Millennials are bucking trends, becoming an increasingly progressive voting bloc and rewriting the long-held rules of politics, writes Isabella Higgins.

Millennials are bucking trends, becoming an increasingly progressive voting bloc and rewriting the long-held rules of politics, writes Isabella Higgins.

  • GraniteM@lemmy.world
    7·
    1 day ago

    Oregon Trail Generation, here.

    Me in high school / college: “There are people with conservative views and there are people with liberal views, and while I see myself as a Democrat, I don’t think we have all the answers, and surely the path into the future is to find people of all political persuasions and find positive compromise amongst them all to move forward.”

    Me now: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…”

  • EightBitBlood@lemmy.worldEnglish
    101·
    1 day ago

    Oh man, I wonder if it has anything to do with the US government completely failing to ever provide any of the following for millenials:

    • Raise minimum wage even once in our entire adult working lives. (20 years)
    • Reduce Healthcare costs and make insurance affordable.
    • Pass some form of gun legislation to prevent Columbine style school shootings that now happen weekly, and have been becoming more regular since '99
    • Maintain the quality of public education.
    • Make higher education affordable.
    • Stabilize the economy so it doesn’t fail evey decade since 2008

    Basically, we’re the first generation of Americans to not have a functional government of any kind that has done anything to improve the quality of our lives. All we have gotten from the decades of our tax dollars going into our bullshit corporate capitalist system is the literal worst Covid response on the plant, multiple bank bailouts, the worst education, the most costly Healthcare, and now for the salaries of actual fascists.

    Fuck any American too stupid and selfish to move left enough to save America. Hope owning the libs was worth getting our Democracy inverted, our Supreme Court destroyed, our justice system shredded, all to get a president that shits himself, insults everyone, and diddles kids.

    It’s that or voting left, and somehow we have that. It would be embarrassing if it already wasn’t so fucking cruel. Millenials aren’t moving left, they’re getting pushed to the point of just not caring for a country that clearly doesn’t care for them and literally never has.

      • EightBitBlood@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        They don’t, and historically never have. So it’s about to get Mario Kart 64 versus mode in the States with the amount of Luigi-ing that is likely going to happen soon.

  • HasturInYellow@lemmy.world
    8·
    2 days ago

    Despite the very real, observable harm that the Internet has done to the world, this is one thing that I think is good about it. Millennials and late gen x grew up with the Internet and the full availability of history and current events. Did everyone use it for that? Fuck no. But some of their friends did. And they talked about it.

    For the first time, most people in a young generation were exposed to the very real horrors of the world and why they happened. The answer is always, “one group wanted power over another” for various reasons. But that desire, wanting power over others, is a very right wing idea. So the effect is a shying away from the thing that has been burning us for literally ever.

  • titanicx@lemmy.zip
    9·
    2 days ago

    I dunno. Plenty of us genx have done the same. I’m really glad to see more move that way, cause seriously, fuck the right.

  • Soleos@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 days ago

    That’s a funny way of saying the center has moved further right faster than our cranky asses have. Jkjk

  • Guy Ingonito@reddthat.com
    65·
    3 days ago

    Probably because they’ve yet to see a right-wing government complete a 4 year term without a calamity occurring.

    I’m 100% serious.

  • Meron35@lemmy.world
    66·
    2 days ago

    I was repeatedly told that when I got older I would “understand” why policy makers made the terrible decisions they did, and that it was immature to believe they were cartoonishly evil.

    Instead, I learnt that the reality was even worse than cartoonishly evil.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      8·
      3 days ago

      A lot of things suddenly get explained when one becomes aware of the traits associated with Psychopathy and Sociopathy and how around 5% of humans are high in the spectrum for one or the other.

      In my own experience, certain kinds of behaviors are incredibly hard to believe in (deep down, emotionally, even if intellectually one does) when a person has an average or above average level of empathy: when you have a normal level of empathy it’s pretty hard to put yourself in the shoes of and naturally accept that some people are casually and without any feeling of guilt the kind of person who, for example, couldn’t care less if their personal-upside-maximizing actions hurt even little children or puppies as long as they didn’t get reprisals from others for doing it.

    • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
      7·
      3 days ago

      Instead, I learnt that the reality was even worse than cartoonishly evil.

      Yeah, it’s saying something when you figure that IRL villains are very often worse than the mustache-twirling villains featured in comic books.

      The banality of evil.

  • Xerxos@lemmy.ml
    43·
    3 days ago

    Quite easily explained: older generations accumulated wealth as they got older, so the central message of the right “I got mine, fuck you” (paraphrased) resonated more with them.

    Newer generations only accumulate debt.

