“You’ll agree more with republicans as you age” was always something I heard from right wing nut jobs when I became voting age. In fact, the opposite has happened.
I often heard something similar, in spirit. Roughly translated: “if you aren’t a commie when you’re 20, then you’re heartless; but if you’re still a commie when you’re 40, then you’re brainless.”
I’m 40 this year. Still a communist. I guess that makes me brainless?
You get more and more immersed in right wing propaganda as you get older. You get exposed to more reactionary institutions, you find yourself increasingly segregated from people of different races and income scales, you suffer the psychological torments of the capitalist rat race more nakedly, and it all adds up.
Lots of people I grew up with in high school are Trump Republicans now. They weren’t MAGA shitheads in school, mostly because they were blank slates. They were warm to ideas like “Free College” when they were in college and cooled on it once they graduated (or flunked out). They were “moderate” when they had friends who were coming out of the closet and dealing with racial abuse and coming home in body bags during the Iraq War. But they grew increasingly right-wing when the law firm and the O&G offices and techbro money orgies demanded it of them.
Even before AI started straight up poisoning people’s brains, they were getting into Facebook groups and Discord channels that rotted them. Nevermind the endless barrage of NYT / WaPo “Why These Trump Voters Need To Be Listened To” articles and CBS / ABC “Transgender Athletes: A Threat To Your Kid’s Scholarship?” TV slop that drives so many liberals insane. Nevermind the Zionists, those nice sweet liberal folks whose faces melt right off the moment you suggest butchering millions of brown people might be bad Middle East policy.
Fucking sucks, but time really does turn people rightward when you live in a fascist hellhole.
It’s people who don’t have a strong opinion because they haven’t been bombarded with a particular flavor of social media yet.
A twenty-year-old is going to have a different view of alternative ethnic groups than a forty-year-old, simply by way of psychological attrition. You can only get so many “Black Man With Sour Face In Orange Jumpsuit” local news jump-scare stories before the racism is bludgeoned into your gray matter.
People also become more isolated from “others” as they age, at least those with stable jobs. They are surrounded by people of the same financial ability, and their job keeps them in an area, and their income matches to a house.
It’s not until they get laid off or they have a medical event that they start to think about it again. As long as the life compared to their peers is ok and their bellies are full, they don’t complain about trillionaires.
Even past this, I think we undersell the socializing value of public schools. This is particularly true of the big state universities, where you’re going to be bumping shoulders with people from the opposite side of the state (even the other side of the country). But even public high schools have a way of co-mingling people from the other side of the tracks for one reason or another.
They are surrounded by people of the same financial ability, and their job keeps them in an area, and their income matches to a house.
Absolutely this. Bigger cities can kinda-sorta avoid this. But the people you know best are going to be your coworkers and your neighbors, strictly by virtue of proximity. One of the perks of social institutions like churches and gyms is that you butt up against people who aren’t perfectly parallel with you in terms of socio-economic status.
It happens, I’m sure. Constant exposure to propaganda and an increase in money can do that to you. But it didn’t happen to my parents (who are seniors now) and it didn’t happen to me, yet.
My point is, it won’t happen to everyone like I was told by people in the town I grew up and first voted in. I grew up in a conservative hellhole, one that may or may not have one of the most corrupt and theocratic governments of any state, if that gives you any hints.
Sure. Nothing happens to everyone (except the one big thing).
But it happens to enough people such that it shapes general public perceptions and vibes.
I grew up in a conservative hellhole, one that may or may not have one of the most corrupt and theocratic governments of any state, if that gives you any hints.
But I agree, it cuts both ways. I wasn’t a raging leftist in high school. I flirted with Republicans, because they were in the majority. I flirted with Libertarianism, because it seemed like they agreed me on a few things at least. I flirted with the local liberal establishments, because it at least looked like a runway towards progressive policies.
You can only see so much corruption, insincerity, and complicity before it drives you to the fringes. If I wasn’t a fire-breathing leftist tankie wumao third-worlder Bookchin afficianado, I guess I would have ended up doing QAnon shit from the strain of it all.
