The always interesting, though not always conservative, Andrew Sullivan has written a piece on why the Right is losing the young, with the extra-provocative subheading “And what the woke actually get right”. Here’s an excerpt.
It’s dawning on many on the political Centre and Right that the current younger generation in America is not like previous younger generations. They’re immaturing with age. Zoomers and Millennials are further to the Left to begin with and, more critically, don’t seem to be moving Rightward as they age. A recent, viral piece in the FT added a new spark to the conversation, arguing that if Millennials matured like previous generations, then by the age of 35, they
should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the U.S. are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history… Millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these.
And the key experiences, it seems to me, are: entering the job market in the wake of the financial crisis; being poorer than your parents when they were the same age; lacking access to affordable housing and childcare; growing up in a far more multiracial and multicultural world than anyone before them; seeing gay equality come to marriage and the military; experiencing the first black president and nearly the first woman; and the psychological and cultural impact of Trump and Brexit.
These are all 21st century phenomena — and simply not experienced by the generations immediately before them. Socially and culturally more diverse, the young are also understandably down on the catastrophic success of neoliberal economics. So of course they are going to be different. When it was their turn on the wealth escalator, it essentially stopped.
Sometimes we forget that these deep factors are what are most seriously in play. And the biggest mistake many of us on the Centre or Right tend to make is assuming that all of the young’s stickier Leftiness — especially the most irritating varieties of it — are entirely a function of woke brainwashing, and not related to genuinely unique challenges. A lot is — the indoctrination is real and relentless — but a lot isn’t. And it’s vital to distinguish the two.
Worth reading in full.
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Britain has not had a government which could reasonably be described as Conservative since 1997, perhaps since 1990. The big state leftist policies pursued by all mainstream parties over the last 25 years have made life’s essentials – housing and energy notably – ludicrously expensive with the younger generation affected most. The client state has grown hugely with most of the country now welfare beneficiaries. Along with this had grown a culture of looking to the state to solve all of life’s problems.
Our country desperately needs a political party and broader movement which is in favour of individual freedom. It has not had such a party for a long time and the Conservative Party is no longer capable of being such a party. The Conservative Party must be destroyed.
… since 1945. The post-war so-called Conservative Governments continued the policies of Socialism introduced by Labour when it gained control in 1945… welfare State, NHS, nationalised industries, unchallenged union power, central economic planning and control.
Margaret Thatcher privatised most State-run business and clipped the wings of the unions, but essentially carried on with the Socialist welfarism, expansion of the State and central economic direction.
I disagree.
Mrs Thatcher changed attitudes throughout the country including some of the MSM and even parts of the public sector (better known as the tax payer funded sector).
Nor even one that could be described as conservative.
Salvation will not arrive via the ballot box.
Hardly surprising that the ‘young’ are Socialists having been indoctrinated by all our institution colonised by Socialists.
Socialism has to collapse about people’s ears, as inevitably it will, before the penny drops.
We cannot afford to wait that long. Communism too many decades to fold and, until the end, there were apologists for them in the west. They have never apologised not retracted not been called-out as they should have been and should be now. Many are still in the universities and maybe some still in tax payer funded jobs.
I have a feeling that until the current system collapses, all its inevitable failures will be blamed on the dying lights of liberty/individualism/classic liberalism/the scientific method – western civilisation may need to be swallowed by the black hole of socialism in order to emerge from the wormhole renewed.
Yup. People will only smell the sh*t they’ve produced when they have to wade knee deep in it. A depressing fact of life.
Imagine the damage to the world before that happens!
The author thinks that the so-called right is not climate-changing aggressively enough, is not embracing the nationless multitude heartily enough and nearly not enough taking the knee in front of eternal segregation.
Short: This text is a complete waste of time.
We all remember the reply from an Irishman who, when asked the way to Dublin, said he would not have started from here. Replace nationality and city as you chose.
The same applies to this question. The issues needed to be addressed decades ago.
The ideas and values of freedom, market economies and democracy have been lost over an extended period. Schools, universities and the MSM have ensured that. Whereas the left in the USA were in plain sight in the Obama administration and even more active and extreme under Biden, they never ever went way in between. Republican Presidents might be elected but the under current of mutually supporting leftist operators were always there.
Similarly in the UK. The Conservative Party has not been bothered about the direction of politics since they threw out Mrs Thatcher. Indeed, they mostly quite like the slide to the left as they too have forgotten the merits of freedom, a market economy and democracy.
The fight for freedom is unceasing and we need to start again soon. What a poity the Freedom Association lost its way as it could have been a prime mover in all this.
And of course things will be so much better under the control of the left. Just look at any communist country for a beacon of prosperity, freedom, and happiness. I think a bigger problem is poor ecucation and an overgrown desire to be cared for by the state instead of making things happen yourself. I’m not sure this is even a left vs right issue.
