A recent FT article has prompted discussion on birdsite as to why the idea that you become "more conservative as you age" seems to be breaking down.
As I've talked about before, this has ALWAYS misunderstood what happens. Which is that people become more conservative when they feel part of (or the opportunity to be part of) the status quo and want to preserve it.
And Xennials/below don't have that.
Here's a thread to explain. 🧵
You can't expect Millennials and below to defend the status quo when the Boomers (speaking generally) pulled up the ladder that would allow future generations to be part of it, once they were in charge of the country.
Ironically, given her 'hero' status in the current Conservative Party, Thatcher did more than anyone to lock in that long-term drift away from conservatism.
It was the Council House sell-off, with no effort made to replace the lost housing stock.
Short term win. Long term fail.
Obviously I'm talking in UK terms here, but the absolute same thing applies in the US too, with some quirks of its own.
If you want everyone to believe in 'the American Dream' you have to let at least a few people, each generation, achieve it.
Also, as I've mentioned, the real pivot point in the attraction of the status quo slices right down the middle of Gen X.
Early Gen X got houses, pensions, free education. Late stage Gen X either didn't, or found them much harder to access/weakened.
Which is why you get more 50 somethings screaming about wokeness than 40 somethings. And why despite the Boomers ageing out of power, gradually, the situation hasn't really improved.
Because we're now in Early Gen X power period.
And why making old people pay for their own care is a MASSIVE time bomb for UK conservatism.
People are cashing in on their home value to do that. So the 'inherit your way into the status quo' path is permanently weakened now.
I really, really, wish they'd done that survey in five year, not ten year, increments.
Because I'd love to see how that 40-49 block split between 40-44 and 45-49.
That's the "beat the UK housing apocalypse" point.
Essentially if you're born in the UK after 1975, your first opportunity to buy a house hit right at the point where you needed a massive deposit and a many-times-value mortgage. If you've managed it all.
And born after 1978ish you had to pay for university in some way.
So the Xennial (i.e. late Gen X) experience is far more similar to the Millennial one than a lot of people realise. If you got on the housing ladder, it was a horrific and costly experience. And you likely either still have, or had to pay off, student loans.
So it's wrong to map age (and, indirectly, generation) to a shift to conservatism, especially in the UK.
It's all about "screw you, got mine."
And few people under 45 feel like they got theirs.
Indeed you could argue it's only people born 1937ish - 1975ish that ever 'got theirs' in the UK.
That's the only group that ever legit got the full benefits of the welfare state and a wave of national, future-focused infra/housing development.
Ironically all the Conservative Party needed to do in order to remain eternally relevant/powerful was maintain the welfare state and housing.
That had created a MASSIVE, natural pipeline of fresh blood into the status quo.
And they screwed up. Hard.
Finally, it's worth remembering that the "Boomers are deliberately selfish" thing isn't really true either.
But admitting you pulled up all the ladders is hard. And there is an ENTIRE RIGHT WING MEDIA INDUSTRY (Daily Mail etc) dedicated to convincing them they didn't.
This is why it's always about Millennials 'choosing' Netfix, or avocadoes over housing. Or about how it's immigrants that are the problem. Or 'wokeness'. Or 'waste' within vital services.
Or the EU stealing money from the NHS.
All of that has one main purpose:
To convince those who are part of the status quo that the ONLY reason those outside it don't have access to it is because they are too lazy, or because of foreigners.
It's absolutely NOT because of their own actions or voting pattern. Honest.
And that's another reason why that shift to conservatism breaks down so hard the further you push through Gen X.
Because the personal experience of being part of it weakens, and there's less of a desire to be convinced it wasn't their fault. Because it wasn't.
And by the time you hit Xennial, you're (mostly) looking at voters who feel that whatever part of the status quo they've managed to obtain was at great cost and/or luck, and can see the inequalities get worse for everyone after them.
Because ultimately this is all about participation and opportunity.
What matters isn't just being PART of the status quo. It's feeling like the OPPORTUNITY to be part of it, for oneself or for others, isn't closed off.
That's what's different for everyone born after 1975.
And not just for them. For some people older than that the issue has always been obvious. For others, as they've grown older and seen children struggle, it's BECOME obvious.
"...at what age do today's 40-somethings expect to retire?"
They don't.
Capital formation has *ceased* in the UK economy: either you inherit wealth, or you will never, never accumulate it through employment.
