Boom(er), roasted
But seriously, the brain is just another part of the body that experiences organ failure over time
There are countries where boomers didn't grow up with leaded gasoline, asbestos, HFC and they are still reactionary boomers. You are looking for material reasons when the reasons are temporal. Something was physically wrong with the 50s.
Environmental pollution from use of tetraethyl lead in gasoline spread to everywhere on earth — one of the first people raising the alarm about it was a geologist named Clair Cameron Patterson who was annoyed that all his samples, even from remote islands and things, were contaminated with lead
Unrelated fun fact, the guy who invented leaded gasoline also invented CFCs (which were responsible for the hole in the ozone layer)
Environmental pollution from use of tetraethyl lead in gasoline spread to everywhere on earth — one of the first people raising the alarm about it was a geologist named Clair Cameron Patterson who was annoyed that all his samples, even from remote islands and things, were contaminated with lead
Yep.. I am in a pretty remote location and our lands are fucked with everything from microplastics to radiation levels to blue jean fibres to .... and we essentially never had access to commodities or industrial production until the 80s, and many places still don't really have much access to anything, yet our lands are chock-full of a whole bunch of bullshit that was produced by people thousands of miles away.
You are looking for material reasons when the reasons are temporal.
When you're so woke you're anti-Marx and stupid
Something was physically wrong with the 50s.
No, it's a simple case of people generally becoming more conservative with age, and there's many reasons for that.
No, it’s a simple case of people generally becoming more conservative with age
Nah.
That's been debunked over and over, the only Republican the greatest gen voted for was Ike, and he was to the left of every consequent dem who managed to sit in the Oval office, meanwhile Boomers voted for both Nixon and Reagan the first elections they could vote in , furthermore as far as social issues goes every demo has gotten more liberal as they aged.
This is misleading. Shortly before Nixon was elected only around 20-25% of very young voters identified as republican, but then Nixon talked about ending military conscription. And it was old people who voted Reagan, despite having voted overwhelmingly for FDR years ago: https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-1980
You are forgetting that it was boomers who were behind the major progressive movements that happened during the 60s and less so the 70s.
It happens in almost every country, except the ones where a huge abrupt rightward shift happened. Young people have good politics, then some of them get rich as they get older and figure out their position within the system and eventually just retire so they're not even part of class struggle any more and only care about their 401ks, or they just simply compromise and they forget about them. Then they also get spooked by change in general and especially social change so they become socially conservative. Of course this mechanism doesn't work when society is falling apart but it worked for boomers because there was huge economic growth and living standards increased so they had less reason to doubt the system.
If you really wanna try to find something inherent about boomers you can try, but you won't find anything significant, and it's definitely not lead poisoning or whatever. It's the same processes that could make zoomers and millennials or any other generation every bit as reactionary in the future. As someone who lives in a country with a severely aging and decreasing population I can tell you old people just suck and refuse to help, but there isn't enough young people to counteract them. Young people are needed. They are the ones who have the energy to do good things and the ones who are give a shit about changing things.
The greatest gen voted for Obama twice, boomers didn't. To boomers credit polling has shown them to be far less racist than the gens preceding them by a very large margin, where as younger gens while being less racist than boomers, it is by a smaller margin than boomers vs silent, and the greatest gen. The data repeatedly shows a person's ideology sifts very little from the first election they voted in, that's when they develop their politics, and it changes very little. Boomers don't have a populist bone in their body, the banks and wall street didn't send me off to war, D.C. did, and what have unions ever done for me except drive up cost of products, and take money out of my check, I got to where I am all by myself, is their mind set, and always has been, it is vastly different mindset from the greatest gen, although it is similar to the salient gen.
The data repeatedly shows a person’s ideology sifts very little from the first election they voted in,
This is definitely very, very wrong.
that’s when they develop their politics, and it changes very little.
Seriously? Have you met a European? Do you know what happened to the May 68 communists? Or hell, even here, the people who were fucking stepped over by a tank protesting a military dictatorship in a university are now overwhelmingly in favor of putting police into universities and pretty much everywhere else. People's politics change massively. If they didn't the world would be a better place. It's not as easy to gauge in the US because any attempt to gauge them by most polls would just be a binary choice between republican and democrat, which isn't a good indicator either. And if you off handedly ask boomers they will just retcon their ideology either way to make themselves look more consistent.
This generational nonsense is fun as a meme but it's a really silly mode of analysis. I swear sometimes people just try to find almost metaphysical reasons why boomers are somehow uniquely and inherently evil because they don't want to think they might turn that way too. But that's how it is. Politics aren't just something that happens to you when you're 18. They're something that develops and changes according to your position in society.
Off the top, again every single demo in the U.S. Has become more liberal on social issues as they have aged, from criminal justice to sexual liberation, the lone exceptions are abortion which has remained flat for the past few decades, and if you consider gun control a left wing policy (I don't) support has declined. In your previous comment you stated boomers are responsible for progressive policies in the 60s, the oldest boomers in 1970 were 22. They promptly became Atari dems at best and reactionary at worst. When they finally started getting elected to Congress they immediately used their power to remove populist dems from banking and finance committees, and got to work gutting new deal regulations on banking and Wall Street. Here in the U.S., boomers were very progressive on race issues relative to the rest of the population, this is true, however they have never had anything but disdain for unions, and thought things like anti-trust were stupid. The boomer mindset at least here in the U.S. Has never been concerned with concentration of capital, at any point in their lives.
the oldest boomers in 1970 were 22.
Boomers were people born post-WWII. So they basically started at 1945. The oldest boomers in 1970 were 25 and that was the main mass of these movements. And despite societal pressures, a lot of boomers have moved the OTHER way on social issues. Like, again, you brought up Reagan, but it wasn't boomers who voted for Reagan, it was silent gen and greatest gen, which, again, was a vast regression for them. Again, not anything unique to boomers.
You act as though millennials haven’t been chugging teflon, pesticides, and microplastics our entire lives.
A lot of minority neighbourhoods also inhaled leaded paint and not all of them are reactionary.
It sucks that the brain requires so much conscious attention and effort to sustain. Even if the majority of shit it does is automatic (like the rest of the organs) having to experience waking reality is a drag for what could be a really cool pokémon snap style railed adventure game.
What we do know is that there was a DIRECT correlation between leaded gasoline and crime rates. Beyond that it's up to speculation what other consequences leaded gasoline had on American culture.
I don't think this is entirely inaccurate, though it's unprovable. I think the economic and racial character of post-war suburbanization are much more relevant and concrete if you want to figure out why Boomers are reactionary, though.