    • J92@lemmy.world
      21·
      3 days ago

      Id say, in addition to your very valid point, that this generation is the first to have this level of access to the un-skewed plight of those able enough to voice or show their situation. The Internet, social media, direct messaging around the world, is giving a very cold view of the world to an increasing number (as the older generations die out and new generations are becoming more cynical and media literate or aware) and it is highlighting how the gears of the world, too large enough to visualise on your own, actually turn and for whom they turn.

      • eureka@aussie.zoneEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        This is important to emphasise. Older generations were, generally, in more of a bubble, it wasn’t easy to spread word with the same reach and authority as national mass media before the Internet.

        Similar situation with other communication advances, like the telegraph, which allowed news of the world and the people around a country to learn and co-ordinate much better than before.

    • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
      12·
      3 days ago

      It was a baby boomer/greatest generation thing. The generation that served in ww2 benefitted greatly from massive programs to aid returning veterans, thus fueling both education, home ownership, and post-war consumerism. They were able to pass that onto the generation that came after, the baby boomers.

      By the time the youngest baby boomers became adults the systems that allowed them and their parents to accumulate wealth began to be dismantled. Neoliberalism didnt happen in a day. It took years to fully tear the old system apart and years before the effect would be fully felt and visible. By then the older people cannot associate the ‘now’ with the events of several years ago, and younger people have never experienced the things that their parents did.

      In short. The version of capitalism that WW2 veterans in the West lived with after the war ‘worked’ for them, while Communist regimes, most of which were built on exploited colonial holdings, or war torn nations that were never developed to begin with… Eastern Europe was much poorer than Western Europe even before WW2, and after WW2 they were both poor and bombed to hell and back. Vietnam was a French colony and the Vietnamese were fighting the French for liberation before they got taken over by the Japanese, who the Vietnamese also fought, before fighting the French and the Americans afterward. China was the USSR of the East… and also extremely underdeveloped.

      This means seeing authoritarianism and poverty in ‘Communist’ regimes while seeing wealth in the US, Canada, the UK, and France after ww2 (which were built heavily on US aid and some where never bombed, like the US and Canada… and France adopted a fuckload of government intervention that fueled their growth) was something that people of that time would associate with those regimes, making it easier for them to think that the socialism there is what caused the poverty when in reality that was simply their starting position and not the end result.

      The shit we are seeing now is basically disproving all of it. Russia has been ‘capitalist’ for 35 years now and they are still heavily underdeveloped in addition to being more authoritarian than it was under certain soviet regimes. Shit that was affordable and easy in the West, even in bad economic times, is now becoming prohibitively expensive. Food production is still extremely high and food waste is incredible… but food prices are continuing to get worse and worse.

      Also for those who care to look at things from an actual historic perspective, it is becoming apparent that the reason why shit was good in the past was not due to endless economic growth but social policy and legislation.

      Building more houses and apartments is pointless. There are too many apartments and too many houses. They are expensive because housing turned from making places to live to a speculative market. This is why Canadian cities are unlivable now.

    • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
      10·
      3 days ago

      Exactly. Boomers had the privilege of owning a home, building up savings, got pensions, and got to retire early. Gen x got most of those privileges, except maybe pensions… now millenials are pouring all their savings just to own a home, and social security is unlikely to exist by “retirement”. And gen alpha are going be entering adult hood with 50 year mortgages? Gee, wonder why the young population is questioning the economic system.

      • shane@feddit.nl
        1·
        2 days ago

        I was just talking with my dad at Thanksgiving. He mentioned that a lot of young soldiers bought expensive cars when he just joined the army. I said that’s definitely true. He said that he didn’t… he paid off his college.

        So he put off buying a new car… for 6 months. 😑

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      Exactly.

      Even greedy millennials who are very low on the whole “wanting for others to be well, not just myself” kind of feeling and personal principles are themselves experiencing how it is to be born under the boot and realizing one is destined to be under it until the day one dies, and that feels bad, it feels unfair, it makes you want to “fuck this shit up”.

      It’s not that millennials are inherently better or worse than other age groups, it’s that they’re far more likely than older generations to be familiar with being relentlessly victimize by present day society, through no fault of their own and merely due to something they were born with (specifically the “when they were born”).

      Basically far more of them know how it feels to be born poor in a society that gives you almost zero chances to climb up from that no matter how capable you are and how hard you work, than previous generations.

      You know which countries had Communist revolutions? The kind with lots and lots of poor people with zero chance of improving their lot, such as Czarist Russia.

    • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      Heh… as Marx got older, he moved from around -5,-5 on the political compass, to around -10,0.

      Yeah. Maybe age alone is not the driving criteria. ;)

      Maybe people just say that to make those prone to following do that.

      That and the money. “No. It’s mine.”

      We millennials were deprived of all of that.

  • BanMe@lemmy.world
    11·
    2 days ago

    In Australia.