Also worth pointing out the stupid first past the post electoral system which elects a Government with a massive majority with a minority of voters. The last 12 years have shown the frailties of that system. And the whole Govt finances are just like home finances schtick that has led to cut after cut to public services. Needless to say I'm no fan of the Tories
@garius I'd like to add that from an American perspective, there are a lot of factors that feed into what we consider to be the mass sociopathy of the boomer generation, and it goes a bit beyond just the class divide. The namesake of the generation, the post war boom, and unique factors of prosperity and American exceptionalism that were the hallmark of the time led to a massive takeover of the political machine by people who were given everything for nothing, and demanded as much as part of their own status quo. They invented whole industries to funnel wealth from past and future to themselves, and wholesale committed to neoliberal policies to entrench that system of power. That consolidation of political power is what is allowing that shrinking minority of the propertied class to continue to shut out everyone else despite the growing disillusionment of the younger generations of serfs.
That divide of propertied vs unpropertied people is what now forms the basis for opportunity vs none, as upward mobility has diminished to the point where only the most privileged and ruthless children of aristocrats need apply.
@earthshine which is, to a certain extent, what at least the last 12 years have felt like in the UK. Arguably the last 25.
We just needed an economic boom before they could start doing the same thing. It's been an accelerated adventure in the consolidation of wealth and power!
@garius interesting analysis, but it begs the question, if the welfare state is part of how boomers "pulled up the ladder" for millenials, how is them voting more left (= more welfare state) going to help them?
Sounds like an alcoholic voting for more booze if you ask me.
A sharp curtailment in the ability to accumulate wealth over a lifetime and invest it in one’s children seems pretty significant in terms of how much one wants to preserve the system.
Look, for example, at the horrible impact of redlining in the US on the intergenerational wealth of African Americans.
@valoisdubins @garius that’s presuming boomers *wanted* to invest in their kids all along, when the evidence mostly shows otherwise.
Remember, THEY voted for the people who instituted such practices. And the fact that they never protested against or recalled their elected representatives for doing so shows at least tacit agreement with all of it.
Boomers benefitted from welfare state support for housing. The argument is that they like previous generations, became conservative as they aged because they were able to get on the property ladder. That conveyor belt broke down halfway through Gen x. So half of gen x and millennials are not moving right like older generations did because they have a lot less invested in the status quo.
I really think it would be worth reading the thread again.
@valoisdubins @garius it’s not the boomer’s fault that the welfare state is failing, it’s their fault for not getting rid of it sooner because they wanted to keep enjoying the benefits while they could.
The welfare state was doomed to begin with, it’s a Ponzi scheme that pays people today with money borrowed from the future. It’s nothing but a vote buying program for unscrupulous politicians.
@ligma @garius I think you may have misread the thread? The Boomers pulled the ladder up by dismantling¹ the welfare state; repairing the welfare state would be lowering the ladder again.
¹: incidentally, it's kinda weird how, for my entire lifetime, “Conservatives” have consistently persued a utopian project to radically reshape the economy.
@RAOF @garius but the welfare state hasn’t been dismantled. In fact, welfare spending has been on a consistent uptrend ever since it was instituted, yet the results in terms of poverty and inequality appear to be getting worse every year.
It’s high time that millenials realize that the welfare state is the PROBLEM. It was never the solution.
@ligma @garius so, there's a lot implicit in your toot, but I'll start with: you're making a subtly, but significantly, different argument. That graph is a graph of social spending, not social programs. That graph is just as compatible with the hypothesis “shifting social spending to individual grants rather than community infrastructure is inefficient”. You're spending more, and not even getting free college out of it 😉
Unless society is willing to let people starve/freeze/die of easily treated diseases/be illiterate/etc you have to have a bunch of social spending.
I wonder the extent to which this is a broader version of the US' health care debacle, where (for example) the federal government spends about the same per capita as the UK spends on the NHS, and then twice as much again in private spending.
(The US has also never had a welfare state in the UK sense - the context the OP is working in.)
@garius
US Millennial here. Thank you for this breakdown.
This is what my gut instinct has been for a while, but haven't been able to put it into words until your post.
@garius I think that "can see the inequalities" is significant.
I'm on the older end of Gen X myself, and pretty affluent. But many of my friends are 20 years younger, and I can see how badly the system has failed many of them. As a result, while I'm more conservative than many of them, I'm still *way* to the left of US average.
The system is increasingly visibly broken, and it's harder and harder for the right wing to pretend otherwise; hence all the culture-war BS to distract away from it.
@garius Yes. I'm Xennial, born 1978. One of the very last cohort to get student grants (shrunken, means-tested, but still grants) and avoid tuition fees. Got lucky with stock options in my first proper job, bought a house in 2011. I got mine by the skin of my teeth, and have a deep appreciation for how much of it was luck.
Cleared off to Canada in 2018 because "having mine" in post-Brexit Britain didn't look like a good long-term strategy. It wasn't easy but I'd do it again.
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