Are Millennials Really Not Getting More Conservative?
Perhaps people are just reading the evidence the wrong way
In the past year, there has been quite a lot of discussion around research showing that Millennials have not been switching to voting for conservative parties as they age, at the rate Boomers and Gen X did at the same age. In both the US and the UK, Millennials were not getting much more likely to vote for the Republican Party or the Conservative Party, despite aging towards middle age. Later in the year, research from Australia also demonstrated similar patterns in that country. Many people have blamed factors like a low rate of home ownership for this phenomenon.
But what if everyone is reading the evidence the wrong way? What if Millennials have indeed gotten more conservative, despite their voting patterns? At least anecdotally, I think this is the case. If we define conservative as the philosophy founded by thinkers like Edmund Burke, and the approach to politics and life it represents, then I think Millennials have certainly moved in that direction, even if they have not fully embraced it. Conservative philosophy is skeptical of radical change, especially if it is rooted in abstract philosophy. Instead, conservatives prefer practical, gradual change that is rooted in the conditions of the real world, as well as the traditions of a given nation. As a Millennial, life has taught me that the conservative preference for practical, incremental reform over deeply philosophical revolutions is actually rooted in a lot of wisdom, and we should heed this wisdom if we don't want well-meaning attempts at progress turning into a cesspool of divisive chaos, and eventually inviting reactionary backlash that makes everything even worse than before.
And it's not just me. I know many Millennials who have reported becoming more 'small c conservative', skeptical of the kind of campus politics embraced by Gen Z. The moderate, truly liberal wing of 'anti-wokeism' also includes many prominent Millennial voices. It seems that many Millennials have learned that social change needs to respect long-standing social values like free speech and freedom of conscience to be successful, and that it is better to build on what we already have than to knock everything down and dream of building a utopia out of nothing. This, I would argue, is already conservative philosophy in action.
However, organized 'conservatism' is not about this anymore. Right-wing parties are not any more likely to respect long-standing values, institutions and conventions. Indeed, in the era of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and other populist politicians, the Right is less likely to uphold long-standing values, institutions and conventions, thus giving no good reason for someone who truly appreciates conservative philosophy to vote for them. Moreover, many Millennials have long-standing commitments to taking climate change seriously and treating LGBT people with respect and equality, two things that right-wing parties have found very difficult to embrace so far, because of the vested interests and rich donors they can't afford to upset. Based on what I know about the people of our generation, I can confidently predict that most of my fellow Millennials won't vote for right-wing parties unless they fix these two issues, and that is not likely to happen anytime soon. Strategists in right-wing parties seem to know this too, which is why they have essentially given up on attracting Millennial support for now, and instead doubled down on the Boomer and Gen X demographics, hoping this can keep them electable for as long as possible. Thus Millennials, although getting more conservative, have no good reason to move rightwards at the ballot box, and indeed have multiple barriers preventing them from doing so. This is why even right-wing strategists have largely given up on Millennials as a demographic, at least for now.
In conclusion, my view is that Millennials are actually becoming more conservative with age, as most people might expect. This is also both a rational thing and a good thing, because it represents maturity gained from life experience. However, given the way the political situation is right now, it is just natural that they would not vote for right-wing parties in large numbers. This is also not likely to change anytime soon. We need to understand that this is not a paradox at all. We just need to separate the idea of embracing conservatism from voting for right-wing political parties. The two have never been necessarily linked, and the divorce of the two is clearly seen among the Millennial generation as they approach middle age.
The Model of Sustainable Progress
Previously, I talked about how, in the ideal case, a practical progressivism and a moderate, thoughtful conservatism act to complement each other, so that moderate, useful reforms can be achieved, and social order and harmony can be maintained, while gradually making things better for everyone. However, what we have right now, in the West in the 2020s, is far from this. Instead, we have extremists dominating the conversation on both sides. I have talked about how the unwillingness to compromise on both sides has led to division and polarization. Importantly, it could also lead to continuous cycling between radical and reactionary policies, which would be a tragic course of political and cultural development, leading to many people being needlessly harmed, as well as unsound policies being enacted and entrenched.
In economics, there is a thing called the business cycle or the economic cycle, where the economy predictably goes through alternating periods of growth and recession. Given that severe economic recessions can lead to economic hardship for many people, in the form of businesses going under, massive job losses and bankruptcy, and the mental health and social implications of these events, it is generally agreed that the economic cycle should be responsibly managed so as to smooth out the cycle as much as possible. This way, both the peaks and the troughs would be less prominent, the economy would be more stable, and less people would be harmed by the fluctuations of the economic cycle. It would also make the economy more fair and just, in that people would be less likely to lose their hard earned savings through no fault of their own, because of events like long-term unemployment or mortgage default in the context of severe recessions.
