Costs in general. I just stand there in the grocers thinking "shit, they should nationalize the food chain"

Political leanings are always influenced by wealth

If you are wealthy and have a chance of becoming even more wealthy ... being a conservative is great because it ensures you keep your wealth and probably gain more

If you are not wealthy ... you have to support socialism because it's your only chance of having a life or even gaining any bit of wealth or control of your life.

I mean I don't have a lower standard of living than my parents sorta but they had seven kids and I have none and still they owned a massive house on a massive lot and I own a condo. They also paid theirs off and point a little plot that I think they hoped to make a weekend getaway thing but never got to the point of being able to do that. I mean I won computers and such but honestly thats not so much standard of living as the march of technology..

I'm curious about the generation that came of age during the Depression, but I don't think we have polling data that far back.

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.

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.

What generation has seen that, though?

The author probably forgot about Gen X like almost everybody else.

Me too, but half my senior class has gone bugfuck MAGA. That's why I left FaceBook in 2016 or so.

Atari Gen here . Born in 1980. I'm in rural Tennessee. Started out super right... As I've gotten older I've moved further and further left.

My political views these days are summed up by this..

I want my gay married neighbors and their adopted trans kids to be able to defend their land and their legal pot plants with full auto imported ak47s. And of course if something happens.. they can go to the hospital and use their universal health care.

It goes a little further than that.. it that's a good start.

And your contemporaries?

Get out of here old man, the left is ours!

We were cool before it was cool.

Me too…but we’re outliers.

SO many people who I thought were cool turned out to be morons…an alarming amount of them were radicalized in the pandemic. Even many of the people I know that think they’re devout leftists seem to feel they need to have one or more “edgy” views that cause them to caucus with radical centrists or right wingers. Like…my bi hippie friend started voting conservative because Palestine…my own lefty brother started voting conservative because of guns. Just found out a very poor ex girlfriend voted conservative because of right wing views on addiction. Then you have all the insane tankies…if you explained horshoe theory to them their heads might explode from the cognitive dissonance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m doing pretty well, personally. I’m in my late 30s, I own a condo that I bought myself - not inherited, and I have a good job with job security. I’m not saying this to brag but I am saying this to say that anecdotally, I have never understood the notion that as you get older, the more conservative/Republican one becomes. And just to heep en the anecdotes, the above is pretty much everyone I work with and everyone I know professionally.

Maybe all these so called lefties that came out of the sexual revolution/hippie/peace and love-era and turned conservative…just weren’t particularly good people to begin with. Maybe being a hippie and smoking weed and being sexually adventurous in your younger years, was just that. Fun. The political ideology was just ‘fashion’ that enabled the lifestyle. But then they got bored or it became more fun to be wealthy when mom and dad handed them the keys to the house and got them the cushy corporate job - but they were always shit bags, even when they were young, so called “liberals”.

I don’t know. I didn’t live through what Boomers and Gen-X modern conservatives, formally liberals, lived through. I just have a hard time believing anyone in 2025, that lines up ideologically with modern day Republicans, can possibly be a good person. It would need thorough explanation to convince me that they formally had an ideology that lined up with mine. I can’t even begin to comprehend a justified rationale for becoming conservative. It seems like horseshit to me.

Get on my property!

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.

This. I was a... "centrist" until I got a job. Now I hate capitalism as a system. Full stop.

It me.

Leftists NOT_RICK, who does 509642577 leftisims a day, is an outlier and should not have been included in the study.

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.

I started as a communist and ended up an anarchist.

We're in the post-truth era. People have been taught that scientific consensus is equal in weight to their feelings on an issue. Climate change can be dismissed as fake news even though there is abundant evidence, it's a disturbing thought so it can just be thrown out.

Greed

This, exactly. Boomer hippies were all about "sex, drugs, and rock and roll." And as they got older, they watched their friends OD or burn out or just get tired of it and settle down, and when they sold out they actually got a decent price for it. And so they say, "ah, progressivism might sound fun when you're young, but you'll grow out of it, like we did."

Millennial progressivism is a different thing entirely. Here in the US (the article is about Australia, but the trends are similar), our progressive movement focused on healthcare. Some journos even commented on how it was strange that all these young, healthy people were rallying around that. It's because we understand that we're all walking on a tightrope over a fucking abyss and all it takes is one thing going wrong and everything will go to shit and you'll be left begging for scraps on the sidewalk, because there is no safety net, because society doesn't take care of anybody. It's a sort of mentality that hasn't really been seen since people lived through the Depression. And we're hardly going to get less concerned with healthcare as we get older.

I don't see my friends burning out on sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I see my friends burning out on working back-to-back 60's at Amazon. I get older, and I see more and more people working hard, doing everything right, and still getting screwed over by capitalism, in one way or another. And what do you even get for selling out these days? They stiffed the fucking guy who turned in Luigi.

In Australia?