Younger generations are more exposed to social media and disinformation that the older generations dismissed decades ago. Boomers also had the experience of fighting for and gaining rights during their lifetime that are now being taken away again. Unfortunately, they largely failed to teach younger generations the value of those fights or the tactics by which they were fought, so many young people don’t understand the implications behind a lot of these cultural shifts. Time is a flat circle.
While this is all plausible, may describe your personal experience fully, and may to some extent be true for a subset of the population, it appears that the notion of the baby boomer generation being, or ever having been, more progressive than the generations that followed is unequivocally false, according to any high quality polling data I’ve yet found. If this is something you are reading somewhere, I would be curious to know where so I can discover how they arrive at that conclusion.
I’m certainly not saying there aren’t progressive boomers or conservative younger people. There’s always a spectrum for every group, no matter how you define the cohorts. The baby boomers on the whole just happen to skew more conservative than the younger generations, and it is an especially strong correlation at that.
My comment wasn’t based on a body of research other than high school us history and some political science classes in college. Agree completely that modern day boomers are not progressives, I was thinking more specifically about the social progress of the mid-late 20th century and how many more people we’ve agreed to include in the conversation than ever before. Hell, women couldn’t vote 106+ years ago. Now we have gay and trans people in Congress, we’ve had a black president, women mostly have rights to their own bodies, etc etc etc. The boomers were, broadly, part of those social changes, though clearly they didn’t all agree, just as they don’t now.
A lot of those wins are getting erased now, by DOGE and others, and there are way more old people at protests than I would expect to see. I’m simply suggesting that the older generations remember the feeling of making progress in a way that younger generations haven’t. It’s probably hyperbolic but it feels like we’ve been slowly regressing, on balance, since Jeb Bush was the governor of Florida and fixed the 2000 election results for his brother George Dubya.
Tl:Dr you don’t know the value of what you have now until it is gone, unless you’ve gone without before.
That’s fair. It certainly does feel like regression. There are all kinds of social values gen x and y remember being taught that somehow were forgotten by the very people who taught them.
“Somehow” is not terribly difficult to work out once we start pulling threads. This well-oiled machine of right-wing propaganda we have today took decades to evolve. Right-wing narrative framing grew in popularity during the mccarthy era, and expanded continually after Raegan’s repeal of fairness doctrine with the rise of [neo]conservative AM talk radio, the 24-hour news cycle, the spread of Murdoch-style tabloid journalism, digital platforms, the algorithmic feeds, tea party, brexit, etc. The onslaught of reality denial and fear is breathtaking.
The post-truth, “alternative facts” era we’re in now is so chaotic that even the educated who should be well-equipped to tell fact from fiction often find it hard to recognize satire, of all things. Conservative boomers, however, most of whom lived in rural areas and didn’t continue education past high school if they graduated at all, have been heavily indoctrinated. And once they started joining the global forum en masse in the 90s and 00s, their indoctrination was inadvertently converted to radicalism by engagement-oriented media saturation.
This subset of boomers is mostly to blame for the generation’s poor reputation, I suspect. They had already been on a steady diet of right-wing propaganda for decades, even if they weren’t yet fully radicalized. But their salient characteristic was how easy they were to manipulate, since they would tolerate and even dutifully spread any lie that affirmed their existing opinions. They could be motivated by prejudice due to their isolation, fear due to their lack of knowledge, and tribalism due to their economic struggles. Above all they were reliable voters, donators, and consumers, making them the perfect marks for populists, demagogues, oligopolists, and hostile foreign powers.
Sometimes I feel like this group really didn’t stand a chance in the face of protracted psychological manipulation from so many groups. I’ve wanted to see the good in them and somehow bring them back to the light. But increasingly I fear that their radicalization is intractable, and there simply isn’t the time left for the journey back. Regardless, the damage is done, if not yet fully realized, and all we can do is stop the poison and rebuild from whatever is salvageable.
The poison is capital. In spite of the systematic brainwashing of the populous, one of the last moorings to fidelity and truth in US politics were the public servants themselves, many of whom pursued politics as a vocation or calling and believed in the mission of a government for the people, even a few republicans. But we let money into politics by degrees, then all at once with citizens united. With that case, corruption of the government was legalized and representation was officially bound to capital. Until that is struck down, and strict regulation of money in politics is enforced, any and all political progress will be thwarted. Capital will continue poisoning our government until there’s nothing left to save. It has to be removed.
I think I more or less fully agree with everything you’re saying here. We’re seeing the same trends and outcomes. Getting money out of politics should be one of the foundational steps we take to rebuild, agreed.
