• spittingimage@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I recently read an article that claims people become more progressive as they age, but society becomes more progressive faster, so it just seems like they become conservative.

    • katy ✨
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      9 months ago

      i think it was just the case in the past because people tended to have more means and affluency as they grew up in the 70s and 80s, so they naturally gravitated toward people like eisenhower and reagan.

      • EldritchFeminity
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        9 months ago

        Yep. I saw a fairly recent study talking about this. The short of it is that they found no correlation between age and political leaning for ANY generation, but a strong correlation between political leaning and wealth.

        As people begin to benefit more from the system, the more they support pulling the ladder up behind them.

        The correlation to age here is that it gets harder to adapt to new information the older we get, so people are more likely to double down rather than change their perspective as society gets more progressive and inclusive. The best weapon against racism is experiences that put people in situations to meet people with different life experiences than them. Get them outside their little white suburban bubbles. This is why conservatives hate college so much. It’s often the first time kids are put in a situation where they’re both out from under the thumb of their parents and exposed to kids who grew up in different circumstances than their’s.