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I'm going to go back to my theory that Conservatism is returning to what things were like in your lifetime or your parents lifetime, and Reaction is pushing back before living memory. I've argued it extensively here before.
The net result is that where before you turned 40 and got comfortable and started to say "Gee, I'd like the world not to change too much, I like it the way it is..." there was a party you voted for. Nixon, Reagan, Dubya all won elections in the US promising less change, keep things the same. I'm not sure that much of the modern Right Wing today promises keeping things the same, keeping them how they were when I grew up. Many seem to urge us on towards change, towards tearing up the social contract I grew up with, towards Retvrn to something I don't know, something new and scary. When I was a kid abortion was legal, my elementary school principle was Black, my dad's best friend on the charity board was gay. If you try to abolish the policies that allowed those things, or if I am convinced that you will even if you won't, my natural conservatism won't help you, it will hurt you. At times, there is no conservative option on the ballot in American politics.
I think this jibes with your Brexit theory of young Brits: traveling the EU and working or partying as they pleased was their birthright, it's what they grew up with. You can't sell conservative to them and say, oh we're going to destroy the world you grew up in. That's a contradiction in terms.
Millennials won't, can't!, become conservative if you don't put conservatism on the ballot.
Abortion is still legal in the majority of states
You think the GOP hates black principals? Wha
Gays can’t work for charities either?
I’m not sure what your arguing here. Do most millennials think republicans are the worst version MSNBC portrays them as? That’s depressing but would explain a lot
I've written extensively on the recent gubernatorial election in my home state, the state in which three generations of my family have been born and where my wife and I own a house up the street from where I grew up, where I've been registered as a Republican since the day I turned 18. Between Mastriano and Shapiro Shapiro, the Democrat, was the one who would conserve the state I grew up in.
Mastriano planned to cut public school staffing by 2/3. I attended public schools throughout, and got a great education in my local school district, I graduated with 30 college credits and my classmates wound up at a variety of ivy league schools. Houses in my school district, like mine, routinely demand a 20+% premium for the schools. Mastriano and his plan would have reduced my largest assets value, and destroyed a local institution I loved. Not conservative. Shapiro pledged to introduce vouchers for those who wanted them in failing school districts. Great! Compromise!
Mastriano stated repeatedly and clearly that abortion should be banned with no exceptions. So while, yes, abortion is under no immediate threat in my state, that is a result of the R candidate losing last November. If he had won, he would be seeking legislation banning abortion while doing everything in his executive power to make it difficult. My dating life would have been different had it been as high stakes as Mastriano desired. Shapiro wanted to keep things the same.
Mastriano stated that gay marriage should be illegal in all cases, and hinted at sodomy laws being reintroduced. Once again, on the ballot, do uncle James and uncle Craig get to stay legitimately married in their home state, a wedding I went to in Jersey when I was 12.
So, explain to me why the GOP can't be identified with their candidate for the highest office in the fifth most populous state? A purple state with a deep Republican bench in the state Senate and local executives, a state where moderates should do well everywhere but inner city Phillie and Pittsburgh.
I desperately want to vote for competent conservative candidates! I don't want a single day in my kid's school wasted on trans ideology! But my life is basically pretty good, I don't want to turn the world upside down. If all the R on the ballot offers is revolution, it's gonna be tough to vote for him.
Sounds like you have a very red democrat in your state, who had to go far to the right to ensure victory, whereas the GOP felt secure enough to take more extreme positions. I’m not sure if Pennsylvania can really representative or not, I’m not American, but a democrat being in favour of school vouchers seems extremely unrepresentative of a what your typical dem politician is like
It was moreso that we had an extremely smart and intellectually consistent Right wing republican happen to win the primary (Jan 6th attendee who calls himself a Christian Nationalist) and the centrist Dem saw an opportunity to curb stomp him by getting a lot of R state level endorsements. As a result of those smart politics, Dems might get control of the state house for the first time in a long time; it almost certainly saved a US Senate seat for the Ds.