Younger generations are more exposed to social media and disinformation that the older generations dismissed decades ago. Boomers also had the experience of fighting for and gaining rights during their lifetime that are now being taken away again. Unfortunately, they largely failed to teach younger generations the value of those fights or the tactics by which they were fought, so many young people don’t understand the implications behind a lot of these cultural shifts. Time is a flat circle.
While this is all plausible, may describe your personal experience fully, and may to some extent be true for a subset of the population, it appears that the notion of the baby boomer generation being, or ever having been, more progressive than the generations that followed is unequivocally false, according to any high quality polling data I’ve yet found. If this is something you are reading somewhere, I would be curious to know where so I can discover how they arrive at that conclusion.
I’m certainly not saying there aren’t progressive boomers or conservative younger people. There’s always a spectrum for every group, no matter how you define the cohorts. The baby boomers on the whole just happen to skew more conservative than the younger generations, and it is an especially strong correlation at that.
My comment wasn’t based on a body of research other than high school us history and some political science classes in college. Agree completely that modern day boomers are not progressives, I was thinking more specifically about the social progress of the mid-late 20th century and how many more people we’ve agreed to include in the conversation than ever before. Hell, women couldn’t vote 106+ years ago. Now we have gay and trans people in Congress, we’ve had a black president, women mostly have rights to their own bodies, etc etc etc. The boomers were, broadly, part of those social changes, though clearly they didn’t all agree, just as they don’t now.
A lot of those wins are getting erased now, by DOGE and others, and there are way more old people at protests than I would expect to see. I’m simply suggesting that the older generations remember the feeling of making progress in a way that younger generations haven’t. It’s probably hyperbolic but it feels like we’ve been slowly regressing, on balance, since Jeb Bush was the governor of Florida and fixed the 2000 election results for his brother George Dubya.
Tl:Dr you don’t know the value of what you have now until it is gone, unless you’ve gone without before.
That’s fair. It certainly does feel like regression. There are all kinds of social values gen x and y remember being taught that somehow were forgotten by the very people who taught them.
“Somehow” is not terribly difficult to work out once we start pulling threads. This well-oiled machine of right-wing propaganda we have today took decades to evolve. Right-wing narrative framing grew in popularity during the mccarthy era, and expanded continually after Raegan’s repeal of fairness doctrine with the rise of [neo]conservative AM talk radio, the 24-hour news cycle, the spread of Murdoch-style tabloid journalism, digital platforms, the algorithmic feeds, tea party, brexit, etc. The onslaught of reality denial and fear is breathtaking.
The post-truth, “alternative facts” era we’re in now is so chaotic that even the educated who should be well-equipped to tell fact from fiction often find it hard to recognize satire, of all things. Conservative boomers, however, most of whom lived in rural areas and didn’t continue education past high school if they graduated at all, have been heavily indoctrinated. And once they started joining the global forum en masse in the 90s and 00s, their indoctrination was inadvertently converted to radicalism by engagement-oriented media saturation.
This subset of boomers is mostly to blame for the generation’s poor reputation, I suspect. They had already been on a steady diet of right-wing propaganda for decades, even if they weren’t yet fully radicalized. But their salient characteristic was how easy they were to manipulate, since they would tolerate and even dutifully spread any lie that affirmed their existing opinions. They could be motivated by prejudice due to their isolation, fear due to their lack of knowledge, and tribalism due to their economic struggles. Above all they were reliable voters, donators, and consumers, making them the perfect marks for populists, demagogues, oligopolists, and hostile foreign powers.
Sometimes I feel like this group really didn’t stand a chance in the face of protracted psychological manipulation from so many groups. I’ve wanted to see the good in them and somehow bring them back to the light. But increasingly I fear that their radicalization is intractable, and there simply isn’t the time left for the journey back. Regardless, the damage is done, if not yet fully realized, and all we can do is stop the poison and rebuild from whatever is salvageable.
The poison is capital. In spite of the systematic brainwashing of the populous, one of the last moorings to fidelity and truth in US politics were the public servants themselves, many of whom pursued politics as a vocation or calling and believed in the mission of a government for the people, even a few republicans. But we let money into politics by degrees, then all at once with citizens united. With that case, corruption of the government was legalized and representation was officially bound to capital. Until that is struck down, and strict regulation of money in politics is enforced, any and all political progress will be thwarted. Capital will continue poisoning our government until there’s nothing left to save. It has to be removed.
I think I more or less fully agree with everything you’re saying here. We’re seeing the same trends and outcomes. Getting money out of politics should be one of the foundational steps we take to rebuild, agreed.