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.
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.