PA is more representative than any state in the union. It has both rural and urban areas, and was the likely flip state in the electoral college for 16 and 20 according to 538. Nowhere else is more representative. Keystone state, baby.
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Problem is, you want social liberalisation (access to abortion in case you knocked up that temporary girlfriend; gay marriage for your uncles) and that doesn't just stop at the step of the ladder you are on. The next step up is the trans ideology, just as the step below that was the gay rights, and the step below that was the contraception and abortion access.
Fiscally conservative, socially liberal gives you the guy who conserved the state you grew up in, but his party is the one waving the Pride flags (some out of convenience, some out of conviction) and by the time your kid grows up, then "trans ideology in school" will be "conserving the state I grew up in".
Sure, but I think we're (including my learned friend @Syo above) going afield from the original argument in OP and my response to it.
OP states that Americans are not voting conservative as they get older. A number of other commenters made the point that young people aren't achieving the kinds of lifetime milestones that they'd want to conserve; I'm making the point that even among the subset of 30-40 year olds in America that have achieved those milestones, the Republican party is failing to field candidates or a platform that wish to conserve the world that helped them achieve those milestones.
If the traditional mechanism is young poor 20 year old liberal becomes fat happy married rich homeowner and thus conservative because he wants to preserve the things that made them happy for their (biological or constructive) children; well I'm 31 and I'm a fat, happy, rich, married, homeowner and in my most recent gubernatorial election the Republican party failed to field a candidate that wanted to protect the way I grew up, the things that made me fat, happy, rich, married.
You can argue that the way I grew up was fundamentally disordered and unsustainable, but that's a very different argument, and it's not an argument to conserve it's an argument for change. It's not protecting the real, it is advocating for the hypothetical. That might be the future of the Republican party or the Right more broadly, but that means tactics will need to change: you cannot count on the Coalition of the Comfortable if your plan is to make everyone who likes the world as it is deeply uncomfortable.
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Do you have data showing the number of such employees when you attended school vs today? Also what fraction of them are actual teachers and how many are bureaucrats that have their job due to the needs of other bureaucrats?
I don't see anything "conservative", at least as understood in America, in widespread premarital sex, with people with whom you intend to part ways in the morning. Thinking this is lifestyle for which the state should permit the sacrifice of unborn children, doubly so.
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If you take the conservatives one is likely to see without searching them out[Media personalities (Tucker), influencers (shapiro), controversial politicians (trump/boeburt)] at their word: Absolutely yes.
Eg, Global warming isn't real, non-hetero's are all groomers, mexicans caravans 10000 strong are coming over the border to rape your dog, etc.
Trump waved a rainbow flag. Shapiro has never denied climate change, just that it isn’t an emergency. Mexican caravans do exist and come across the border and are worse than ever, why is that upsetting to find out for a millennial? Do millennials think borders are oppression?
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Can you point any big commentator saying anything resembling that? I know progressives love too pretend "ok, groomer" is a slur against all non-straights, but you explicitly mentioned "taking them at their word".
I only seem to remember one drama about a caravan. It was years ago, don't know about 10K but it was pretty big, and some "paper of record" was explicitly taking the other side of the issue, writing articles about how awesome the caravan is, and how evil the Trumpists are for not wanting to let it in. Is the official progressive position now that it never happened?
There’s pretty regular caravan drama, actually, but taking Republican public figures at their word is not exactly ‘they’re coming over to rape your dog’, nor is it that they’re Mexican(although if the median American has less understanding of the distinction than politicians and pundits I can’t blame them). It’s usually a narrative of ‘their are too many crossing all at once’.
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In a sense, this means that the IDW/"anti-woke" thing is probably closest to what would be the basis for a successful current small-C conservatism. After all, in the end, IDW means retvrning to the tradition of the 90s, or even the early 00s - sure, there's gays and immigrants and so on, but gosh, wasn't it also funny when you could still make jokes about them in South Park and things weren't so woke?
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