Do People Actually Get More Conservative As They Age?
When trying to make sense of political change, it might be worthwhile to instead look at things generationally.
There’s an old cliche that goes something like “to not be a liberal before age twenty means you have no heart, but to not be a conservative by age forty means you have no head”.1 This idea that whatever young people may believe now will eventually fade away into the beliefs of their parents is often taken for granted in our culture. And why shouldn’t it? After all, the political conflict between the “stodgy old right winger” and the “idealistic young left-winger” is something we see all the time, either in our lives, the lives of the people we know, or in the media.
I didn’t particularly give much thought to the subject until I stopped to take a closer look at the data. And reflecting upon what I found within the context of the last century of political history, I think there’s a lot to be said about how we commonly understand political change — and how we often get it wrong.
This is the first new post I’m doing since officially moving my blog over to Substack. I figured I would try to start off with a relatively straightforward, low-stakes, and accessible piece to ease everyone in. As I’m planning to switch up my posting style to publish shorter pieces more frequently (about once per week is the current plan), I figured this was the perfect time to finally get around to covering a topic that’s been marinating in my head for a while.
For those of you who don’t know, I am a bit of an election nerd, but moreso coming from the data side of things — there’s just something about the numbers and graphs I find really fun to dig into. A couple years back, I stumbled upon a very interesting set of old polls2 by Pew Research3. It specifically was looking at how people’s birth year (not their age) influenced their voting history. If you were to take a look at the report, this one chart would immediately jump out at you as it highlights a pattern that is less noticeable in today’s political environment. Take a look and try to see if you can spot it.
To be fair, the chart already states it pretty explicitly, but the pattern in question is that people seem to carry over the “memory” of the zeitgeist they came of age within. If we go purely off of the (then) current age of each group, the trendline wouldn’t hold. After all, the Greatest Generation was turning out for the left-wing Democratic Party at higher rates than their younger Baby Boomer counterparts.
But, it makes perfect sense when you think about it. This was a generation that came of working (and voting) age during the Great Depression. The era they would begin to follow the news, begin to engage with politics and define their own identity, was one where a left-wing political vision was popular. By taking the history into account, we can make sense of other spots here too.
The post-war conservatism of the 1950s (under Eisenhower and Truman to a lesser extent) and the right-wing Reagan Revolution of the 1980s created generations of people who would continue to show loyalty to the Republican Party. Fond memories of liberal cultural icons like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton shaped a millennial population to be more inclined to vote Democratic. The flipside also holds true — presidencies that go poorly can create a culture that favors the opposition. The widespread failure of the welfare state in the 1970s created an environment ready to shift to the right. On the other hand, take for example how Watergate seems to have created a small Democratic bias in the cohort of voters who came of age under Nixon. It’s rather noticeable in what’s otherwise a rather continuous stretch of Republican dominance.
And I think that’s part of what trips us up nowadays. We’re in a rather weird moment in our nation’s history where that aforementioned stretch of people now fully occupy the upper end of our nation’s bell curve when it comes to age. Meanwhile the resurgence of the Democratic Party following Reagan involved winning over Millennials and Gen Xers. It’s easy to make the mistake of looking at the old people today and assume that this is what old people have always looked like.
But let’s put aside the data for a second. Even if we look at this from a more intuitive, cultural sense, this hasn’t always been the case. Those who grew up in the ‘80s might remember a sitcom by the name of Family Ties. It centered around three yuppie kids growing up in the Reagan-era and the ways in which their then-fashionable right-wing politics clashed with the out-of-touch leftism of their hippie parents.
Perhaps the youth may be inclined to rebel, but rebellion needn’t have a specific political bent. For example, Gen X was notoriously apolitical in its counterculture. And there are various cases we can point to where children grow up to be more right-wing than their parents. Across Western Europe, we’re currently seeing a liberal establishment propped up primarily by older voters, while it’s the young voters that the far-right continues to gain considerable momentum with4. And as I discussed in my prior essay analyzing Judaism, Jewry as a whole has seen an increase in religiosity in recent years, especially among the young.
As the historian Eric Hobsbawm points out, even our current conception of “the youth” as a single, coherent class with political interests writ large is actually a rather new idea.
