This is almost exactly our story. Except my dad doesn’t seem to believe in death panels but he is convinced that 70% of Americans are all living their lives on his tax dollar. (You know, like we were living on other people’s tax dollars in the early 80s)
My dad’s a union man and mom worked for the school district. They’ve both got pensions and spent 0 days in college. Dad didn’t even finish high school but walked in to a factory when he was 17 and started making big bucks.
They are not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Neither are their families (they’re the most well-off - everyone else is actually on welfare of some sort). Another one of dad’s fears is the estate tax (???)
I just don’t get where they’re coming from and what led them here. Well, I mean, I know it’s because they watch Fox and listen to conservative radio. But I don’t know why they agree with the bias of those outlets.
You are the one who is trying to play No True Scotsman with definitions and re-define the right wing nature of the Boomers out of existence. And like it or not the nation as a whole has moved well to the right, both relative to itself in the past and to the world in general.
My father fits the description in the OP to a T. He used to be really liberal, like, long hair hippie proud draft dodger, ivory tower academic liberal. Now you can’t even talk to him with him going into an anti-Obama frenzy, of the secret-muslim-death-panel variety. On top of everything else, he’s turned incredibly hawkish and looks with disdain on war protestors. If you ask him to explain why protesting war is different now vs. when he did it, he can’t… he just gets mad.
It’s not the policy differences that bug me. He used to be proud of his intellectual rigor, now he’s just a robot repeating even the most inane of Fox News talking points. Which he watches 24/7.
I’m 61 years old, a boomer, a parent, a lifelong liberal who voted twice for Obama and is disappointed because he isn’t more liberal. I did lose a chunk of my investments on the last recession, which I blame on Republicans. Thanks to Obamacare, my kids can get health insurance. I love science and believe it should be taught in schools, am not afraid of Islam as a religion and I stopped listening to Rush when he stopped being amusing – which was about the second time I heard him.
I am not alone in my peer group.
I accept all your apologies for your blatant, age-related stereotypes.
Just another example of confirmation bias. I am surrounded by old hippies still fighting the good fight. There’s a lot of stupid people out there. Not everyone abandons their principles.
Oh, this is just great. After all the shit my friends and I took from the soi-disant Greatest Generation 40-50 years ago, now we get another helping. Thanks a lot guys, and congratulations on ending the Afghan war and shutting down Gitmo.
Raises hand Sounds just like me. I’m getting more and more liberal as I age. (Not like that right winger **DerTrihs) ** And atheist too.
BTW, while I didn’t see anyone die while I was in college, I was right smack in the middle of a police riot, and saw some cops fire tear gas at the (luckily locked) doors of the MIT womens dorm.
If you had asked me pre-Facebook, I would have agreed that older folks are more conservative, more afraid, etc. etc. But that’s because as I grew up, I liked hanging out with people who were around my age and had similar values to mine (which are fairly liberal, except when they’re not), and I stopped hanging out socially with people who held different values. With Facebook, I see lots of conservative, fear filled people my own age and younger because I Friend nearly anyone I might have once met who sends me a request. I don’t filter my Facebook friends like I do my real life ones.
The proportion seems about the same on gun control and Obamacare. Fewer open homophobes in the younger group, but otherwise about the same spectrum of liberal to conservative I see in the old coots.
I think the problem isn’t really one of age or politics, but of media. It’s no coincidence that a lot of conservatives and fear filled watch FOX and listen to Limbaugh. It’s my contention that it doesn’t always happen in that order, though. I think watching FOX and listening to conservative radio actually creates conservatives. I think immersing oneself in any one viewpoint, hearing the same arguments from varied sources around you, etches neural associations which follow the logic to the same conclusions.
We joke about “drinking the kool-aid”, but the fact is that humans are social creatures, and we want to get along with and think like the people around us. Remove actual people, and media fills the void. Watch enough FOX and, despite your fervent attempts otherwise, you start to think like them. Not because it’s right, but because it’s easiest and safest to think like your tribe.
