It seems in Britain the people who were old enough to fight or at least remember WW2 as it happened are less right-wing than the boomers who were born after the war but chant “two world wars and one world cup”.
I saw a video by Morris Massey (who is very entertaining and talks a mile a minute). His thesis is that your core values are established at an early age by what’s happening in your world and who your adolescent heroes are -which is why each generation (in general) has these different outlooks on life. He goes into this in a lot more detail - but for example, “The Greatest Generation” had WWII and “win at any cost” was their value; the previous generation had the depression and getting a job, income stability, having a livelihood was most important. Whereas the boomers grew up with everything available, so they were not worried about whether they would have a job, money, or feed on the table - it was always there.
He related one story from the 70’s about older management trying to figure out the front line workers. They screw up, management tells them “take a day off to think about your job.” The Boomer worker replies “Hell, I’ll take three, thanks!”. It drove management crazy, because they could not understand how someone could care so little about having a steady job. Massey’s solution - don’t suspend them, make they stay on overtime and do the work to fix the problem. The younger workers hated it, they stopped screwing up so much. They didn’t care much about the extra money, they wanted leisure time.
Unfortunately, the lecture tape was made decades ago, and I would love to see an updated version with the Gen X and Gen Y life outlooks included… Apparently he’s a motivational speaker and these tapes can cost hundreds of dollars.
IMHO as a Boomer it seems that the latest generations have been screwed over by the globalization trend, have become less financially secure and more anxious about their future, and have a genuine distaste for “business as usual” politics, which might explain a lot.
Obviously you’ll see differences issue to issue but the OP can see generational trends wrt same sex marriage here: Consistent generational divide in support for same-sex marriage | Pew Research Center
This is such a ridiculous myth. I graduated college in the midst of a recession. My now wife and I started on food stamps. I couldn’t find any work in my field so I clerked in a store for a year. Nixon, of all people, inaugurated the CETA Program, a modern WPA that created jobs for the unemployed. It lasted through Carter, and I was fortunate to get a couple of jobs under it to give me a resume for a permanent job. My wife started with a job as a temporary secretary before getting hired permanently and working her way up the company.
Boomers did not have it all. The majority of boomers who went to college were in the first generation of their families to do so. Lots of working class kids went on scholarships or else their families had to make sacrifices to pay for tuition. Yeah, I was one of them. So were most of the kids in my freshman dorm. I dropped out of grad school because I had zero money. My wife picked up a MBA through night classes. We did not go from college straight into the suburbs. Like every succeeding generation, we lived in apartments and saved to buy a starter home, not a McMansion.
I have no idea whether today’s world is better or worse for young college grads, and I don’t think anyone can quantify that. My guess is that every generation comes out of school with uncertainly. The 70s were horrible economically and the 80s seemed better only until the reality that Reagan was driving the economy into the ground hit and knocked Bush 1 out of office. Go back and read the newspaper headlines from any time in history. They are always filled with how bad things are “today.” Don’t get your history from memes.
I tell people that when I was going to college (early to mid-70’s) you could walk into Ford or GM and ask for a job and get one… by the late 70’s the recession was in full swing and that was not the case. And yes, for every hippie drop-out living on who-knows-what there was probably a silent majority who were like me (and you, I presume) working their asses off and terrified things would change and they would have nothing a year down the road. But… there were enough of the rebellious I-don’t-work-I-don’t-care types to create a social movement, and that is what shaped the world those decades.
But what I can say is a lot of what I got for living in that age - like defined benefit pension plan, full time work, ability to own a house and create retirement savings, education I could pay for with a summer job… I don’t see those being easily available to today’s generation.