When my parents were younger they were hippies and even lived on a commune. They were into natural childbirth and wheat germ and Dylan and weed and “Free to Be You and Me.” My father was a Vietnam-era draft dodger and proud of it, and a stay-at-home-dad in the 80s.
Now my father listens to Fox news unironically, is basically hawkish on Iraq/Afganistan, and talks about Obama’s “elitism” (meanwhile my father has a liberal arts Ph.D.), whereas my mother has the same essentially liberal politics she ever had.
Probably because you don’t pay any attention to liberals, except the ones you’re trying to vote out of office.
How about Reagan, Thurmond, Elizabeth Dole, Condoleezza Rice, Phil Gramm or Norm Coleman? They didn’t just become conservative; they actually switched their party registration.
For one thing, gay men are the exception. Sure, there are gay conservatives, but they’re way outnumbered by gay liberals. So it seems that the deciding factor is whether a person is in a minority (either a numerical of cultural minority). In other words, straight white males are somewhat of a “privileged” class, and see the world through different filters than the rest of us. Things change when you consider yourself an underdog. I know that in my case, the more “out” I became, the further to the left I moved.
So, generally speaking, women and African Americans don’t generate the same emotional feelings abut family and property ownership that drive political points of view?
I’m 58. I like to think I’ve stayed the same and the rest of the country has gotten way more conservative.
But it’s easy to be a liberal when you don’t have as much to lose. By the time you’ve hit your 50’s and 60’s, you’ve accumulated a lot of stuff whether or not you intended to.
I’d be interested in seeing whether older voters’ conservative leaning applies as strongly to social issues as it does economic issues. The only issue I see older voters line up solidly on is Social Security/Medicare.
The failure in this assumption is the generalization that the majority of older white men are rich. Which is false. While the majority of rich men are older and white, the majority of older white men are not rich.
Generally speaking, women and African-Americans don’t own property. Non-Hispanic whites are more than one and a half times as likely to own homes as African-Americans (75% vs. 47%). Single women are about one-third as likely to own homes as single men.
These figures actually represent something of an unrepresentative spike, too, since minorities and single women represent roughly half of all subprime borrowers (and hence are likely to default in large numbers).
Moreover, women and African-Americans typically hold less equity in the homes they do own.
Reagan became a conservative in early middle age and was a fervent anticommunist even before then.
Thurmond was a virulent segregationist early in his political career, continued to oppose civil rights legislation for many years afterwards and then actually moderated his position on race in his late years. Apart from race, I don’t ever remember him being characterized as a youthful liberal who shifted to the right as he aged.
I’d like to see something resembling evidence that shows that women and blacks don’t tend to become more conservative as they age.
Myself, as I get older I see no problem with gays owning guns, as long as they’re not getting government handouts to buy them.
Probably because as you get older, you realize that actions have consequences and you’re accountable for them. In other words, you have more personal responsibility. Furthermore, you realize that people aren’t going to give you things just because you want them, nor should they.
These two mentalities don’t sit well with liberals.
When he was young, he rebelled against his parents’ religion. Then he was drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam (where he actually had the choice to not serve if he had not rejected being a Mennonite). He came back to his good union job. Then he was laid off. Then it got so bad that he needed public assistance for his family.
Then for about 25 years it was all gravy at the union job. He worked his way up from lowly machine operator to skilled trade. By the time he retired, between him and my mom they were finally making six figures.
And I think by then he totally forgot where he’d come from and how the world had changed. All of a sudden he’s “rich” (he has no idea that he’s not rich), immigrants are taking the same job he had when he was young (except the job he had when he was young no longer exists in America), and forgets that he used to need public assistance and will be getting public assistance in the near future (which to him will be icing on the pension-and-health-benefits-cake).
He definitely seems to have an “I got mine” mentality. He doesn’t want the government to tell him what to do (no one can tell an old guy what to do anyway). He’s never had to think about differently-colored people in office, and now here they are.
Mostly, now that he’s retired, he’s got all day to sit around and listen to other old white people on TV telling him to watch his back. There aren’t too many old white people urging him to be less scared and less selfish.
But Mr Obama didn’t really win 'cause people liked him. They disliked GW Bush so much and that carried over.
Remember Hillary came within a breath of beating him. Had John Edwards not been in the race, she might’ve siezed the momentum and got it. She was kicking Obama’s ass at the end there.
It was like this with Humphrey in 1968. LBJ was hated, and when he didn’t run, Humphrey inherited all his backlash and Nixon didn’t have much problem winning.
People didn’t like Mr Obama as much as they dislike GW Bush and wanted to vote against him.
Plus the Oprah effect was huge. If not for her Hillary would’ve romped it in.
The whole premise is faulty.
Women and African Americans get conservative also as they age. You just don’t tend to focus on that as much.
