• EthicalHumanMeat [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I don’t know that that’s true, tbh.

    I think it is. Look through some of Pew's polls from the last few years, for example. Or look at this poll looking at the reasons for Biden's low approval ratings across different demographics.

    It's a pretty persistent pattern I've noticed. And a weird one. Left-wing politics (talking about things like self-professed support for socialism and attitudes toward billionaires) tend to be more popular with the groups you'd expect: women, PoC, lower-income workers, queer people, etc. But age tends to be one of the stronger predictors. There are economic factors, and others like racial diversity, but I think the internet being more permeable to dissenting views (still mostly controlled by corporations though it is) is another.

    Or even if it is, it’s actually not the case that boomers, or anyone older than a millennial at any rate, have (as a broad demographic) always had the political constitution that they currently do.

    Both age and generation are factors. Politics tend to shift to the right with age, but attitudes also shift generationally, the trend being leftward over the last few. Only a slight majority of people supported the civil rights act at the time, for example. Compare with today. I don't think most Boomers were ever particularly left-wing, even when they were young.

    The reality appears to be that the populace of the country as a whole only becomes more reactionary as conditions worsen.

    Can you substantiate this? Because politics on the whole have shifted pretty dramatically left (insofar as socialist politics exist again for the first time in like 60 years) within the last eight years or so, while living conditions have declined dramatically. And I'm talking about public attitudes and organizing, not US policy, which we know has next to nothing to do with the popular will (dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) and is still dominated by the older generations. Fascists have become more emboldened, but they're still a minority, and they skew disproportionately older.

    • SadStruggle92 [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I guess this is my answer here, all I can do is look at the people in my immediate vicinity (I don't exactly live in a major city here, nor do I work in a white-collar field), and tell you that I am in no-way surprised by the outcomes of the polls here; and I also don't think that anybody that I know personally are substantially to the left (let alone more prone to organizing, probably less so tbh) than anybody in the Boomer generation was at our age; and a lot of the people I know don't even necessarily have their own home.

      Perhaps geography, and proximity to the city has a larger impact on these things than intergenerational politics does. That's my perception of the matter.