A friend sent me this opinion piece from the Washington Post with its eye-catching headline:
Are millennial leftists aging into right-wingers?
It was written by a young Canadian named J.J. McCullough who is a moderate-centrist liberal. His thesis is that the “millennial generation,” in the midst of a “midlife crisis,” is finding “its way into voting Republican.” (He could have included Baby Boomers along with Millennials.)
McCullough offers several reasons why older people experience this change in heart, but he summarizes them all by noting that “a shared loathing of the liberal establishment” is what they have in common. Pronoun introductions (he-his), “perfectly race- and gender-balanced workplaces,” a fear of offending people, and you end up with “a generation primed to be at least a little reactionary-curious.”
There’s nothing really new about this. Old sayings show that this transformation has been evident for a long time. “A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged” said the neo-con Irving Kristol 70 years ago. Then there’s the adage usually attributed (falsely) to Churchill: “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.” Both sayings suggest that McCullough’s thesis is correct.
The problem is that those old terms, “conservative,” “socialist,” “liberal,” “right,” “left,” “reactionary,” ‘progressive” and so on, have reached their expiration dates. They once might have meant something, but the American electorate has become too nuanced, too complicated to fall into such neatly-ordered pigeon holes anymore. How would you describe a Millennial or Boomer who has grown increasingly less idealistic when it comes to human nature (because he understands how difficult it is for people to change), who is far tougher on crime and public safety than when he was 20, who is impatient with the arrogant “we know better than you” attitude of wokesters, who loathes the defund-the-police craziness, who thinks pronoun introductions are ridiculous—and yet at the same time is strongly pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-decreasing the use of fossil fuels, pro-union, and against the intrusion of religion in government?
The answer is that such a person cannot be nearly categorized. He is more “conservative” in many ways. Yet he maintains that cheerful optimism for the future that has long been associated with the Democratic Party: the belief that government has a role to play in our lives, and that role can be progressive and positive. He may lean Republican in many ways, but he is too aware of the dangers of Republicanism (especially when combined with Trumpism) to go over full-fledged to the G.O.P. Thus, when McCullough predicts that “a crop of seniors” is likely to insist that “what the nation needs now is a strong Republican government capable of keeping a new, illegitimate progressive movement from ruining the nation with its immature nonsense,” I think he’s overly pessimistic. The Democratic Party can correct itself from within, but it’s going to require lots of straight talk to so-called progressives, in which we tell them, basically, to shut up or find themselves a new home.
Steve Heimoff