I believe a similar concept can be applied to our politics and culture. In this analogy, moments of change and progress are similar to peaks, and periods of relative conservatism are similar to troughs. Overall, social change happens at the pace that society can take it, and there appears to be hard limits to this, just like the pace of economic growth. In this view, we can't really accelerate the pace of social progress beyond those limits. What we can do, however, is firstly to smooth out the cycle so as to have sustainable progress over time, and secondly to prioritize the more important and beneficial changes.
I think the history of the West in the past century actually provides plenty of evidence to support this model. The 1920s saw unprecedented social progress, especially in some parts of Europe, and the 1930s brought a more reactionary mood. The post-war 1950s was very conservative, but the 1960s saw another period of radical change. In turn, the radicalism of the 60s and 70s led to another conservative period ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher, which basically lasted three decades. Over time, the pendulum swung further towards reaction, leading up to the religious right's brief 'awakening' around 2004, which was met with progressive and libertarian backlash. Following this, the 2010s saw the rise of wokeism, which in turn was met with the election of Trump and the rise of the populist right afterwards.
Just like the business cycle, this social change cycle led to numerous negative outcomes: the reactionary mood of 1930s Europe provided fertile ground for the rise of fascism. The conservatism of the 1950s was too stifling for many people, particularly women who wanted to have careers. Some of them later divorced their husbands in the freer climate of the 1970s, to pursue what was denied to them when they were younger. The radicalism of the 1960s brought about a massive increase in social problems like drug use and broken families that have stayed with us to this day. The conservatism of the 1980s-2000s brought with it a prolonged period of homophobic sentiment. This sentiment, coupled with the AIDS crisis, meant that many lives were prematurely lost in the 1980s and 90s. 2010s wokeness brought cancel culture, which ended the careers of some people, and terrified many others into silence. The populist right moment, well, I think I don't need to elaborate (plus it's still ongoing). As you can see, the peaks and troughs of the social change cycle are clearly harmful, just like the peaks and troughs of the economic cycle, and we should therefore try to smooth it out as much as possible.
If we want to smooth the cycle out so we get sustainable and rational social change, where should we start? Going back to the economic cycle analogy, we can see that monetary and fiscal policy is used to smooth the economic cycle out, by managing demand in a countercyclical way. For example, when inflation is too high, interest rates are raised to bring demand down, and when economic growth is too weak, interests rates are cut to increase demand. We can apply this philosophy to social change too. For example, when things are getting too radical, society would need more voices calling for caution. Indeed, Edmund Burke, often regarded as the father of conservatism, was actually mostly a liberal, who broke from his fellow liberals to call for caution in the face of numerous aspects of the French Revolution going too far. I think there is a clear analogy to the anti-woke liberals of the 2010s here. On the other hand, when things are getting too reactionary, society would need more voices championing progress. The picture is actually more complicated in reality with our divided and polarized society nowadays, because things could be simultaneously getting too radical and too reactionary in different geographical areas or different sections of society. In this case, we would have to simultaneously call for more caution in some places (e.g. on college campuses and inside the LGBT community), and more open-mindedness in other places (e.g. in anti-woke circles).
There is also another, more fundamental way to smooth the cycle of social change. Radical ideas lead to attempts at radical change, which then provokes a backlash that empowers reactionary politics. Therefore, if we dissuade people from adopting radical ideas in the first place, it would have a smoothing effect on the whole of the cycle. What we need to do then, is to encourage progressive-minded people to choose a moderate, gradualist path to progress. In particular, we should argue against theories that promise a short cut to radical change, especially those that are not grounded in real world conditions. Such fantasies of almost overnight revolutionary change inevitably lead to radical demands that set off the whole cycle, and they need to be abandoned if we want to smooth the cycle.
In our arguments against radicalism, we also need to argue for an alternative. I think we should advocate for gradualist, liberal reformism as the alternative, and point to its track record of success in improving society as justification for choosing this path. This could win over those who are receptive to evidence-based arguments.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
Was Ronald Reagan really a "conservative" - whatever that really means?
This reference provides a comprehensive critique of his dreadful sanity:
http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/RonaldReagan_page.html
He set the stage for the destruction of the once prosperous working class and now the increasingly impoverished middle class.
And are the current crop of highly organized power-and-control-seeking so called conservatives really advocating slow incremental change? I think not!
This website provides http://www.project2025.org/about/advisory-board in-your-face-evidence that they do not and that when they gain the necessary political power to do so they intend to impose their all-inclusive religious, cultural and political agendas, as described in their very comprehensive manifesto onto the American body-politic. If Trump is re-elected they will have almost unlimited political power so to do.