These masses of young men and women [of the 1960s]… increasingly concentrated in large and often isolated campuses or ‘university cities’, were a novel factor in both culture and politics… As the 1960s revealed, they were not only politically radical and explosive, but uniquely effective in giving national, even international, expression to political and social discontent… Nevertheless, this leaves us with a slightly puzzling question: why did the movement of this new social group of students, alone among the new or old social actors of the golden era, opt for a radicalism of the Left?… Before the Second World War, the great majority of students in central and western Europe and North America had been nonpolitical or Rightwing.5
And what he finds in his investigation is that a lot of it comes down to conditions very specific to the environment of the 1960s. The world into which the Baby Boomer generation was born was radically different from that of their parents (and arguably that of all prior history).
They grew up knowing widespread prosperity, not poverty. They grew up in a world that wasn’t highly rural and localized, but in a culture where music, fashion, and mass media spread across the globe. Higher education was previously a pipe dream reserved for the elite, but now families of all backgrounds were sending their children to college for the first time.
…this new mass of students stood, as it were, at an awkward angle to the rest of society. Unlike other and older-established classes or social groupings, they had no established place in it or pattern of relations to it… In many ways the very existence of the new masses implied questions about the society that had engendered them; and from questions to criticism is but one step. How did they fit into it? What sort of society was it? The very youth of the student body, the very width of the generation gap between these children of the post war world and the parents who remembered and compared, made their questions more urgent, their attitude more critical. For the discontents of the young were not blanketed by the consciousness of living through times of staggering improvement, far better times than their parents had ever expected to see. The new times were the only ones that young men and women who went to college knew. On the contrary, they felt things could be different and better, even when they did not quite know how.6
What we’re dealing with here isn’t an age gap, it’s a generation gap. Experiences specific to each decade and how people were reared in said decades shaped their understanding of society and how things “are meant to be”.
As baby boomers age into the senior generation alongside a Generation X who came of age in the similarly prosperous 1990s, their experiences and history come to be the default frame of reference whereby we make sense of politics.
As I talked about in an older post, human beings seem to have an instinctual bias towards the history of those who are still alive. Probably because we’re social creatures who make sense of things by actually talking and listening to people rather than looking through books.
But every now and then, it does help to take a step back. We’re not just talking about voting patterns here (although they can at times be helpful as an indicator), since political parties are concrete organizations which constantly redefine themselves. We’re talking about the broader political and social vision ideologues carry with them.
Baby Boomers may no longer be the image of the counterculture, but that’s because they’ve already come to redefine the culture so drastically. Hedonistic attitudes towards both drugs and sexuality are no longer the taboo they used to be, the Church plays a less formal and less central role in Western politics, and conservatism as a whole has taken an increasingly individualistic bent. It’s not that they’ve somehow changed — their political vision often times isn’t particularly out of line with the status quo of the 1980s/1990s.
The challenges faced by present-day younger generations relating to affordability, technology, and globalization are fundamentally different from what came before. The post-2008 world is one in which the neoliberal consensus has been shattered and the old “live and let live” mentalities come across as inadequate to handling today’s problems. It should come as no surprise then, that when people grow up under different historical conditions, they come to different political conclusions.
“Maturing” is never a neutral concept. Adulthood is the result of a process of socialization, and it’s impossible to objectively analyze that without considering the surrounding society one grows up in. We can only ever make sense of things within the frame we are given, and will always prioritize the history that we have actively experienced for ourselves. Two people of the same age living in different times can come to wildly different conclusions on well…. everything.
If we want to make sense of a constantly changing world, we have to be able to step outside our own boxes and neither bias ourselves towards seniority nor towards youth. Change can target anything, but change can also unexpectedly switch direction. History is a dialogue of people with different windows into time, and by studying, relating to, and balancing these different perspectives do we gain the humility and flexibility needed to not be caught off guard the next time things change.
There’s a wide array of variations on the quote attributed to all sorts of people from Burke to Churchill throughout (specifically modern) history. Further discussion on the origins of the quote can be found here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/
Pew is known for being one of the most reputable public opinion pollsters in the industry, known for their tracking of long-term political trends and the evolution of public opinion of various issues.
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes p. 298-300
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes p. 301
A very strong inaugural post. Especially liked this graf:
> “Maturing” is never a neutral concept. Adulthood is the result of a process of socialization, and it’s impossible to objectively analyze that without considering the surrounding society one grows up in. We can only ever make sense of things within the frame we are given, and will always prioritize the history that we have actively experienced for ourselves. Two people of the same age living in different times can come to wildly different conclusions on well . . . everything.