Indeed this is WAY beyond left versus right. It is sanity versus insanity, liberty versus tyranny, and oligarchy versus humanity. Period.
Just Google “Horseshoe Theory”. The extreme ends are far more alike than different. Two wings, same bird. Two sides, same coin.
Agreed. From the late ’90s onwards (ie Blair) our children have been increasingly institutionalised from a very young age and prevented from developing self-reliance and resilience.
Then they went into the institutionally left-wing State Education sector and were brainwashed by left-wing teaching for the next 13 years after which, an increasing and now large proportion went to university for further indoctrination into cultural marxism and left-wing activism. Many then went straight into politics and/or governmental institutions (Civil Service, Quangocracy, Charity-Quangos).
We have two, possibly three generations of Kidadults …… they have never really grown up, don’t know how to think for themselves and don’t know how to function without Big Brother.
Two points:
1) Most people actually don’t become more conservative with age. That canard is a conflation of age, period, and cohort effects. Separate those out, and if anything, most people tend to become more liberal with age.
2) The rest of this article reads kinda like what every single generation has said about the younger generation since at least the days of Socrates. But this time is different, right?
God help the future if these are the people who will be running it! just imagine how far they will go down the net zero planet saving line, years maybe decades of spending trillions,lowering living standards, indirectly causing poverty to a third world just beginning to get out of it, …only to find it made no difference, the numbers will be mind blowing,.. God what a waste!
This isn’t a very clever article. What is meant by ‘the right’ and ‘the young’? What is meant by ‘conservatives’? And how exactly are they being lost – by what metric is it being measured?
Whatever the precise meaning is, there may be some truth in saying that the right is losing the young. By the time I left school at 18 seven years ago, the politically vocal students were all, almost without exception, card-carrying members of the climate change, infinite genders and critical race theory club. Since my schooldays I have scarcely encountered such people, but that reflects to some extent my social habits.
However, while I was very much alone then in my conservatism, I am not so now. There is quite a number of younger (i.e. under 40) people who consider themselves conservatives or classical liberals. It irks me that the author of the above piece seems to have lumped conservatives and classical liberals together under the ‘conservative’ banner. They are not much alike, except that both are largely intelligent, well-meaning and reasonable-minded, and are now increasingly maligned by a political establishment which has co-opted the term ‘liberal’ for itself when really it is socialist.
I suspect young socialists still vastly outnumber young conservatives and classical liberals, but possibly not by as much as people may think. Young socialists appear ubiquitous because they are promoted in the media and fast-tracked through the institutions. My conservative friends may be politically active but they generally want a quiet existence. They also don’t stand a chance of being given any attention by the mainstream media, unless the purpose is to smear them.
What I really object to in Sullivan’s piece is the following:
And the key experiences, it seems to me, are: entering the job market in the wake of the financial crisis; being poorer than your parents when they were the same age; lacking access to affordable housing and childcare… the young are understandably down on the catastrophic success of neoliberal economics. So of course they are going to be different. When it was their turn on the wealth escalator, it essentially stopped… The left’s advantage is that they have directly addressed this generation’s challenges, and the right simply hasn’t.
The seven years since I’ve left school and have had to navigate the world myself have taught me much. I, like so many people my age, share the frustration of not being able to leave my family home and become fully independent. However, unlike many others, I have been successfully self-employed since leaving school.
Anyone who cares to conduct an intelligent critique of the present-day problems which many young people experience can only find themselves becoming more conservative. Uncontrolled mass migration which has made demand for housing needlessly high, while the misdirection of housing regulations makes the process of house-building so costly and expensive that it favours avaricious developers and discriminates against the impecunious buyer or the enterprising would-be house-builder. And don’t get me started on taxes… For 2021-22, I have had to pay tax at about 30 per cent, which isn’t unusual, I know, but it’s just one further blow when you’re trying to put money aside for that house, and you know your tax money is being diverted to the unemployed, illegal immigrants and an NHS which doesn’t work, and which I don’t agree with in principle anyway.
Unfortunately, few people bother with a critique. They have bread and circuses, and handouts, and ‘answers on a plate’ which they’re rewarded for parroting. We have engineered a situation where ignorance and intolerance are rewarded and there is no incentive to work hard or be enterprising – except in my case, because I like my job and find the act of working satisfying in itself.
I agree with you that the article is too simplistic.
The Left leaning, woke message appears to be shouting loudest in the media.
I also think there are other factors at play. The arrival of the internet with all its consequences, the ever increasing state interference, the increasing powering global institutions.
So much to unpick.
I primarily blame the magic money tree, or rather the illusion of it, egged on by the fatal zero interest period.
