It depends where in Europe. Take a look at what’s going on in Hungary.
To answer the question, there will always be differences of opinion regarding policy, and one group will be perceived as conservative with respect to another group. Precisely what that means will definitely change over time.
Of course, it’s very iffy to assume that birth rates and interconversion rates will remain the same, given that they’ve obviously changed in the past, or we wouldn’t be so far out of equilibrium right now. To get anything resembling a decent estimate, you’d need some sort of model for how those rates change, and I have no idea how one could ground such a model.
People have repeatedly claimed this and they’ve usually been proven wrong.
Also, he seems to ignore the fact that there are different metrics to measure young people’s conservatism.
For example, Andrew Sullivan and others have made a point of showing how the embrace of gay marriage is about the embrace of conservative values and he’s pointed out that polls show that the young people of today disapprove of adultery in larger numbers that the young people of the 80s.
I’d also recommend this much better article from Slate. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/millennials_racism_and_mtv_poll_young_people_are_confused_about_bias_prejudice.html
You’ll notice that not only do 88% of millennials object to “race preferences” and 70% do so regardless of the historical past, but more than half of all white millennials think discrimination against white people is just as big a problem as discrimination against black people.
My personal opinion is no. I don’t feel the social conservatives are really in charge of the Republican Party. I think the people who are running the Republican Party are the corporate interests. They’re setting the real agenda for the party. Then they throw some “family values” issues in to attract socially conservative voters. That’s why you see social conservative issues like abortion and gay marriage getting talked about a lot but you see corporate issues like tax policy and deregulation getting enacted into law.
And I don’t see those corporate interests fading away. They’ll keep the party alive and they’ll keep appealing to social conservatives as long as they’re useful. If social conservatives drop down to numbers where they’re no longer worth the effort, the corporate interests will just switch to a new group like the libertarians to drum up votes. The bosses will remain the same even if they put up a different banner to attract new followers.
What’s going on in Hungary?
N.B.: When I speak of a “new party system” I assume the D and R party-labels will endure, but applying to different formations/constituencies/coalitions, as has happened many times in the past.
That would be interesting; ideological libertarians pride themselves on being pro-market but not pro-business, and balk at corporate welfare, big government contracts, etc.
We millennials will transform America into a liberal nation. We definitely won’t sell out like the hippies. Right?
This. A hundred years ago the party slogans and issues were completely different, but it was still same gentlemen’s duel between different sectors of capital.
Thing is, millenials are not outright “liberal” but describe themselves as Independent politically. From a social perspective, undeniably liberal on issues like SSM, decriminalization of drugs, etc. In terms of governance, I think we will end up re-defining both parties toward the middle. Growing up under bitter partisanship has soured us toward politics in general.
I’ve always said that if the Libertarians ever took power in Washington, they’d enact all their business deregulation programs before lunch on the first day. And ten years later they’d still be discussing decriminalizing drugs.
Every political organization has its public agenda and its real agenda. You can distinguish the two by what laws they actually enact. Abortions, for example, have been legal for four decades now. If the Republicans really wanted to make it illegal, they’d have done it by now. But it’s not an issue they’re really committed to.
But tax cuts? Reagan became President in January and the corporate tax rate was cut by August. (The spending cuts that were supposed to accompany this, however, got put on the “to do” list and never happened.) This illustrates the difference between what’s on the public agenda and what’s on the real agenda.
In the last election, not only did the conservatives win a majority of seats in parliament but the neo-Nazi Jobbik party won 23 seats.
Well, I don’t think any form of Nazism is ever going to get any traction here; the Americans most disposed to be attracted to it are also maniacally suspicious of centralized national state power, and of any form of “socialism,” national or otherwise.
Oh, I agree. I was just responding to the comment by Pjen that European politics consists of centrists with shades of moderation. This is decidedly not so in Central and Eastern Europe.
Well, without reading every post, I just want to say that predicting the “death of social conservatism” is just plain foolish. These things are cyclical. Social conservatism may fall out of political fashion for a while (probably a generation), but once a generation grows up under a liberal slanted society it will come back.
Reliance on either end of the spectrum will almost always create a backlash, mostly because people have no freaking sense of history, as well as a pollyanna attitude about the state of the country when they were children. For instance, I was a kid in the late 60s and early 70s. Despite the Vietnam War crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis, not to mention a few notable assassinations of prominent Americans, I tend to think of that time in idyllic terms. Heck, these days I’m even beginning to reminisce about the Cold War fondly. We tend to remember the good and forget the bad about the past, and the fact that most children are sheltered from the really horrific news doesn’t help.
Everyone wants the world to be like it was when they were children, when the fact is the world wasn’t like what we remembered it being. So, we hop on the bandwagon of whatever was the political climate during that time of our lives, hoping that we can recreate that social climate. And it never occurs to us that we really, really wouldn’t like it if we got it.
No, they’re not. Some things, when they die, are dead for all time. We will never go back to slavery or Jim Crow, or pre-feminist notions of gender roles, or agrarianism, and America will never again have a “Christian consensus.”
Lifelong religiousity relies to a certain extent on ignorance, which tends to decrease over the long run. More access to information that is not carefully tailored to the needs of religious propaganda also tends to reduce religiousity. Barring the rise of restrictive censorship programs on religious topics, such as are now practiced in the Middle East, religion is doomed in the long run … maybe in the short run.
ummm–some of us Dopers have noticed that fighting ignorance takes longer than we thought. 
And despite the best hopes of the born-again, evangelical scientists like Richard Dawkins, religion ain’t going away.
The “Death of God” was announced on the cover of Time magazine in 1966.
But the funeral is going to be delayed for a few more millenia.
It seems to be dying off rapidly in places like Europe.
That’s the most depressing thing I’ve heard in a while. It goes against everything I always imagined – human beings shedding themselves of religion within the next century or two – but the facts and logic you cite are real, and a real bummer. The only hope is in gradually reducing that “heritability rate” of religion, I guess through many kinds of fora…the SDMB among them.