What drives me nuts about the whole “boomers vs. millennials” narrative is like – its construction depends entirely on the erasure of already marginalized people.
“Boomer”, in these arguments, always means “white, affluent, and able-bodied”. The existence of poor, nonwhite, or disabled baby boomers contradicts the oppressor/oppressed paradigm, so they are simply ignored. “40 years ago everyone had a house and a job and lived in harmony” is a fiction. It has always been a fiction. It’s post-WWII propaganda constructed to dismiss systemic poverty and racism. Hold up the smiling suburban ideal and no one will notice the slums. It has never been true for more than a fraction of people, and it drives me batty how many millennials wholeheartedly buy into it. I’m sincerely sorry you can’t afford a house, but for the love of god stop acting like systemic inequality was just invented because you hadn’t noticed it before.
It’s fiction that directly implies the demand “Make America Great Again”.
Also friendly reminder that the reason old people skew conservative is not that people get more conservative as they get older, but that poor and disabled and otherwise marginalized people tend to die younger.
So yeah, there’s probably more conservative boomers than millenials NOW. That doesn’t mean that was the case when the boomers were in their late 20′s and early 30′s.Is that actually true at least to the degree of “the only significant reason why it happens”?
The “people become conservative as they age” often seems to be targeted at “your thirties” or “as soon as you have a stake in maintaining society” and it’s often discussed as a trend that happens to individual people who were never marginalized.
Honestly, to the extent that it’s a thing, I think it’s mostly cohort effect. The thought-drivers of a generation marinate in certain memes while they’re in high school and college, and because they’re the rising youth, those memes are “radical.” Twenty years later those same memes are “conservative” and the new cohort is interested in different things.