New adaptives most socially conservative since Silents?

[pbrower2a]

(05-21-2017, 07:29 PM)Galen Wrote:

(05-21-2017, 06:54 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(05-20-2017, 07:47 PM)Galen Wrote:

(05-20-2017, 05:16 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: It's at least based on data.  Do you have any data to the contrary?

You need to remember that Eric (inflammatory description redacted again) and Odin don't live in the same universe the rest of us do.

It is essential to remember that youth are much more malleable in their political and social values than are adults. Since this is a Crisis Era, events will shake whatever foundations of political affiliation of "Generation Z:.

It seems unlikely that the drift to the left that has been going since the sixties will continue forever.  Gary North has an interesting article on what he calls The Great Default.  In another article he covers this idea in more detail.  The real question is who gets the loot when the non-discretionary part of the federal government reaches 100%?

It will be very interesting to see how Generation Z reacts to this breakdown since I very much doubt they will embrace the values of the Boomers.  It also seems unlikely they will consider government in a good light.

Continuing drift to the Left from the 1960s? I'd say that the college campuses became less friendly to the Left as Generation X chose to make places for themselves than to make the world a better place, and a culture more hedonistic and cynical than what Boomers had. Meanwhile, the Religious Right started making gains in all generations at the time. That's the Reagan era. The only people well organized to effect change were the plutocrats and executives (and they had a pliant President as an excellent propagandist) and the Religious Right.

The "Left" was concerned with avoiding wage cuts, not having such garbage as young-earth creationism and the 'providential history" of David Barton imposed upon schools, and not facing regimentation of sexuality. Those may have been "Left" victories, but that's as far as it has gone. Successful defenses are not definitive triumphs.

The fall of Communism in the Soviet bloc  was generally cheered throughout America, an indicator that the Hard Left was practically gone as a cultural or political influence. Likewise the invasions of Grenada (to thwart an Deep Red coup against a 'pinko' leader) and Panama (drug-enabling dictator who threatened Americans)... and of course the liberation of Kuwait from a murderous tyrant who had invaded Kuwait in violation of international law.  Sure, that shows the power of the Left of the 1960s... its absence. The anti-Soviet hawks simply became irrelevant once the Cold War came to an end. Bill Clinton may have defeated the elder Bush in a Presidential election, but he chose to maintain the foreign policy... only without the big military buildup of Ronald Reagan.

September 11 seemed to change everything. Americans united behind the President, a big-government right-winger, in response to the worst terrorist attack ever upon America. I can't remember anyone arguing that we had it coming because we were a racist, plutocratic, male-chauvinist, homophobic society. The problem was that we had a weak President who didn't pay attention to intelligence. He also put blame   on the wrong culprit for 9/11 and got America into a badly-bungled war. He also mishandled a natural disaster, something that looked bad to most Americans.

So America dumped the Republican majority in both Houses of Congress in 2006 (more an issue of competence than of ideology) and elected what you probably think of as "One Big-A$$ Mistake, America} -- you know, the radical Islamic Marxist born in Kenya. By 2009 the Right had its Tea Party,and eight years later America has quite possibly the purest plutocracy in the West. I find it hard to believe that anyone can see Donald Trump and his coterie, including a Congress and most state legislatures under control of corporate interests, as any7thing other than a triumph of the Right. The ruling elite of America acts as if no human suffering is in excess so long as it creates, enforces, or indulges elite profiteers and their most-needed tools. If that is not reactionary and right-wing, then what is?

Yes, there is a backlash. But if there is a Left in America, it is really new -- not at all connected with the cultural ferment of the 1960s. Boomers have little to do with it. As a Boomer on the Left I do not care what culture that younger adults express. (By the way -- my culture is ultra-conservative. I love classical music, and I am beginning to appreciate Norman Rockwell). I've got bigger concerns, like whether we have rule of law and government responsive to people who have little stake in the opulent splendor of elites.

Man existing solely as a machine for generating wealth for elites -- now that is a reactionary idea. That's how life has been for slaves, serfs, and zeks. I am enough of a radical now to recognize Marxism-Leninism as a reactionary ideology.