The generational approach to understanding social relations and habits has been an unavoidable interpretive backbone in public debates for some time now. And it would not be an exaggeration to assert that a kind of socio-political astrology has developed. Affiliation boomers brings certain attitudes and destiny, and belonging zoomers some quite different. It is quite easy to debunk such an approach and show that there are significant social differences within a generation and that specific cultural differences, mostly based on the (non)acceptance and shaping of new communication technologies, are not so significant as to contribute to deeper political differences between generations.
However, as we have already written more extensively here, simply neglecting generations in the analysis also means rejecting history as such. Generations are not only shaped by cultural and technological changes, but also by important political events and economic power relations. These events, changes and relations of power create the impression of "natural" and possible or impossible in society and politics. Of course, even within the generations themselves, not everyone is exposed to these trends and tendencies equally due to their different statuses. Just as those impressions can change within the same generation. However, we do not have the luxury of completely bypassing generational experiences and leaving them completely to PR services and marketing agencies.
The research results published at the end of last year represent an additional contribution to this attitude. According to these findings, we are witnessing quite significant political changes in American and British society. Namely, when political inclinations are in the middle, in those societies, until recently, there was an "iron law" that was supposedly defined by Winston Churchill long ago in a popular quote. It doesn't really matter who the real author of that aphorism is: "If you're not a liberal at 25, you don't have a heart, and if you're not a conservative at 35, you don't have a brain." This life wisdom was also confirmed by the trends. In all generations so far, including the "silent generation" (1928-1945), boomers (1946-1965) and Generation X (1966-1980), the same rule applied. Each generation up to the age of 35 voted between 5 and 10 percentage points more than the national average for Labor or the Democrats, so that, after reaching the national average in the late thirties, support for the Tories and Republicans increased with age in all generations and increasingly surpassed the national average .
However, with the advent of millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, the rule lost its validity, and thus obviously that popular aphorism. Namely, the voting patterns when it comes to them suggest that there was no "natural" turn to the right over the years. On the contrary, the shift to the left is increasingly pronounced. As an explanation, two reasons are mentioned in the previous reactions, economic and cultural-political. At a crucial moment, that generation felt the effects of the 2008 crisis, which made it even more prone to leftist views when it comes to the economy. Guardian columnist Owen Jones added in his reading of the research that this is a generation with a higher level of awareness of minority rights and that this should be taken into account when it comes to political elections.
If we interpret the approach to conservative options over the years as a kind of reconciliation with the world, then we need to see what this reconciliation is materially based on. In a situation where solving the housing issue is becoming an increasing challenge, pensions are increasingly uncertain, and health care is increasingly unaffordable, it is not unusual for the "iron laws" to soften. Of course, this does not mean that we are on the threshold of some kind of tectonic political changes, but only that the period of some thirty years of (selective) welfare state after the Second World War in the West should be viewed as a historical anomaly. And when it comes to the relationship between capitalism and democracy and when we talk about the redistributive capacities of capitalism.
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