General Politics Discussion [ARCHIVED] • Page 250

It is way too low, but considering 51% of the country believes in electoral fraud I can't say I'm shocked.

 

i mean, "millenial" is a ridiculously broad distinction that includes everyone from 18 to their mid 30s. it's useless as a signifier.

plus, when you only have ~47 million people voting in primaries and caucuses anyway, and a lot of those coming from people who can afford to take time off to vote, or dont have obligations, or have participated in the process for years/multiple cycles...the percentage isn't too surprising.

 

actually, doing the math out here, the study about sanders' youth support says it looked at voters under 30. looking here So How Many Millennials Are There in the US, Anyway? (Updated)

it looks like thats about ~50 million, i guess. so thats about 3.5 million/50 mill that voted in the primaries, which is about 7%. not too shabby, all things considered imo!

 

Can we take a second and marvel at the fact that they estimated that there were roughly 77,000 individuals in the United States to be at age 100 or older? That number is staggering and awesome to me, considering when they were born life expectancy was about 50 and it's already theorized that the first person to live to be 150 is already alive (It's not me).
Life expectancy in the USA, 1900-98

Sorry, back to how we suck as a nation at voting. 7% is abysmal, 50% should be considered not shabby.

 

It's not useless at all, as even people aged 30-35 are far more likely to be left leaning/ left wingers than the 55+ crowd.

I never said the percentage was surprising, it's just pathetic. People under 35 have enough clout in sheer numbers to wield electoral power--if they would actually use it.

 

Ideally, the Senate would be reformed into a parliamentary body and the House left alone so that the republican illusion of people voting in the interest of their geographic area could subsist. I have no qualms about tolerating far right parties if it means actually being able to feel represented in my government.

 

It's only 50 million if you exclude the 29-35 crowd, which I would not. That group, if I remember correctly, still broke for Sanders, though it was much closer.

But even with we stick with that 50 mil number....7% is pathetic, but maybe even more pathetic is you could probably decide entire elections just by getting that 7 percent up to like 12%

 

Do you think as people get older they tend to lean conservative? My perception of the baby boomer generation as they grew up in the 60s were more progressive but now they tend to stand behind Trump

 

It's useless because it encompasses too many different demographics and shoves what should really be two different "generations" into one. It's too broad.

the 30-35 gets excluded because the WaPo article about sanders' support limits it to 30 and under. Keeping it consistent across measures is important

 

yeah my dad loves to quote
"If you aren’t a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you aren’t a middle-aged conservative, you have no head." which I disagree with
but yeah college republicans always seem so I don't want to use a mean term but off to me, like why is that child wearing a suit and why do they love Reagan so much

 

Alex Keaton is probably their father

 

So I generally hate "see, cops do nice things too" news stories, but I have to tip my hat to the St. Louis County PD for a brilliant PR move. They teamed up with the Missouri Humane Society to release a Cops and Kittens calendar and Pitbulls and Police calendar.

STL County Police debut adorable new calendars

 

I don't think it has a whole lot to do with age, I am more liberal that I have probably ever been. I think there might be some truth to the fact that people change their political views as their lives get more complicated with starting families, buying a home, moving up in there career etc.

Let's face it, it's easy to be a liberal when you are young and full of aimless energy. It becomes harder to justify those impulses when you have things like a mortgage and a child to think about.

 

I think this is a very misplaced summary. It's easier to be selfish and intellectually lazy when your life has laid its foundation and you can defer to your personal history as the measuring point for the political experiences of others.

Very little, if anything, regarding my own move to the left has had anything to do with "impulse." If anything, political impulses almost always affect me from the right re: executing horrible criminals, punitive sentencing for unproductive people, bombing the shit out of foreign terrors, typecasting welfare recipients, being angry at losing money to taxes, etc.

 

Are you implying that those on the right are more selfish and intellectually lazy than those on the left?

 

I don't know what it is, really, other than the whole nostalgia factor. As people get older, the "new" is always seen as worse, more corrupt, etc. That being said, I'm pretty sure there was a bunch of things that younger boomers were actually more liberal on than younger GenXers.

15-20ish year intervals are always used to describe generations, the Millennial generation is no more special than the GenXers or Boomers that they get to have two different generations. There are definitely going to be huge differences between the oldest and the youngest of a generation--I've seen it a lot the last few years as someone in the middle-older section of Millennials being around the youngest of millennials in high school. There are definitely a lot of differences, but more similarities than you might imagine. But by and large, people under 35 in this country right now are both the biggest generation alive and the most left wing. That left wing preference is not represented by the government because that under 35 crowd just doesn't vote. If they would....I'd imagine you'd have more Bernie Sanders types in government, and less Hillary Clintons.

That's Alex P. Keaton.

 

Yes, I absolutely am. I'd like that written on my headstone.

 

I don't know what really started my shift left other than spending my entire teenage years in the Bush years. So the Repubs got off to a rough start there with me. Then I was old enough to start understanding policy, and the 2007 primaries had the Dems talking a lot about health care policy. I started reading around a lot about a single payer and/or public option type health care system and realized I really heavily supported the idea (probably didn't hurt that I went 2-3 years without health insurancearound that same time). That led to tax policy and etc. But Health Care policy definitely has a special place in my heart and is probably the biggest thnig that drew me to left wing policies.

 

Eh, I don't know that I agree with that premise. There are smart and stupid people on both sides of the aisle. I also don't even know how we would go about quantifying that. So it's sort of pointless to debate to begin with.

 

I have met one conservative in my entire life who was intelligent and understood substantive policy.

I had drinks with him last week. He's now just left of Ralph Nader.

Every other conservative I had ever met, even those who are very intelligent in academic settings, are absolute dogmatists and anti-intellectuals with regard to politics, and most have never actually applied themselves to learning basic political facts.

 

There is nothing specific to getting older that makes one more conservative. They're people, subject to the same political, social and economic shifts as the rest of us, along with those corresponding changes in consciousness. Also, for the past forty years or so, the reactionaries have had dominance, ideologically and otherwise, thus allowing them to craft a form of common sense that makes the world intelligible. So, it isn't surprising that older people today tend to be more right-wing, even though many of their demands aren't. They don't see neoliberalism as at fault, they want the old compromise back, in which they can have the entitlements to themselves, crowding out those who are underserving (black/brown people), as well as he psychological wage of being dominant.

 

You and I have very different experiences in that regard. I know Hispanic Trump supporters, homosexual Cruz supporters, and good ole boy rednecks who are die hard Sanders supporters.

People are complicated, and I don't really believe that you have to read mountains of policy papers before deciding whether you are for or against something. I can support single-payer and conceal carry rights on principle alone after all.

EDIT: I guess since we are both speaking on anecdotal experience this conversation might not go anywhere haha. But I respect and appreciate your perspective.

 

I don't know, most conservatives I speak with do not know anything about economics, let alone having any answers for the social issues that arise out of a particular mode of human interaction.

 

Conservatives know a lot about economics from a textbook sort of sense. Like, I can tell you all of the words but don't ask me what they mean.