pension.
In aggragate, that’s the more reliable way to make a population more conservative, but remember that a reasonable portion of fascists in a society that is going in that direction are going to be people who either lost that or never had it and, in either case, blame some minority for that fact. (The majority are still people like you describe, though, the petite bourgeois, etc., who feel insecure in their holdings)
I agree if you mean neoliberal-conservative
I have a house and a pretty sizable retirement account.
I will GLADLY take a lower home value, higher taxes on my retirement, higher taxes in general, so long as the ultra wealthy are also taxed accordingly.
Or you’ll get more communist when you have people to protect, like children or friends who start getting sick now that they’re not young anymore
I became a socialist because I was an “essential employee” during the height of the pandemic. I was treated like shit by my company, the customers, and the government while they sung my praise. I watched my grandpa get good cancer treatment with the VA (shocker, I know, but it happens) while my sister and grandma had to fight insurance for cancer treatment.
We can’t make a perfect world, but we can make a better one. And it starts with a socialist economy.
Luckyyyyyy!
I grew up in a rightwing household, and unquestioningly drank the koolaid until my late teens. The right’s bullshit eventually became impossible to ignore, so I dove right into the ‘both sides!’ trap and rode the Libertarian train for a while.
It became really easy to articulate what I didn’t like about the right; describing what was bad about the left was just echoes of Fox bitching about things like them voting on emotion instead of logic… but no real examples.
Around my mid-twenties I finally realized ^that was projection; then 2016 happened and holy shit they’re running Trump and Hillary?? Easily the two most hated candidates in my lifetime… against Gary Johnson - an admittedly goofy personality but likeable and most importantly not crazy, THIS IS THE LP’S TIME TO SHINE! …yeah they got 3% of the vote. We won’t ever see better conditions for a 3rd victory, so, pipedream shattered.
Guess I’ll have to just pick a lesser evil, so let’s see what we have to work with…
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there’s the red team. Burn through our fossil resources with reckless abandon. War, war, war, and more war. Shave social services down to nothing so we can claim ‘fiscal responsibility’ which is good I guess (hey! eyes down here, we’re done talking about the war part), a blatant integration of religion and politics, and they want to make life as miserable as possible for my gay/colored/female/nonchristian friends. Fuck, that’s pretty bad…
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Alright, next we have the blue team, which is the opposite of all those things, at the exceedingly high cost of… getting cockblocked by the red team when they try to implement those things… and… well there was that time Bill lied about getting a blowjob- outrageous! Surely the red team does a better job of keeping it in their pants… *checks* …uhh, nope! Fuck, I’m starting to become aware of my own cognitive dissonance and it feels like absolute shit.
So I start voting one issue at a time, crunching both options against eachother and choosing the one that’s best for the US. That way there’s no bias and I won’t be part of this tribal bullshit plagueing our politics… Weird, when I ignore affiliation and vote on policy alone, my ballot becomes solid blue. What are the odds of that?! Next election, solid blue again. And again.
My desire to be ‘independent’ on label alone is pretty much gone at this point, and I’m being more and more vocal about supporting leftwing policies. Family isn’t a fan, but they hit me with the shit OP is poking fun at - I only shifted blue because I’m poor! Once I make more money, just you wait and see, I’ll come crawling right back.
Now, I’m not rich or anything, but I’m (finally!) not living paycheck to paycheck. During all ^that I wandered into the military which gave me access to all kinds of socialized resources which have enabled me to get where I’m at now and have made a pretty significant improvement on my life. The thing that pisses me off about those socialized services is WHY THE FUCK DOESN’T EVERYONE HAVE THIS?! So wearing camo for 4 years for some reason got me this VIP tour of what we should should be doing for everyone.
I was a late bloomer, I got there. I haven’t missed a single election since 2016, big or small. Solid blue. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll even look up the voter registration of candidates for nonpolitical positions like judges, and red is a deal breaker.
