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.
Costs in general. I just stand there in the grocers thinking "shit, they should nationalize the food chain"
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...
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?
Because the line must ho up!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably because they've yet to see a right-wing government complete a 4 year term without a calamity occurring.
I'm 100% serious.
I agree 100%. They're incompetent and dumb as hell.
umm? gen x here. lefterer every day.
Me too, but half my senior class has gone bugfuck MAGA. That's why I left FaceBook in 2016 or so.
Atari Gen here . Born in 1980. I'm in rural Tennessee. Started out super right... As I've gotten older I've moved further and further left.
My political views these days are summed up by this..
I want my gay married neighbors and their adopted trans kids to be able to defend their land and their legal pot plants with full auto imported ak47s. And of course if something happens.. they can go to the hospital and use their universal health care.
It goes a little further than that.. it that's a good start.
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.
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.
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.
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, with none left over for savings, 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 population is questioning the economic system.
Because everything is fucking my shit up and family is worth less than nothing. Older generations got some personal benefit from fasch policy as they aged.
Me, I just see it proven evil and stupid literally every single day. Hard work just gets you more debt. Ownership is fake unless youre already wealthy. The law doesn't protect me. The government is not my friend. The people in charge dont know what they're fucking doing unless there's a child in the room-and in that case I'd rather not know, but keep finding the fuck out. We know we don't get to retire.
It's a material interest thing. And at this point a lot of us aren't dumb enough to betray our comrades for the scraps our grandparents go6 by age 30.
I’m doing pretty well, personally. I’m in my late 30s, I own a condo that I bought myself - not inherited, and I have a good job with job security. I’m not saying this to brag but I am saying this to say that anecdotally, I have never understood the notion that as you get older, the more conservative/Republican one becomes. And just to heep en the anecdotes, the above is pretty much everyone I work with and everyone I know professionally.
Maybe all these so called lefties that came out of the sexual revolution/hippie/peace and love-era and turned conservative…just weren’t particularly good people to begin with. Maybe being a hippie and smoking weed and being sexually adventurous in your younger years, was just that. Fun. The political ideology was just ‘fashion’ that enabled the lifestyle. But then they got bored or it became more fun to be wealthy when mom and dad handed them the keys to the house and got them the cushy corporate job - but they were always shit bags, even when they were young, so called “liberals”.
I don’t know. I didn’t live through what Boomers and Gen-X modern conservatives, formally liberals, lived through. I just have a hard time believing anyone in 2025, that lines up ideologically with modern day Republicans, can possibly be a good person. It would need thorough explanation to convince me that they formally had an ideology that lined up with mine. I can’t even begin to comprehend a justified rationale for becoming conservative. It seems like horseshit to me.
How do you think the hippies afforded that lifestyle? Most of them had rich parents. They were kumbaya because they didn't have to worry about anything, not because they had any sort of solidarity.
most of them had rich parents
Nope. Knew some. You coukd genuinely work part time for a month, then fuck around doing van-life for a year on that money.
Some had rich parents. Not all. Maybe not most.
Right wing parties feed on fear: the fear of losing what you have.
Millenials have had no chance to build anything to lose. They're not self contained fiefdoms jealously guarding Whats Mine Is Mine, they rely heavily on social groups and community.
I’m millenial. I’m as left as they come. Fuck the right so hard
It me. I have always considered my self “left” in the American sense, but high school me would have scoffed at my adult self adopting the socialist label.
This. I was a... "centrist" until I got a job. Now I hate capitalism as a system. Full stop.
Maybe because concervativism went from stay at home mom's to ethnic cleansing and genocide.
No shit. We are living in a worse time of inequality than the gilded age.
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.
"First generation to be worth a damn"
No matter how good or bad your situation is, turning right is like gouging your own eyes out. It makes the situation worse for literally everyone. Even the hyper rich would be better off under a more left paradigm.
Let's go! One last Millennials are ruinning...
Fascism!
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.
Maybe as a group ? but I am cis white Gen X and started out as middling conservative in my eary 20s, now green environmentalist and anarcho-socalist at 58.
How anyone can age, look around at the enviormental devestation, including climate change enhanced catastrophes that are going to get much much worse along with vast inequality and think this is good lets keep doing this, is bemusing beyond my ability to understand.
I’ve yet to personally meet a GenX republican.
They’re out there. Go check out comedians.
“Uhhh, you can’t say anything anymore. PC police will come cancel you.”
No. You suck. Your misogynistic and racist jokes aren’t funny. No one owes you their money.
Gen X I've only gotten more liberal as I've aged
Less uptight, more open-minded in general.
Really? Because they are the generation most likely to vote republican
I remember a health care video interviewing someone that got cancer. They said "we did everything right and we're bankrupt." Everything right meaning getting a degree, good job, etc and they got fucked.
Millennials are the first generation to move left as they age
I told you boomers I was gonna do that, when I was 17, already coming out of my corporate-fanboi phase of my teens. "Afukinatoadaso"
Glad there are millennials who came after me doing so too. Unsurprising, given what we went through. Well done capitalism, selling out our futures.
Now I just hope more remembered it's freedom too, and not just jumping boat from Big Baron into the arms of Big Brother (or Big Bully, or Big Bank, or Big Blight, or Big Bot).
Like ol Mikey Bakunin said: "We are convinced that freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice, and that Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality." -- Mikhail Bakunin https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin
[Edit... it's only early to mid 40s for the first Millennials so far... We'll see if that sticks. As the saying goes, "60's the new 40".]
Spending several decades of my life hearing right-wing politicians and voters tell me that my "lifestyle choice" is bad, that I'm a degenerate who is ruining the country, that I don't deserve equal rights, that I deserve to be executed, and so so many other repulsive things like that definitely pushed me towards the other direction, politically.
Truthfully though, even if I weren't a part of the LGBT+ population, all the other ridiculous stuff would have been more than enough on its own to turn me off to right-wing politics.
Realistically, I think it's the authoritarian core of it mixed with the anti-intellectual principles that I always found off-putting. Although I never would have guessed we'd end up where we are in the USA back when I was a kid, this all honestly makes sense.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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