Everything else derived from there.
The embedded video clip of Peter Thiel is also well worth watching in that regard:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2023-01-13/four-stages-societal-collapse-and-thiels-libertarian-challenge
“The natural demeanor of the young is to resist censorship, silencing and the stamping out of heterodoxy.”
Not anymore, to the contrary, as we have seen and and are witnessing.
‘Socially and culturally more diverse, the young are also understandably down on the catastrophic success of neoliberal economics.’
I flirted with that and some other ‘progressive’ viewpoints for a while in light of the ever more egregious excesses of Capitalism.
Until I saw what the ‘progressives’ are really up to when they are in power and how far along they already are in cementing it.
For that, the Covid period and now the climate change con one was truly priceless.
It’s because they don’t grow up.
They are perma children and aspire to be so for their entire lives.
They’ve developed the worldview that growing up, providing for yourself and your family and taking responsibility for your life is a quaint old fashioned, passé idea.
The things that go wrong are the fault of others, society, anyone but themselves.
I think that is a bit of a hasty generalization. But in all honesty, can you really blame them for feeling that way, with the way that what passes for “adulthood” is socially constructed under our fake, rigged, and unnatural social and economic system designed solely to make the ultra-rich even richer? When the game is obviously rigged, only suckers play by the rules.
I’ve seen enough! I’ve had my fill of mainstream politics! 50 f’ing years of cobblers.. I voted Labour since I could vote, now, I’m done, I hate Labour, they do not represent me at all and neither do the F,ing tories! F them all , don’t vote or vote reform,
OR suffer more of the same, enjoy 😉
I think it’s best to vote for the least worst rather than not vote at all.
If I lived in England I might vote for Reform or the SDP or for a decent candidate regardless of party, perhaps Rosie Duffield if I lived in Canterbury.
But I live in Northern Ireland where throughout my entire life I’ve voted mainly for the SDLP or Alliance or the Greens, but never again, at least not the SDLP with their current leader, Colum ‘No jab no job’ Eastwood, and at the last election, last May, I voted for the DUP for the first time, mainly because they have at least one good candidate, Paul Frew (though not in my constituency) and they were the only major party saying people should not be coerced into getting vaccinated, and they were less keen on lockdowns than the other parties..
The reasons are simple.
The left has invaded all educational, government and business institutions.
The dismantling of the family unit leads to 1 year old being put into child care, where the Big State can commence their indoctrination- a process that continues for the rest of their lives, via school, university, civil service or big business job, and cheered on by MSM.
The left understand the importance of influencing neural development at an early age.
As Aristotle or the Jesuits reportedly stated, “Give me the child until he is 7 and I’ll show you the man”.
You forgot that radicals always turn right as their brains mature. We’re all stupid when we’re young.
Tories never had a lot of young supporters – not since WWII years, anyway!
The youth are inherently naive and idealistic – and prior to the age of social media, weren’t much interested in neither news or politics. Since then, however, far-left liberal values have spread amongst the youth like a “parasitic pathogen” to quote (evolutionary-psychologist) Professor Gad Saad – in the same vein in which we saw eating disorders spread out after the advent of the Internet.
The answer isn’t more authoritarian censorship or “nudging” but a return to strict, unbiased politics and education – to better enable critical thinking!
It is remarkable that young people seem to be clamouring for their own impoverishment. But not entirely un-expected as they have for many years been manipulated and brainwashed by a predominantly liberal progressive mainstream media that has taught them that anything to the right of centre is not just illegitimate, but evil. They have been conned into thinking that unless they subscribe to the 5 main agendas of equality, diversity, race, gender and climate then there must be something wrong with them. You will see above all the climate placards with young people demanding us be rid of fossil fuels, not because they KNOW they are bad, but because they BELIEVE they are bad. But when you don’t know something is true and instead you just believe something is true, then you are indulging in religion. There is a distinct religious element to climate change belief, where those doubting or questioning it are seen as “heretics”. We are apparently to face an environmental “apocalypse”. We have “sinned” against the planet. —-Ofcourse on closer inspection none of that is remotely true. —- Instead, we have brought billions out of abject poverty, doubled life expectancy, freed billions from a short life of back breaking labour and stopped them dying of preventable disease. ——–The fuels responsible for this great leap in prosperity are coal oil and gas, but because of faith and emotion, rather than fact and reason, they are now to be demonised so that we can be “saved”.——Modern environmentalism is good at attracting “followers”, who want to be missionaries that influence government policy based on what they claim is “science”, but not “science” as we have come to understand it. It is a post normal science not based on any observational evidence but on a set of beliefs and concepts. These people may find comfort in their community of believers, but no religion can be allowed to dictate to everyone else and impose their beliefs on others.