I’m from Texas. From my experience, it could apply to anyone over here or east straight on to Florida. Nevermind the nightmare politics of the upper midwest or the fascist fuckwit colony of Idaho.
Oh yeah, I mean, religion is everywhere, including in those governments. But the Mormon church quite literally is the government in Utah. The vast majority of the state government are temple-recommend card carrying members of the church, and also went on missions. These aren’t just practicing christians, most of them are bishops or high ranking members of the church.
I think that it’s a difficult thing to understand from the outside, but if you lived there for more than a year, you’d definitely understand what I mean. Utah is a huge bubble. They turn their noses up at anyone perceived as an outsider (in practice, this meant “not Mormon”), including Atheists, people who were agnostic, Christians, Catholics, and people practicing Judaism. The way this was done was very insidious as well, because to your face, they’d be all nice, but then you’d hear their disapproval and judgement through the grapevine.
Anyway, I’m rambling/venting now, but my point is that Utah is about as close as you can get to a fully theocratic state in the US, it’s much closer to something like the Vatican than anywhere else that I’ve lived or visited. Idaho is the way it is because of Utah - it has an extremely high Mormon population as well.
But the Mormon church quite literally is the government in Utah.
And the Southern Baptist Convention run Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi. Meanwhile, Opus Dei Catholics have their hooks deep into Missouri and Louisiana. Churches are a common way to organize a political vanguard in order to manage an ostensibly democratic institution. The Mormons have a ton of influence in neighboring Arizona, Nevada, California, and across the border in Sonora, Mexico.
Utah is a huge bubble.
I grew up in a town outside of Houston, Texas called Sugar Land. We also used to jokingly refer to it as “The Bubble”, as it was a Planned Community that resulted from a collaboration of the O&G industry, the D.R. Horton Home Builders, and the Sugar Creek Baptist Church under Tom DeLay. Then the Catholic Church moved in and blew the whole thing up by flooding the district with the perfidious Irish and the nefarious Taiwanese.
But yes, being one of half a dozen Jewish kids in a sea of Southerners was certainly an experience.
my point is that Utah is about as close as you can get to a fully theocratic state in the US
US Theocracies are more common than you’d first guess. Louisiana is fully co-opted by southern Catholics. Check out the Veiled Prophet Society in St. Louis (half a zillion podcasts on the subject). Texas has its share of outright cult towns, the Branch Davidians being an iconic but hardly idiosyncratic example. And then you’ve got the various Black Baptist church tentpole institutions from Harlem to Oakland (marginally less toxic than the whites, but no less influential nor dogmatic).
The fastest way to get a large number of people to vote for you is to appeal to a member of the clergy. So quite a bit of US democratic power springs from a comparatively small but vocal set of religious hubs.
I am in no way denying that other states do similar things. I am saying that Utah is a completely different animal than those states. It was founded, incorporated, built, and run by Mormons the entire time (there used to even be a Mormon army), with a super majority of residents themselves being Mormon, all while the Mormon church is one of the richest religious organizations in the county. They’re literally one of the biggest private land owners in the country as well. They are rich and by far the most powerful organization in Utah and Idaho.
Again, I do genuinely believe that you’d have to live there (and thus deal with the Utah government) to understand what I mean. It is not the same as the south. There aren’t just cult towns like you describe, that is literally the whole state. Even relatively blue areas such as SLC suffer from the control and oversight of the church.
Getting older includes losing your field of fucks to give. If you’ve spent your life bullying and celebrating your ignorance like them, you’ll become more conservative. If your views and your morals have stayed somewhat consistent and you’ve been generous, courteous and compassionate, those values will persist your lack of fucks to give, often pushing you further left rather than right.
“You’ll agree more with republicans as you age” was always something I heard from right wing nut jobs when I became voting age. In fact, the opposite has happened.
I often heard something similar, in spirit. Roughly translated: “if you aren’t a commie when you’re 20, then you’re heartless; but if you’re still a commie when you’re 40, then you’re brainless.”
