Yes, I think so. I think you get away with a bunch of rash foolish stuff when you’re young, but if you really want to establish yourself financially and personally, you have to quit goofing around.
I have no evidence one way or another, but the question reminds me of an oft-cited quote (falsely) attributed to Winston Churchill:
Note: Here’s a cite for the statement that the quote isn’t actually Churchill’s:
My father was a lifelong Republican and still seemed to grow more conservative with age. He was raised in Hollywood, California, and I remember my shrew of a mother throwing into his face all of these wild and crazy things he’d made the mistake of telling her he did as a young adult. He’d look over at me and then plead with her with his eyes to shut the hell up in front of the kid. Then by the time he was in his 60s, it was difficult to get him even to go see a movie if there were swear words in it.
He and all of his siblings must have been influenced by their father, my grandfather, another lifelong Republican. He was born in 1876 (he had all of his children late in life) and raised in upstate New York. Lincoln and Grant would still have been fresh in everyone’s mind, and the Republican Party must have seemed larger than life to him during his formative years. But my grandmother, the woman he married, wasn’t even born until he was something like 24 years old, so maybe he wasn’t all that staid.
I never met my grandfather, but I enjoyed reading and hearing about him (he ended up a small businessman in Hollywood), and between him and my father I never could shake a certain respect for conservative people no matter how hard I tried when I was younger and it wasn’t “cool” to be conservative. These days, like Sateryn76 above I’m another fiscal conservative who would not mind seeing quite a lot besides property crimes become legalized, but I no longer feel the need to see radical change overnight.
There are some very good and decent people who are conservatives, and it pains me when I see them dismissed out of hand as some sort of carnival freaks.
I first heard this little quip when I was 20 or so. Coincidentally, just around the time I was heavily into Ayn Rand.
I’ve made a full recovery, thank you very much. Perhaps I was just heartless when I was young, and now am brainless; others may judge as they see fit, as I think I am neither. But I don’t expect I’ll ever again be as conservative as I was when I was younger.
I think most people simply become more reasonable as they get older, because they have more life experience and are exposed to more different kinds of people and go through good times and bad, and learn a little bit along the way.
That generally means that people who were radical in their younger years (either on the right or left) learn that things aren’t quite as black-and-white as they looked when they were in college, and moderate their positions somewhat.
Of course, you find people who use their ideology as a hammer to blame people around them for their own failings, and those people tend to become even more partisan and polarized as they age, because they’ve invested more of themselves in their ideology.
For myself, I was a pretty hardcore libertarian in my early days (high school through college). I saw very little reason for government at all, other than to maintain law courts and police and a military. I was also fairly heavily influenced by Ayn Rand, although I was never an objectivist of any sort, and thought Objectivists were like the crazy cult side of the libertarian axis.
But as I’ve gotten older and moved my reading and thinking away from libertarian dogma and into mainstream economics, I’ve moderated my beliefs about what government should do quite a bit. But in some other areas, my beliefs have actually gotten stronger as I’ve found more and more validation for them. So I’m still very much on the libertarian side of the aisle, but it’s more along the lines of the Chicago school than the Objectivist institute.
On social issues, I’ve been mostly liberal my whole life, but I’ve moved left on a number of issues, such as the death penalty and gay marriage. I was never opposed to gay lifestyles, but thought changing the institution of marriage was too socially destabilizing. Now I don’t care.
To be fair, you can’t directly address the OP’s question by looking only at current demographics. All that shows you is that old people are more conservative, not that any given individual is likely to become more conservative as they age.
I’ll just note again that–while I in no way vouch for the source of information–post #12 has a link to an actual survey. People become more partisan as they grow older, not more reasonable and independent. The middle shrinks.
It’s children. Nothing makes you examine what your really, realy believe so much as that. A comfortable person will wish to sustain that level, will be resistant to change that might threaten his capacity to pass that along.
But a person who feels himself oppressed, for whatever reason, will become even more concerned to eliminate those factors that oppress him, he will become more demanding of change so that his children will not face the same obstacles as he.
This holds true as well for those of us who are not particularly oppressed, but want a more just and equitable world generally.
Also, I think our cultural norms have been progressing toward social liberalism for a long time now, which would naturally make the older generations who cling to the ideals of their youth become more conservative by comparison.
It’s harder to make the same statement about economic liberalism. As far as I can tell, it goes in cycles, probably coinciding with the business cycle. In booms we become economically conservative, in busts we demand more government intervention.
