Heck, i’m getting more left leaning over the years myself. In like 4 or so years even Bernie probably would’ve told me to slow my roll haha
I know some older Americans who would have considered themselves centrists most of their lives but the last couple of decades have driven them to the left of the democrats. Significantly.
That “oldest rule” doesn’t actually stack up though as older people are more likely to be relying on state benefits and healthcare. So here they would likely be less right wing than the dominant parties but more socially conservative than them. Having grown up in a state with council housing being the largest stock of houses and a public health system, but with mass emigration so a monoculture and social conservative rigidity. Though even there the demographics of voting on social change show that old people are very capable of change. All major demographic slices voted for marriage equality and an end to the ban on abortion. I see far right as more of a worry in growing in younger people who have no possible chance of buying a house where rents are astronomical being radicalised by racist grifters and blaming the wrong people.
ETA
Demographic slices, not Alice’s autoincorrect.
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The other consideration here is are they are less conservative than how their government operates. Which seems true in the US. The graphic doesn’t tell us anything about what people actually support.
Which was found out when Roe was overturned. This kind of chart does nothing to move the government to less conservative policies and just divides people so some can feel better about themselves and feel good about their ageism.
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I often wonder how much of that “you get more conservative as you get older” is just self-reporting people just embracing the “common wisdom” and thinking that partying, etc, when you’re younger is the same thing as being “liberal”… I think of my BIL, who is politcally on the right, but he used to have a bit of a “partying” type of life-style, but is now a regular church goer type. His politics have not really changed much in the years I’ve known him (voting for GOP, not a fan of the Clintons, etc). I wonder though if asked, he’d say he “moved to the right” as he aged…
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And what does 5-6% more conservative than the average actually mean? And is it in anyway significant or just a rounding error?
What policies do people support and not support? We damn well know that on many major policies- abortion rights, LGBT rights, racial equality - the majority’s voice has been shut down.
We are not a democracy in the US in so many ways.
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I question whether my millennial self even remotely has the same definition of “conservative” as my 70+ yo family members.
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That’s also very much a belief reinforced here by religious rehabs.
Big cultural impact there influencing the way people think and talk too.
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This too! What do we mean by conservative and liberal in general? I feel as if these words have changed meaning, and often is just whatever the “other” guy does not like is the “other” viewpoint, if that makes sense.
Exactly. Just pinning down how people vaguely self-identified doesn’t tell us what the actually believe are good policies.
When you ask about specifics, these are things people support, whatever “tribe” they identify with… but as you said, we’re not much of a democracy.
I’m thinking we’re maybe moving out of a period where these French revolution era signifiers make any sense…
Do you mean like religious rehab programs? Makes me think of Hershel Walker, who believed he was “fixed” because of Jesus… Shit doesn’t work like that.
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Yeah for sure.
Consider how hard it must be here for a gay atheist to find a safe place to recover… And most people are nominally christian to begin with.
There are some real scary aspects to the whole mental health cottage industry here too.
Ultimately the answer should have been “more of all types of places for everyone” but… Somehow that never gets the votes.
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Yeah, I know there must be more secular versions of rehab, but like so much else in our country, the Christian right has come to dominate so much of our privatizing country since Reagan… the idea of “community care” sounds good, until you see how many right wing Christians used that to inject their vicious, extreme ideology on the rest of us. There certainly isn’t anything wrong with people making the choice to depend on their faith to get through something like addiction, but that should be a personal choice, not the ONLY choice that people have…
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I think they truly believe theirs is the only salvation possible and that they know the mind of God so well that they are sure they are doing God’s work exactly as intended… Even when it fails. The rest are grifters or just meeting the minimum requirement to not be scrutinized too much.
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Oh no doubt!
Which of course is so very presumption on their part, given their own doctrine about not second guessing the mind of god. They’ve lost the thread on the humility part and the listening part…
Well, that’s just Satan at work! /s
Yeah. For sure…
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That’s the thing. When asked about “stricter gun control laws,” as one example, the numbers are blah. Because the existing laws vary so much state to state that someone in VT might be for it and someone in CA against it even if they want the same exact thing. But when you ask about specifics, the numbers are clear:
And our politicians are letting us down. On this and all the other things you noted.
Another one I found was public healthcare. If you just ask if people are in favor of Medicare for All, lots of people will say no because they think that means private insurance options would go away. But if you word it correctly and accurately, clarifying that both can coexist, the numbers are clearly in favor.
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Yeah, this exactly! When you get into specific policies, there is strong bipartisan support for what we’d consider the more left-leaning position…
They are… the GOP by pushing anti-democratic (little d) positions down the our throats, and the Democrats for not more actively pushing back against it. A major part of the problem is how very gerrymandered our electorate is to keep people in office. As long as shit is gerrymandered in that way, it’s gonna be incredibly difficult to make real change. The struggle seems to be coming down to the courts, and right now, the GOP has managed to institute a majority of ideologues on SCOTUS (even as Biden has managed to appoint a record number of judges). As long as SCOTUS is being held hostage by the far right, they can keep pushing through right wing policies in an undemocratic way. All they have to do is make constitutional challenges, which the court will eventually take up. Unless that is, they can manage to get SCOTUS to be held accountable in some way. Right now, Thomas really needs to be impeached and removed from office. He’s absolutely complicit in some way with Jan. 6th. I don’t buy Ginni Thomas insisting that there was a firewall between her political activities and Thomas’ decision-making from the bench…
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Ginni Thomas is a hard sell as the kind of person who maintains strong personal boundaries that’s for sure.
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And there’s the unfortunate effect that grifters holding a bible are more likely to get a pass when they are caught…
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With pols and courts making it more difficult:
When the lawsuits come and get escalated is when I expect the GOP-dominated courts to make the worst out of a bad situation, too.
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To be fair, I don’t think they can coexist long-term. The real benefits of public healthcare come from single-payer health insurance. The savings from the system come when the entire billing and paying system is simplified. The payer side needs the leverage to be able to dictate how much is paid for each procedure; the hospitals benefit by reducing their internal bureaucracy (20-30%!) that is dedicated just to dealing with the dozens of payers and essentially different codes, rates, and billing systems for each.
Conservatives talk about government waste? They should spend some time in the billing and coding department of a large hospital.
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Hmmm, but I’m pretty sure Germany has both and has since I first visited in the mid-90s. Maybe we’re talking about different things? I’m thinking of places that have the public healthcare, but then people who can afford it can pay for private care, kind of like those fancy passes people get to cut the lines at Disneyland. Is that something else?
And to be clear, I’m not saying I love the idea of a two-tiered system, but just about anything would be better than what we have here now. As you know better than most.
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You’re absolutely right about everything you wrote. It is very much like the FastPass system at Disney, including private insurance patients bumping public patients in line for procedures. That’s a very bad thing when it comes to things like coronary artery stenting. IMO, it’s by far the worst part of the German system.
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