    In America the effect really depends on the subgroup you’re looking for. Educated vs uneducated, wealthy vs poor, rural vs urban. Overall Millennials haven’t gotten more conservative as they age, but aren’t continuing to move left. The entire cohort has always been many points left of the others, absolutely from the constant crises. I’m not sure of any recent research on the cohort moving further in recent times, but I’d love to see it if anyone has it.

    The other worry here is, Millennials might also be the last generation to do this, as we’re losing in many thought spheres where young people get their information, including first political impressions of the world around them. Conservative think tanks absolutely saw what was happening with Millennials and vowed to win back the next generation.

      • BanMe@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 days ago

        Sadly they’ve intertwined it with the already fragile state of masculinity so now it’s not uncommon for teen influencers to also be neo-nazis. We weren’t listening to boys and this happened. The boys are not OK.

  • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
    151·
    3 days ago

    Are millennials also the first generation to have lower standards of living than their parents? I think housing costs is the biggest part of that.

    • West_of_West@piefed.socialEnglish
      93·
      3 days ago

      Costs in general. I just stand there in the grocers thinking “shit, they should nationalize the food chain”

      • obvs@lemmy.world
        59·
        3 days ago

        It’s hard to think of powerful businesses I interact with from day-to-day that government shouldn’t either completely nationalize or expropriate their property and split up.

        • grocery chains √

        • power companies(including gas stations)? √

        • internet providers? √

        • real estate companies/landlords √

        Yadda yadda yadda…

        • West_of_West@piefed.socialEnglish
          41·
          3 days ago

          So much is paid for by taxpayers anyway. Like cell towers.

          The gov’t subsidized cell towers but doesn’t own them and can’t dictate cost. So why did tax payers cover it?

        • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          3 days ago

          Problem being is it’s hard to write laws appropriately.

          A huge difference in government and private enterprise is that government is 100% inflexible. Doesn’t matter how stupid the results of the law are, nor how damaging. The workers have to follow the letter of the law until the state or federal Congress changes it. Government workers have no incentive to make sure you’re satisfied. What are you gonna do? Not come back?

          My pet theory is that conservatives hate government because they’ve encountered this, don’t understand this is how it has to be. This is also why they want to privatize everything because “government stupid”. No, you don’t want government bending rules, unlike…

          Private concerns can instantly say, “This is fucking stupid and we’re changing tack.” If a customer finds themselves victim of a stupid edge case, the company can work around it for them. They’re motivated to keep customers happy.

          There are cases for both sorts of ownership. Tag offices in Oklahoma were privately owned nightmares with some of the highest rates in the nation. Here in Florida we can not only get tags, but a myriad of other services at the county tax office. Cheap too! OTOH, tags were a SecState thing in Illinois and it was a total nightmare. Boss knew if you had to renew tags you were taking no less than half a day off.

          I’d be interested in seeing how more public/private combos work. Our power company was such a thing, elected board members and all. We had stupid cheap power until, guess what, it was sold to a private power company. Some people’s rates doubled and most of us saw 40% increases.

          To your examples, in order:

          • Private grocery chains because I want them in competition, but break up and deny the monopolistic companies.

          • Power companies, government. Nobody has a choice anyway, only one set of infrastructure, simple enough to legislate.

          • Gas stations, private. Again, I want them competing and it’s not like they’re gouging us on gas prices. The margin is a few pennies per gallon, not enough to keep them in business without selling other goods.

          • Real estate/landlords, private, but with serious fucking guard rails and renter protections. How the hell is there a legal app for them to collude on prices?!

          And YES, these monsters should be split back up. We’ve become so used to megacorps we’re not remembering what the past was like. If you brought anyone, even a Republican, in from the 80s, they’d fucking scream over the state of mergers.

          • cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            4·
            3 days ago

            Then government is a shit form of collaboration, or at least totally incompatible with capitalism/private ownership.

            Also, corporations are just as inflexible. You know that, Right? Have you ever dealt with an insurance company? A software company?

            Fuck that. No more non-personal/communal ownership, no more government.

          • Lodespawn@aussie.zoneEnglish
            3·
            3 days ago

            Western Australia’s main power utilities are both private companies with the sole share holder being the state government. Power is reliable, systems are well maintained, particularly given the wide areas covered and the low density of population, prices are reasonable, the energy minister has input into direction and planning but mostly stays out of operation, executive and everyone below are all hired on merit

            • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
              1·
              3 days ago

              You could say the same about some kleptocratic states too. Without the maintenance nor the reliability. It’s about integrity and accountability whether it’s state owned or government owned. The difference is motives for individuals involved. Capitalism values the profit motive. Public private partnerships value how it looks to voters, who are generally worse off as they pay more for what would be more efficient under government control. Having two competing is probably an attempt to get the best of both worlds.

