Millennials are bucking trends, becoming an increasingly progressive voting bloc and rewriting the long-held rules of politics, writes Isabella Higgins.

  • Guy Ingonito@reddthat.com
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    4 hours ago

    Probably because they’ve yet to see a right-wing government complete a 4 year term without a calamity occurring.

    I’m 100% serious.

  • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
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    6 hours ago

    I know anecdotes aren’t data, but I’m a millennial who moved further left with age.

    I started left, but am now more vehemently so.

  • Meron35@lemmy.world
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    45 minutes ago

    I was repeatedly told that when I got older I would “understand” why policy makers made the terrible decisions they did, and that it was immature to believe they were cartoonishly evil.

    Instead, I learnt that the reality was even worse than cartoonishly evil.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 hours ago

      A lot of things suddenly get explained when one becomes aware of the traits associated with Psychopathy and Sociopathy and how around 5% of humans are high in the spectrum for one or the other.

      In my own experience, certain kinds of behaviors are incredibly hard to believe in (deep down, emotionally, even if intellectually one does) when a person has an average or above average level of empathy: when you have a normal level of empathy it’s pretty hard to put yourself in the shoes of and naturally accept that some people are casually and without any feeling of guilt the kind of person who, for example, couldn’t care less if their personal-upside-maximizing actions hurt even little children or puppies as long as they didn’t get reprisals from others for doing it.

    • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
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      6 hours ago

      Instead, I learnt that the reality was even worse than cartoonishly evil.

      Yeah, it’s saying something when you figure that IRL villains are very often worse than the mustache-twirling villains featured in comic books.

      The banality of evil.

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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    5 hours ago

    The first? Are we sure about that? Generations circa 19th and earlier 20th century haven’t moved left as they aged? Sus.

  • Digit@lemmy.wtf
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    7 hours ago

    Millennials are the first generation to move left as they age

    I told you boomers I was gonna do that, when I was 17, already coming out of my corporate-fanboi phase of my teens. “Afukinatoadaso

    Glad there are millennials who came after me doing so too. Unsurprising, given what we went through. Well done capitalism, selling out our futures.

    Now I just hope more remembered it’s freedom too, and not just jumping boat from Big Baron into the arms of Big Brother (or Big Bully, or Big Bank, or Big Blight, or Big Bot).

    Like ol Mikey Bakunin said: “We are convinced that freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice, and that Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.” – Mikhail Bakunin https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin

    [Edit… it’s only early to mid 40s for the first Millennials so far… We’ll see if that sticks. As the saying goes, “60’s the new 40”.]

    • Digit@lemmy.wtf
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      7 hours ago

      Heh… as Marx got older, he moved from around -5,-5 on the political compass, to around -10,0.

      Yeah. Maybe age alone is not the driving criteria. ;)

      Maybe people just say that to make those prone to following do that.

      That and the money. “No. It’s mine.”

      We millennials were deprived of all of that.

    • Digit@lemmy.wtf
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      7 hours ago

      Saw our boomer and genX parents ride the rise, told it’d be ours too, only to witness everything taken away, revealing only the lies remaining; the false promises that daddy corporation would take care of us all.

      On a personal note, saw my parents throw away their entire 2 million, cost me a million in effort through blackmail, slavery, torture and fraud, and then inverted my efforts, so it’s like they managed to throw away 4 million, and then I’m there with the government doing waves of culls of the disabled poor by cutting them off to starve, denying them even the pittance (~ I’ve heard said, disabled people’s costs of living are 4-10 times higher, and, so, why is the top rate of disability support income less than half what they say is the living wage?)… yeah, the inequality keeps going down all the way. Not just comparing the billionaires and trillionaires to the working class and upper precariat. … All while knowing the technology exists to emancipate everybody to lush abundance… Buuuut, is suppressed, because, ’ gotta keep those rents and regressive tax extortion and usury flowing, eh?

      Sucks being dependent on your abuser.

      … Will not be televised.

  • JayK117@aussie.zone
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    9 hours ago

    Maybe because concervativism went from stay at home mom’s to ethnic cleansing and genocide.

  • Xerxos@lemmy.ml
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    12 hours ago

    Quite easily explained: older generations accumulated wealth as they got older, so the central message of the right “I got mine, fuck you” (paraphrased) resonated more with them.

    Newer generations only accumulate debt.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 hours ago

      Exactly.

      Even greedy millennials who are very low on the whole “wanting for others to be well, not just myself” kind of feeling and personal principles are themselves experiencing how it is to be born under the boot and realizing one is destined to be under it until the day one dies, and that feels bad, it feels unfair, it makes you want to “fuck this shit up”.