My parents are both 72 and are raving liberals. They’ll talk about how much they love Obama and my mom still participates in counter-protests for those attempting to block access to Planned Parenthood. Not all old folks are old fogies.
Er, being “over 40” does not equate to being a Boomer. I’m 43 and a solid Gen-Xer, thank you very much, and also I guess a liberal even though it feels weird to think of myself as such. Almost all the rest of my family are rabid conservatives and always have been. Very tiring. My mother is a Boomer and my dad a pre-Boomer. They believe in death panels and the whole nine yards and listen to Fox I-can’t-bear-to-call-it News almost 24/7.
Over 40? Shit, I’m almost 50 and relate to NOTHING that the boomers lived through. I’m of the generation that someone coined “Generation Jones” , people born between 1954 and 1965 (according to wikipedia). We fall between the cracks between Boomers and GenX. I was either too young or too old for what each lived through.
And to get back on topic, my friends are mostly liberal or fall somewhere in the middle, but it’s rare for me to meet someone my age that is extreme conservative. Just my opinion.
My step-dad is the worst about it all, and I’m guessing it’s because he also works as a pastor (that’s what he calls himself) in a small, very loyal group of some bizarro Messianic Jewish/Pentecostal study. So it could just be fanaticism, too.
During the joint birthday breakfast for my husband and mother last year, everything went fine until the last fifteen minutes, when he started praising the works of Dinesh D’Souza. Ever since then, he’s been getting more and more vocal.
This is also a guy who tried to convince us this was real, even saying he personally witnessed the soda on pork thing.
He even started his song and dance when I was in the pre-op wing before my surgery last fall. I was nervous enough without his crazypants ravings being shouted for everyone to hear. It was incredibly embarrassing.
My parents were both seriously into the counterculture scene in college back in the late 60’s - my dad in particular a big-time antiwar protester. They were both in the 1970 March on Washington, and they still like to regale us with the bands they saw and the drugs they used. And both of them now have a number of beliefs that are decidedly right-wing, as well as others that are very much to the left. As of now, I have no idea who they vote for in the U.S. elections. They’ll go on and on about how they don’t trust Obama, but on the other hand, as far as they’re concerned the Republicans will always be the party of that piece of shit Nixon.
I think that in the end, radicals stay radicals. It doesn’t even matter what you’re radical about - the radical mindset stays with you even if you specific beliefs tend to wander with time.
And now to be confused with that generation and its screwed up beliefs is almost beyond endurance. The anecdotal evidence being tossed around here is no substitute for reality. The boomers are more liberal than the older generation and almost as liberal as the younger ones. Some of you should be directing the bulk of your ire towards the generation that’s been retired for 20 years yet still hanging around voting against same sex marriage and marijuana decriminalization.
It isn’t just about being conservative. My mother in law is incredibly liberal and is getting paranoid as she ages. During the last election she lost a lot of sleep and worked herself up until she was physically ill over the republicans who were going to stage a nationwide attack on liberals. They were going to cause car accidents in liberal areas to block people from getting to the voting booths and do other unseemly things to force liberals out of power. I finally took away her TV remote and wouldn’t let her watch MSNBC until the day of the election because she was so freaked out.
:nodding: I’ve heard that “Generation Jones” too. I was born in 1960, which makes me a kid when Vietnam and such were going on. My next door neighbor’s daughter had peace signs plastered all over her VW Bug, but she never participated in a protest AFAIK. Neither did any of her friends, or even kids slightly older than her. I do remember, though, that a lot of her male high school classmates were drafted.
My boss’s husband actually wants to kill Obama, and everything out of his mouth is a Republican talking point. I wouldn’t care what his views are, but he seems to have put no thought into it, and it’s actually kind of pathetic, because he seems to be an intelligent man, and yet everything is almost an exact quote. And he keeps spewing this garbage all the time, instead of stopping to think about it for even a second.
And atheist too.