Plus there are mixes. I am very liberal when it comes to social issues, but on economic issues I’m conservative. The two aren’t always seperateable but for the most part I can seperate them.
This is definitely true. In my case it was being gay, plus growing up black, poor and atheist in the South. Not only do I fit the underdog framework in your post and ended up being very socially liberal, because I’ve seen extreme income disparity firsthand and benefitted from programs to alleviate the suffering that caused, I’ve ended up quite fiscally liberal as well.
Thanks for articulating that it’s probably a sense of being part of a privileged class that may factor into which political direction older white move; that’s been my thought for a long time and actually what I feel is driving some of the easily tapped into anger and fear of Tea Partiers and others today as the world around them is so rapidly changing (polls looking at the makeup of the Tea Party bears out the dynamic broached in the OP).
They also trend more conservative than the rest of the country on issues like gay marriage and DADT.
Actually, many conservatives are quite radical and want to turn America and the world into something its never been, like a full blown Christian theocracy (devoted to their particular sect, naturally).
Many of them do, and blacks on average are more conservative than whites. They aren’t likely to run to the Republicans however because the Republicans are deeply and blatantly racist. Just as most conservative gays aren’t going to be Republican because of their blatant homophobia, and most conservative atheists aren’t going to be Republican because of their blatant religious fanaticism.
But they do tend to be the sort who think they will be rich or would have been rich if the Jews/immigrants/liberals/blacks weren’t in their way.
I don’t know much about Elizabeth Dole’s political views, but I don’t think Condi or Gramm became more conservative. They were Democrats because their daddy was a Democrat and their grand-daddy was a Democrat. And I strongly suspect Condi, while conservative on foreign policy matters, may be moderate on economics and outright liberal on some social issues. Phil Gramm is just your classic case of a Southern Democrat defecting to a party that actually embraced his worldview, as many Southern Democrats did in the 70s and 80s.
Norm Coleman is a good example though – he was almost a caricature of a hippie when he was young, and became a pretty conventional mainstream conservative by the time he was elected to the Senate.
Dude, you’re the same age as I am. And so far I’ve been becoming more liberal as I age. And it’s posts like this that let me know I’ve made the right choice. You can’t grasp that we are not selfish, and do not want to change things for ourselves, but for other people. You know, the moral thing to do, unless you are a Randian.
If anything, it is conservatives that have a sense of entitlement. You think you’ve earned the right to not help other people less fortunate than yourself. And, usually, you’ve not even been through a tenth of what those people have been through. Thus you’ve done less work yet get more rewards. Yeah, actions sure have consequences.
You seem to have several views that I don’t agree with.
young people are always liberal
white people are conservative
People get more conservative with age
All 3 have tons of issues with them. The concept that young people are always liberal isn’t true. The current millennial generation is far more liberal than young generations in the past, likely due to a mix of growing up among severe economic uncertainty combined with massive global problems requiring strong government to solve them. Young people who voted in 1980 supported Reagan by 20 point margins. Young people in 2008 voted Obama by 30 point margins.
Young people today are liberal because the economic, social and global climate makes it the best option. People who graduate college 30k in debt who can’t find jobs, who can’t get good health care, who don’t care about religious authoritarianism and who realize peak oil and global warming are serious problems aren’t going to support plutocratic economics, theocracy and libertarianism.
As far as white people and conservatism, it depends on the part of the country. In Mississippi or Alabama, 90% of whites vote republican. In Vermont only 35% do. So yeah, whites in rural parts of country (esp the south, midwest, northwest) tend to vote GOP. But it is geographic in part. White people in the south vote GOP 60-90% of the time. In the northeast and west coast it is closer to 30-40% of the time. In Ohio it is about 50-60% of the time. etc.
As far as point 3, there was a study out finding the opposite. Age results in more liberalism.
However because on some attitudes (esp social attitudes on issues like racial justice, gay rights, religion, etc) older age is strongly connected with more conservative positions, it appears old age results in more conservatism.
On the subject of why do older white men vote republican though, in my experience they do it because they think they can stand on their own 2 feet w/o the government telling them what to do or providing for them (just keep sending them their social security checks, wouldn’t want the delusion to crash). And because they think their taxes will be raised and the money given to blacks, latino immigrants and poor people. I think white middle class conservatives have invented a socioeconomic totem pole with themselves on the top.
But I don’t know. Part of me wonders if all the white kids who fought for civil rights and ending the war in Vietnam in the 60s & 70s are now the 60 year old white people who listen to fox news, oppose civil rights and support neocon foreign policy.
My impression is the concept that people become conservative with age isn’t really true (it just appears that way since older generations were far more conservative on social issues, so their baseline is to the right). But who konws.
You must have missed my point that these are generalizations, generalizations supported by campaign strategies of political parties.
The OP doesn’t assert the generalization that “white people are conservative”, it asserts the generalization that “older white males are conservative”, two very different generalizations.