I’m 40 this year. Still a communist. I guess that makes me brainless?
I’ve heard it as “if you’re still a communist when you’re 40, then you’re poor.”
You can also substitute communist with socialist or liberal.
Also I’ve heard another version where 20 is democrat, 30 is Republican, and 40 is libertarian.
It’s all “my team” kind of bullshit.
I originally heard this as:
If you’re a Republican at 20, then you’re heartless. If you’re a Democrat at 40, then you’re broke.
You get more and more immersed in right wing propaganda as you get older. You get exposed to more reactionary institutions, you find yourself increasingly segregated from people of different races and income scales, you suffer the psychological torments of the capitalist rat race more nakedly, and it all adds up.
Lots of people I grew up with in high school are Trump Republicans now. They weren’t MAGA shitheads in school, mostly because they were blank slates. They were warm to ideas like “Free College” when they were in college and cooled on it once they graduated (or flunked out). They were “moderate” when they had friends who were coming out of the closet and dealing with racial abuse and coming home in body bags during the Iraq War. But they grew increasingly right-wing when the law firm and the O&G offices and techbro money orgies demanded it of them.
Even before AI started straight up poisoning people’s brains, they were getting into Facebook groups and Discord channels that rotted them. Nevermind the endless barrage of NYT / WaPo “Why These Trump Voters Need To Be Listened To” articles and CBS / ABC “Transgender Athletes: A Threat To Your Kid’s Scholarship?” TV slop that drives so many liberals insane. Nevermind the Zionists, those nice sweet liberal folks whose faces melt right off the moment you suggest butchering millions of brown people might be bad Middle East policy.
Fucking sucks, but time really does turn people rightward when you live in a fascist hellhole.
that’s not being a blank slate though, that’s being so devoid of empathy that you can’t even imagine what it’s like being yourself a few years ago.
It’s people who don’t have a strong opinion because they haven’t been bombarded with a particular flavor of social media yet.
A twenty-year-old is going to have a different view of alternative ethnic groups than a forty-year-old, simply by way of psychological attrition. You can only get so many “Black Man With Sour Face In Orange Jumpsuit” local news jump-scare stories before the racism is bludgeoned into your gray matter.
sure but that’s all predicated on growing up in an individualist culture.
People also become more isolated from “others” as they age, at least those with stable jobs. They are surrounded by people of the same financial ability, and their job keeps them in an area, and their income matches to a house.
It’s not until they get laid off or they have a medical event that they start to think about it again. As long as the life compared to their peers is ok and their bellies are full, they don’t complain about trillionaires.
Even past this, I think we undersell the socializing value of public schools. This is particularly true of the big state universities, where you’re going to be bumping shoulders with people from the opposite side of the state (even the other side of the country). But even public high schools have a way of co-mingling people from the other side of the tracks for one reason or another.
Absolutely this. Bigger cities can kinda-sorta avoid this. But the people you know best are going to be your coworkers and your neighbors, strictly by virtue of proximity. One of the perks of social institutions like churches and gyms is that you butt up against people who aren’t perfectly parallel with you in terms of socio-economic status.
It happens, I’m sure. Constant exposure to propaganda and an increase in money can do that to you. But it didn’t happen to my parents (who are seniors now) and it didn’t happen to me, yet.
My point is, it won’t happen to everyone like I was told by people in the town I grew up and first voted in. I grew up in a conservative hellhole, one that may or may not have one of the most corrupt and theocratic governments of any state, if that gives you any hints.
Sure. Nothing happens to everyone (except the one big thing).
But it happens to enough people such that it shapes general public perceptions and vibes.
But I agree, it cuts both ways. I wasn’t a raging leftist in high school. I flirted with Republicans, because they were in the majority. I flirted with Libertarianism, because it seemed like they agreed me on a few things at least. I flirted with the local liberal establishments, because it at least looked like a runway towards progressive policies.
You can only see so much corruption, insincerity, and complicity before it drives you to the fringes. If I wasn’t a fire-breathing leftist tankie wumao third-worlder Bookchin afficianado, I guess I would have ended up doing QAnon shit from the strain of it all.
