The concept that young people are always liberal and old people are always conservative is false. There have been studies finding that people actually become more liberal with age, and that millennials are progressive/liberal because of the environment they/we grew up in, not because of age. young people who grew up under Reagan were extremely conservative. young people who grow up now are progressive, and those liberal attitudes are probably going to last for decades to come.
The average fox news and talk radio viewer is 65-67, and many are male. So within 15 years the vast majority of diehard conservatives will be dead. Also within 15 years millennials will make up about 35-40% of the electorate.
So you have 35-40% of the electorate with socially & fiscally liberal attitudes, combined with 80% of the audience of fox news and talk radio being dead (basically the most conservative 10-30 million people in the US dying) and you end up with a far more liberal society. Replace the most conservative 10-15% of the electorate with 10-15% who are fairly liberal, and it changes everything.
The Tea Party is nothing new. Fake right-wing grassroots movements comprised of people who claim to have been previously non-political have been created during every Democratic presidency of the 20th century: FDR has the Liberty League, Kennedy had the John Birch Society, Clinton had the Arkansas Project and militias, and Obama has the Tea Party.
Well maybe, but don’t underestimate the power of corporate money in politics. After all we just passed a health care bill without a public option despite polls showing a solid majority of voters wanted a public option.
Of course it is. That’s why to my knowledge no one has asserted that it is. What they (and I) say is that people tend to be more liberal in their youth, and that people tend to become more conservative with age.
I’m sure you won’t agree with that either, but you need to argue from the position of what people have actually said and not in easily falsifyable absolutes that no one has actually claimed.
No, not really.
In the first place, O’Donnell is hardly a “hero” of the Tea Party; she’s merely a candidate who the Tea Part decided to support in the Delaware senate race.
Palin, I’ll give you. But there’s a lot more to her than people around here like to admit, or even acknowledge.
But the idea that Tea Party members in the main are stupid flies in the face of logic, given that they tend to be wealthier and more highly educated than the general population. To wit:
Demographically, as the US becomes majority Mexican and black obviously that will go against the Republicans. The challenge for the Democrats will be that along with baby boomer retirements, there will be a skill shortage leading to reduced economic performance. Also, you’ll have increasing income inequality between the more educated and less educated as unskilled jobs get replaced by technology or outsourced.
Politics shmolitics. There’s something different that has relatively recently evolved: a massive, multifaceted and heavily integrated industry that is generating a substantial profit from a defined audience. It may have existed before in some senses (it does have roots), but the depth and breath of today’s industry–television, talk radio, publishing–are unparalleled. While anything can happen, the sheer economic volume and its potential lead to self-perpetuating corporate marketing efforts; the diversity of economic actors assures that the current brand may mutate in some ways yet individual failings and die-offs will be small in comparison to the whole.
Again, politics shmolitics. The braying voices and ugly lies and distortions of both left and right-wing positions undercuts the notion that this is a “conservative” movement. The media monstrosity is taking otherwise articuable sentiments from both sides and couching them in over-sensationalized terms meant to sell advertising space.
Immigrants do not replace the native-born population, they supplement it. High immigration figures would not in any way cause a “skill shortage” in a given generation, not even if all the immigrants are unskilled illiterates.
Why the “generation” qualifier? There’s no question that as the native population ages and retires and dies out, and immigrants continue to flood in, the immigrant population will for all intents and purposes replace the native population.
Or is it your contention that America’s white population has merely “supplemented” the Native American population?
Care to point out just who it is you’re rolling your eyes at?
Or have you just cooked up a faux-racist comment yourself and then attempted to pass it off as coming from the opposition?
No, not unless the native-born population goes through a simultaneous decline in numbers – absolute, not just relative, numbers. You seem to be assuming not only that immigrants are coming but that native-borns are no longer reproducing. That’s not really true even in Europe, and far less so here.
:dubious: The Native Americans did go through some serious declines in abolute numbers.
They also went through a process of cultural destruction and displacement – something which immigrants to the U.S. do not threaten to do to the native-born, as you know.
Wait, why?