Bu then there are those of us without children. We, too, become more conservative. It’s not children that do it for us.
I think that as you grow older and get more life and people experience, you start to realize the basic truth of William J. H. Boetcker’s The Ten Cannots:
* You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
* You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
* You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
* You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
* You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
* You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
* You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
* You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
* You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence.
* And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.
Seeking to apply that to a particular political POV inevitably puts one on the conservative side.
This is a fabulous statement. Where did you find it?
It’s often mistakenly attributed to Lincoln, but it’s actually from a pamphlet called The Ten Cannots, published by a Presbyterian minister, William J. H. Boetcker, in the early 20th century.
Why is this a debate? It’s a factual question that political scientists and political psychologists have been discussing for a couple of decades now. Here’s the straight dope thus far:
Political psychologists identify what they call four lifetime models of political socialization:
- primacy model
- impressionable years model
- lifelong openness
- life cycle model
the idea that people grow more conservative as they grow older, essentially this old dictum attributed to Churchill that he who is not left wing in his young years has no heart but he who is not right wing at a ripe old age has no brain, is captured by the life cycle model. It is generally argued that being right wing is associated more with responsibility (house ownership and the like, and raising children) than being left wing.
The lifelong openness model basically suggests that people are always equally open to formative experiences; the primacy model suggests that people are predominantly open to socialization at a very young age whereas the ‘impressionable years’ are those of late adolescence and early adulthood. These latter two models suggest that once someone in his youth, be it late or early, is influenced to be either conservative or liberal, or right wing or left wing or whatever, they’re going to stay that way.
Obviously, these are models with only a limited applicability to the real world of people. Thankfully so, I might add. Some pattern of socialization might apply better to some people than to others; Also, it can be the case that more than one pattern might be observed: for instance, even a person socialized from a very young age to be left wing is going to be affected by something like a big depression, a huge war or a major terrorist attack, no matter what his or her age is.
However, most of the research does indicate that the norms and values that someone holds when he or she is around twenty years old have a tendency of sticking around. By and large, I’d have to answer to Siam Sam’s OP with a no rather than a yes. Of course, there may have been individual cohorts for which such a change did occur, but you can probably find cohorts in which it went the opposite way. The most prevalent development, however, is no development: most people end up feeling about politics when they’re old pretty much the way they do when they’re young.
My father came to this country from El Salvador, with little more than the clothes he was wearing and an assignment from his family to get a job and start sending them money.
Yet despite that, he was deeply distrustful of the left, and the first election that I can remember my parents discussing he supported Nixon over McGovern.
I wonder why he didn’t feel himself oppressed?
Because he came from El Salvador?
I mean, after living in a banana republic, any American politician looks liberal.
I’ve become slightly more conservative over the years. But I started out as a moderate to conservative Democrate, and somehow I’m now a “loony lefty.”
Apparently everyone else got more conservative as they got older, and I stayed more or less the same.
It would be extremely hard to parse out political viewpoints from demographics. People get older. As others have mentioned people also start accumulating wealth. But the world is also getting much smaller with newer technology, the economy is always changing, society is always changing, with such fluid change, I really don’t see how we could get a firm answer.
With that being SAID, I’m going with accumulation of wealth driving political views, not age. When young, you’re looking for a helping hand in getting started and a safety net as you get your sea legs in society. Once you’ve grown older, you have an established and steady job and personal life, you’re able to catch yourself and no longer feel like you should pay for that safety net that you’re no longer using.
These sound like a manifesto for the ruling class. A how-to guide for keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. A wishlist for the powerful elite.
They are all highly contentious, I would say, because the socialist argument would be that the above things are exactly what you do need to be doing ie making the wealthy pay more tax. Those with the broadest backs should bear the heaviest burden.
Likewise with the rest of them:
So the poor should be happy in their poverty and not try to rock the boat?
No? How big is the US deficit currently?
Ha! So it’s ok to be poor - it’s character building.
This sounds like an exuse for not helping them at all.
Really? To me that list sounds like what an ignorant person thinks, “the libs” are trying to sell. That list is a pickup truck full of strawmen bouncing down an old country road. And no insult intended, it seems to be the sort of thing that’s aimed at people who don’t think very hard about their opinions.
“Yeah, the libs wanna take my money to help lazy fucks!”