The existence of for-profit prisons is also a factor, istm.
Neither of those points refute the statement you quoted.
An 11% margin.
In 2020, Biden led by 24% in that age group; in 2016, Clinton led by 30%. The data clearly shows that young voters, while still skewing liberal, are much more right-wing than in the past. Cite:
(Scroll down to “Age and generation”).
Maybe. Or maybe Trump didn’t run on traditional right wing issues. He ran as a populist and a racist. (And while he’s governed more as a racist than as a populist, i think populism was more important in his electoral victory.)
There really were people who moved from Bernie to Trump, because they were populists.
Or maybe among the youngsters there just is a disturbingly growing segment by now used to being trolling redpill edgelords for the lulz and the libtard tears and who cares about consequences. Not a majority but a lot more than many expected ( * ) and their share is also proportionately inflated by the segment of the same age group who sat it out and denied Harris their vote because Too Establishment or Gaza or whatever.
( * I know there are still people around counting on the demographic doom of conservatives. Said it before, saying it again, I’ve been hearing how the “new generations” will save us since back when people older than I were the new generation)
If you rely on social media, it really does look like there are a lot more people openly declaring themselves racist. This is a definitely a rhetorical change from how things historically have been. Even David Duke, a former grand wizard of the KKK, doesn’t identify as a racist or admit that he is one. So that’s a valid data point, but you have to take care with the meanings:
- Obviously David Duke is a screaming racist, regardless of how he describes himself. The “older people” cohort is like this. They see little benefit in admitting to it, but what they’ll admit is completely unrelated to who they are. In fact many of these people are trolls who rejoice in playing the “I’m not touching you” game. You can’t take their word at face value.
- It’s far from clear that social media posts represent “young people”. You don’t know their ages or identities. We can probably agree that they’re mostly not boomer-age but that’s not a reasonable categorization of “young people”.
- It’s far from clear that social media racists represent a significant part of the population, or even actual human beings in some cases.
I think it’s fair to say that we’re in an age where the taboo against self-identifying as a racist is weaker than it used to be, and this is more starkly evident in the younger generation, in which it was once reliably strongest. I also think it’s fair to suppose that social media has converted more people to racism than in the past, simply because people are (A) bolder behind their keyboards, and (B) easily fooled by the illusion of numbers. I thiink it’s also fairly uncontroversial to say that the older generations nowadays have a larger fraction of anti-racists than in, say, the 60’s, simply because anti-racism first broadly emerged in the 60’s.
All of those nuanced positions are reasonable, but they’re not reducible to a conclusion that younger people are more bigoted than older ones.
We also don’t know who’s an actual person vs a bot, who’s posting agitprop, who’s a foreign agent. It’s still true that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.
That’s perfectly true, and a good reason to be wary about overestimating online sentiment, but I also think it’s wrongheaded simply to dismiss every popular thing you don’t like as “bot activity”. You’re in Elon Musk territory when you do that.
Not everything on social media is real, but social media is real. It influences opinions and attitudes in real ways. I think a lot of how we got to this dark place is people pretending that TV is real and social meda is fake. It’s very easy for people in that mindset to tell themselves that there aren’t that many Trumpers or Nazis, or that Trump is just goofing on Twitter, he’s an ok guy who will shake things up in some innovative and entertaining ways.
I realize I’m arguing both sides here, but it’s a nuanced situation. Social media is real and shouldn’t be dismissed, but it’s also incredibly distorted in ways that will lead you to confirmation bias if you’re not careful.
This board revolves around facts and logic. The core of conservative ideology is personal reactionary grievance. I hope conservatives continue to leave.
In the 90s, my parents, their relatives, and their peers openly complained about black people, Latinos, immigrants, poor people, people who didn’t speak English. I just assume that is the default position of any white person over the age of 40 until proven otherwise.
Ayup. And the GOP knows this extremely well.
“We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
–Republican Senator Lindsey Graham
The GOP aggressively mined the red states and rural areas, spreading enough venom to increase voter turnout. It worked once, failed once, and then worked again.
[I must be sad … 'cuz two out of three’s still bad.]
How do you pivot from these borderline insane die-hard MAGA/January 6th/Proud Boy types back to a platform that will retrieve the likes of George Will, David Brooks [NB: decision pending], Pat Buchanan, and Bill Kristol?
I don’t think old school conservatives are a) as numerous as the rabble that the GOP has roused, or b) as patient and forgiving as the deplorables. I don’t see having your cake and eating it, too. I think you have to pick a target market.
And I think they have. They heard you, Lindsey.
Meaning only one thing: more demagoguery, vile and odious marketing efforts, voter suppression, gerrymandering, and ‘culture wars’ from the GOP.
Angry white guys don’t just happen. They have to be carefully taught.
Yeah, you have to give Republicans credit here. They saw the problem, they made a long-term plan, and they executed it very well.
- Control of the judiciary
- Replenishing the younger generation (not entirely, but sufficiently)
- Inroads to sympathetic minorities (angry Latino men)
- Gerrymandering
- Media capture
- Alliances with international far-right and authoritarian states (Russia, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Israel)
Contrast with Democrats, whose strategy seems to rest on the assumption that their inevitable popularity and democratic dominance is simply a matter of waiting for the opposition to discredit themselves.
Normally I’m not big on one liners, but that one is nice.
Hey!!! Cool you still had your info to get logged in!
Do you think this was a long term goal of people that can’t tie their own shoes, or did they fall back asswards into it.
I’m thinking that for other than a few, it’s the later. Shit, even a Koch bother is suing them.
With an abundance of charitable interpretation, I speculate that you are unfamiliar with the meme’s source, and lack the intellectual curiosity to find out.
That’s okay, I’ll tell you anyway.
You wrote that at least older religious conservatives had morals, with the strong implication that that made them better than younger, modern conservatives.
The meme is from the big Lebowski. The character in question says, “Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism: at least it’s an ethos.” Your reasoning closely mirrored his.
And, in the movie, he’s a fucking idiot.
Having an ethos is not better than lacking an ethos, if your ethos leads to the Holocaust. The writers did not spell this out: the joke was how completely obvious the point is.
Having morals is not better than not having morals, if your morals lead to Jim Crow and the confederacy and to women lacking the vote and to the Trail of Tears and to myriad other things that old conservative morals led to.
Your reasoning was just as stupid as the character’s in The Big Lebowski. And then for you to come back and say that the meme is defending Neonazism?
Fucking idiocy.
Well, they can get angrier when they realize they were had.
Solid analysis.
To the extent that one would expect the young to be less racist than the old, the younger generation is a disappointment, by some measures. Yeah, I gave myself a lot of wiggle room because I located mixed evidence at Pew.
First piece of evidence. How much progress have we made on race? How much more is to be done? Youth are more likely to say we have more work to do, but by pretty damn thin margins I opine. The split between Republicans and Democrats on the other hand is dramatic.
What about attention given to racism and slavery? Interesting younger people are more interested in that, though again partisan disagreement is more dramatic:
Well, I’m over 40 and have no friends or relatives who act that way.
And I’m 75 and I don’t have any friends or relatives that act that way either.