      It’s not that millennials are inherently better or worse than other age groups, it’s that they’re far more likely than older generations to be familiar with being relentlessly victimize by present day society, through no fault of their own and merely due to something they were born with (specifically the “when they were born”).

      Basically far more of them know how it feels to be born poor in a society that gives you almost zero chances to climb up from that no matter how capable you are and how hard you work, than previous generations.

      You know which countries had Communist revolutions? The kind with lots and lots of poor people with zero chance of improving their lot, such as Czarist Russia.

    • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
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      8 hours ago

      It was a baby boomer/greatest generation thing. The generation that served in ww2 benefitted greatly from massive programs to aid returning veterans, thus fueling both education, home ownership, and post-war consumerism. They were able to pass that onto the generation that came after, the baby boomers.

      By the time the youngest baby boomers became adults the systems that allowed them and their parents to accumulate wealth began to be dismantled. Neoliberalism didnt happen in a day. It took years to fully tear the old system apart and years before the effect would be fully felt and visible. By then the older people cannot associate the ‘now’ with the events of several years ago, and younger people have never experienced the things that their parents did.

      In short. The version of capitalism that WW2 veterans in the West lived with after the war ‘worked’ for them, while Communist regimes, most of which were built on exploited colonial holdings, or war torn nations that were never developed to begin with… Eastern Europe was much poorer than Western Europe even before WW2, and after WW2 they were both poor and bombed to hell and back. Vietnam was a French colony and the Vietnamese were fighting the French for liberation before they got taken over by the Japanese, who the Vietnamese also fought, before fighting the French and the Americans afterward. China was the USSR of the East… and also extremely underdeveloped.

      This means seeing authoritarianism and poverty in ‘Communist’ regimes while seeing wealth in the US, Canada, the UK, and France after ww2 (which were built heavily on US aid and some where never bombed, like the US and Canada… and France adopted a fuckload of government intervention that fueled their growth) was something that people of that time would associate with those regimes, making it easier for them to think that the socialism there is what caused the poverty when in reality that was simply their starting position and not the end result.

      The shit we are seeing now is basically disproving all of it. Russia has been ‘capitalist’ for 35 years now and they are still heavily underdeveloped in addition to being more authoritarian than it was under certain soviet regimes. Shit that was affordable and easy in the West, even in bad economic times, is now becoming prohibitively expensive. Food production is still extremely high and food waste is incredible… but food prices are continuing to get worse and worse.

      Also for those who care to look at things from an actual historic perspective, it is becoming apparent that the reason why shit was good in the past was not due to endless economic growth but social policy and legislation.

      Building more houses and apartments is pointless. There are too many apartments and too many houses. They are expensive because housing turned from making places to live to a speculative market. This is why Canadian cities are unlivable now.

    • J92@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Id say, in addition to your very valid point, that this generation is the first to have this level of access to the un-skewed plight of those able enough to voice or show their situation. The Internet, social media, direct messaging around the world, is giving a very cold view of the world to an increasing number (as the older generations die out and new generations are becoming more cynical and media literate or aware) and it is highlighting how the gears of the world, too large enough to visualise on your own, actually turn and for whom they turn.

      • eureka@aussie.zone
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        1 hour ago

        This is important to emphasise. Older generations were, generally, in more of a bubble, it wasn’t easy to spread word with the same reach and authority as national mass media before the Internet.

        Similar situation with other communication advances, like the telegraph, which allowed news of the world and the people around a country to learn and co-ordinate much better than before.

    • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      Exactly. Boomers had the privilege of owning a home, building up savings, got pensions, and got to retire early. Gen x got most of those privileges, except maybe pensions… now millenials are pouring all their savings just to own a home, and social security is unlikely to exist by “retirement”. And gen alpha are going be entering adult hood with 50 year mortgages? Gee, wonder why the young population is questioning the economic system.

    • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      Same, my grandmother never voted for a conservative in her life. I miss her, but I’m sure that if she had lived to see this day, it would have just made her golden years more stressful than they already were. I at least have the knowledge that even if my parents disagree with me, she would’ve supported the things I stand for.

  • shani66@ani.social
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    16 hours ago

    “First generation to be worth a damn”

    No matter how good or bad your situation is, turning right is like gouging your own eyes out. It makes the situation worse for literally everyone. Even the hyper rich would be better off under a more left paradigm.

  • Nbard@aussie.zone
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    17 hours ago

    Right wing parties feed on fear: the fear of losing what you have.

    Millenials have had no chance to build anything to lose. They’re not self contained fiefdoms jealously guarding Whats Mine Is Mine, they rely heavily on social groups and community.