              • Lodespawn@aussie.zoneEnglish
                1·
                3 days ago

                They don’t compete, they are regionally separate, western Australia is the size of three texas’ but with a population of 3m. Neither utility is a public private partnership, they are private companies setup and run by the state government for the people. The organisations are like private companies but the owners are the people.

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
      18·
      3 days ago

      Political leanings are always influenced by wealth

      If you are wealthy and have a chance of becoming even more wealthy … being a conservative is great because it ensures you keep your wealth and probably gain more

      If you are not wealthy … you have to support socialism because it’s your only chance of having a life or even gaining any bit of wealth or control of your life.

      • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
        14·
        3 days ago

        That’s why people traditionally moved right as they aged. However, millennials are bucking the trend is the point.

        It is also posited that as you age, you’re more likely to have family and think about their immediate needs rather than society at large.

        However, it can be just greed. The problem for conservatives is that they have tipped the balance so much that the divide is much greater and inequality greater, so they need to convince people to vote against their interests. The bottom 90% are far better off under more social measures.

        • SparroHawc@lemmy.zip
          4·
          3 days ago

          I’m pretty sure their point is that millennials are unable to accrue enough wealth to become conservative.

      • DireTech@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        9·
        3 days ago

        Pretty sure the majority of the US conservative base is not wealthy. Only the top 0.1% has benefited financially from recent changes.

        I think it has a lot more to do with someone’s own experiences with government. I’ve lived in areas with corrupt local governments and incredibly well run governments. I can absolutely understand those who live their whole lives under corrupt local governments, the ones they actually interact with on a regular basis, thinking every other one is just as bad and wanting it as limited as possible.

        Then of course there’s the more hate oriented agendas, but calling those merely conservative feels like we’re being too kind to them.

    • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
      7·
      3 days ago

      I’m curious about the generation that came of age during the Depression, but I don’t think we have polling data that far back.

      • Triasha@lemmy.world
        8·
        3 days ago

        The generation that came of age in the depression voted for FDR 4 times and gave him supermanorites in Congress.

        They rewrote the American social contract.

        They were left of the generation before and the generation after.

      • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
        6·
        3 days ago

        From what I’ve seen, research and habits wisez those that grew up in the depression tended to be thrifty for life, always planning meals and avoiding waste. It was a hard habit to break after being hungry I’m sure. I haven’t seen anything about their political leaning. I think community and helping people rated highly in values. Both sides of American politics would claim that as their values.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          6·
          3 days ago

          Let’s not forget that FDR, essentially the closest thing the US has had to a socialist president, was elected four times to help dig us out of that mess. He was so fucking popular.

    • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
      7·
      3 days ago

      I mean I don’t have a lower standard of living than my parents sorta but they had seven kids and I have none and still they owned a massive house on a massive lot and I own a condo. They also paid theirs off and point a little plot that I think they hoped to make a weekend getaway thing but never got to the point of being able to do that. I mean I won computers and such but honestly thats not so much standard of living as the march of technology…

      • niartenyaw@midwest.socialEnglish
        11·
        3 days ago

        i think it’s reasonable to include those things in standard of living. their standard afforded them the choice to do those things, so if you don’t feel like you are afforded those same choices while living at a similar level of comfort then imo the standard has decreased.

        • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
          5·
          3 days ago

          well I talked about big things. I can buy better food which is not just a matter of it being available. Like pasture raised eggs and there are a few other day to days were we don’t have to go with the absolute cheapest or generic. although in the last year much of that I have had to drop.

  • JayK117@aussie.zone
    30·
    3 days ago

    Maybe because concervativism went from stay at home mom’s to ethnic cleansing and genocide.

  • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
    21·
    3 days ago

    I know anecdotes aren’t data, but I’m a millennial who moved further left with age.

    I started left, but am now more vehemently so.

    • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      8·
      3 days ago

      Saw our boomer and genX parents ride the rise, told it’d be ours too, only to witness everything taken away, revealing only the lies remaining; the false promises that daddy corporation would take care of us all.

      On a personal note, saw my parents throw away their entire 2 million, cost me a million in effort through blackmail, slavery, torture and fraud, and then inverted my efforts, so it’s like they managed to throw away 4 million, and then I’m there with the government doing waves of culls of the disabled poor by cutting them off to starve, denying them even the pittance (~ I’ve heard said, disabled people’s costs of living are 4-10 times higher, and, so, why is the top rate of disability support income less than half what they say is the living wage?)… yeah, the inequality keeps going down all the way. Not just comparing the billionaires and trillionaires to the working class and upper precariat. … All while knowing the technology exists to emancipate everybody to lush abundance… Buuuut, is suppressed, because, ’ gotta keep those rents and regressive tax extortion and usury flowing, eh?

      Sucks being dependent on your abuser.

      … Will not be televised.