Ha, I thought theocratic government would narrow it down. It’s Utah.
I’m from Texas. From my experience, it could apply to anyone over here or east straight on to Florida. Nevermind the nightmare politics of the upper midwest or the fascist fuckwit colony of Idaho.
Oh yeah, I mean, religion is everywhere, including in those governments. But the Mormon church quite literally is the government in Utah. The vast majority of the state government are temple-recommend card carrying members of the church, and also went on missions. These aren’t just practicing christians, most of them are bishops or high ranking members of the church.
I think that it’s a difficult thing to understand from the outside, but if you lived there for more than a year, you’d definitely understand what I mean. Utah is a huge bubble. They turn their noses up at anyone perceived as an outsider (in practice, this meant “not Mormon”), including Atheists, people who were agnostic, Christians, Catholics, and people practicing Judaism. The way this was done was very insidious as well, because to your face, they’d be all nice, but then you’d hear their disapproval and judgement through the grapevine.
Anyway, I’m rambling/venting now, but my point is that Utah is about as close as you can get to a fully theocratic state in the US, it’s much closer to something like the Vatican than anywhere else that I’ve lived or visited. Idaho is the way it is because of Utah - it has an extremely high Mormon population as well.
And the Southern Baptist Convention run Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi. Meanwhile, Opus Dei Catholics have their hooks deep into Missouri and Louisiana. Churches are a common way to organize a political vanguard in order to manage an ostensibly democratic institution. The Mormons have a ton of influence in neighboring Arizona, Nevada, California, and across the border in Sonora, Mexico.
I grew up in a town outside of Houston, Texas called Sugar Land. We also used to jokingly refer to it as “The Bubble”, as it was a Planned Community that resulted from a collaboration of the O&G industry, the D.R. Horton Home Builders, and the Sugar Creek Baptist Church under Tom DeLay. Then the Catholic Church moved in and blew the whole thing up by flooding the district with the perfidious Irish and the nefarious Taiwanese.
But yes, being one of half a dozen Jewish kids in a sea of Southerners was certainly an experience.
US Theocracies are more common than you’d first guess. Louisiana is fully co-opted by southern Catholics. Check out the Veiled Prophet Society in St. Louis (half a zillion podcasts on the subject). Texas has its share of outright cult towns, the Branch Davidians being an iconic but hardly idiosyncratic example. And then you’ve got the various Black Baptist church tentpole institutions from Harlem to Oakland (marginally less toxic than the whites, but no less influential nor dogmatic).
The fastest way to get a large number of people to vote for you is to appeal to a member of the clergy. So quite a bit of US democratic power springs from a comparatively small but vocal set of religious hubs.
I am in no way denying that other states do similar things. I am saying that Utah is a completely different animal than those states. It was founded, incorporated, built, and run by Mormons the entire time (there used to even be a Mormon army), with a super majority of residents themselves being Mormon, all while the Mormon church is one of the richest religious organizations in the county. They’re literally one of the biggest private land owners in the country as well. They are rich and by far the most powerful organization in Utah and Idaho.
Again, I do genuinely believe that you’d have to live there (and thus deal with the Utah government) to understand what I mean. It is not the same as the south. There aren’t just cult towns like you describe, that is literally the whole state. Even relatively blue areas such as SLC suffer from the control and oversight of the church.
Getting older includes losing your field of fucks to give. If you’ve spent your life bullying and celebrating your ignorance like them, you’ll become more conservative. If your views and your morals have stayed somewhat consistent and you’ve been generous, courteous and compassionate, those values will persist your lack of fucks to give, often pushing you further left rather than right.
Same here. Turns out reality has a liberal bias unless you go out of your way to ignore it.
prior to the internet the establishment controlled public opinion
Really? Reality is biased towards oligarchy?
No, oligarchy is a poor approach that’s applied to reality and enforced by violence.
Maybe you just never grew up and allowing you to vote was a mistake. Have you considered seeing a doctor about this?