The better off I become, the more blue I get. The notion of red-shift with income is trash.
there’s the red team. Burn through our fossil resources with reckless abandon. War, war, war, and more war.
The blue team is doing the same thing: burning through fossil resources in the name of war. The military complex doesn’t stop or change when blue or red are elected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Israel_in_the_Israel–Hamas_war
I encourage you to keep studying and researching. Politics isn’t a football match where teams compete against each others and “left” and “right” are two buzzwords.
https://archive.org/details/lawauthorityanar00kropuoft/page/n5/mode/2up
Alright, next we have the blue team, which is the opposite of all those things, at the exceedingly high cost of… getting cockblocked by the red team when they try to implement those things… and… well there was that time Bill lied about getting a blowjob- outrageous! Surely the red team does a better job of keeping it in their pants… *checks* …uhh, nope! Fuck, I’m starting to become aware of my own cognitive dissonance and it feels like absolute shit.
The DNC isn’t to the opposite of the GOP, they are aligned on the vast majority of issues and use the rest to yap loudly in disagreement. Dems aren’t left.
During all ^that I wandered into the military which gave me access to all kinds of socialized resources which have enabled me to get where I’m at now and have made a pretty significant improvement on my life.
Social programs aren’t socialized, that’s a bit of a misnomer.
However US Corporations that exploit US Workers and Workers abroad are subsidized, even for their losses. Us Taxpayers pay them while they exploit us further and Social Services get gutted and crumble. Gotta love neoliberalism, where socialized welfare is bad for workers, but good for corporations.
Edit: not actual socialism like worker owned, just socialized losses, as in the working class paying taxes foot the bill for the corporations benefit and privatized gains
Have you read Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism? It analyzes modern Imperialism, where workers in the Global North are both exploited by their bourgeoisie and yet benefit from the fruits of Imperialism, forming a labor aristocracy.
It isn’t Socialism for corporations, it’s Imperialism in action.
No, I have not. I’ve only touched on the book Consequences of Capitalism so far. Thanks for the req, I’ll check it out.
Socialism isn’t the right word, it’s not like they are worker owned in any regard. It’s just that the subsidies they receive for the benefit of their private business and profits for shareholders come from taxpayer money. Further redistributing weather to the wealthy at the expense of the working class Americans, and further enabling them to exploit us more. Their gains are privatized and their losses are socialized by the working class.
No problem! Lenin’s writing is very eye-opening as it’s Marxism applied to more modern, international Capitalism, but he may not make the most sense if you aren’t already familiar with Marxism.
I’m somewhat familiar with the principals, but not enough to thoroughly explain them in a casual conversation.
It’s definitely eye-opening to contextualize things like Nationalism, Fascism, Colonialism, and Imperialism within the Capitalist mode of production
Edited my comment to distinguish between genuine socialism and the welfare of corporations being socialized thru taxpayer money for their benefit and our expense.
You may want to swing back to Principles of Communism as well as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels, then Wage Labor and Capital as well as Value, Price and Profit by Marx before getting into Lenin if you’re not confident in the basics of Marxism. Lenin is Marxism applied to early 1900s Capitalism, which has largely grown along the lines he analyzed and predicted (among numerous other analysis in theory and practice).
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Yup but I have seen it in my peers unfortunately. Honestly though not in the ones who were actually passionate. Like the guy who started the environmental club is as left as he ever was but like the one friend I had I think just parroted what most of his friends said atm.
my experience is the opposite
How’d you get a picture of me?
In the mid 20th-century, people reliably got more petty bourgeois as they got older.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379422000452
Yep, correlation, not causation. Getting older doesn’t cause it.
There’s a much better correlation between wealth and conservatism than age. Almost like those who begin to benefit from the system of oppression are incentivesed to keep it going.
If something, as years roll on talking to people with different experiences enriched me as a person.
I am becoming more annoyed by young liberals as I get older but I’m sure as shit not turning GOP conservative.
