These paragraphs were in an article written by Dana Rosenfeld, a Reader in Sociology at Keele University, on ageing on the academic comment website The Conversation this morning. They address the issue of whether we become more conservative as we age:
Not so. Imagine ten people: one aged ten, one 20, one 30 and so on. The oldest is less liberal than the 60-year-old, who is less liberal than the 40-year-old, and so on. You might conclude people get more conservative with age. But you'd be incorrectly assuming that each person started out with the same political outlook.
A 100-year-old woman, born in 1918, formed her baseline political opinions in a very different time. What was liberal in the 1940s is conservative now (consider race relations, feminism and sexual norms). What you're seeing is a 100-year-old whose political opinions have become less conservative, but remain more conservative than her children's or grandchildren's opinions, who began their lives on a more liberal footing. This is what researchers in the US found in their study of political attitudes among different age groups over 30 years. They concluded that “change is as common among older adults as younger adults”.
I admit I had not looked at the issue in that way before. And it is an interesting insight.
As is well known, it is older generations (of which I am a part) who voted Brexit and who are inclined to keep the Conservatives in office. It has been said that as those generations (with my father still alive I can still think there are multiple older generations) pass on the world will get more liberal. That, though, depends upon the thesis noted above being true.
In other words, we don't drift right but actually drift left as society gets more liberal but started further to the right, and so seemingly always stay on the conservative side of the spectrum. In net terms overall society does , however, get more liberal.
I hope so.
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What has changed, for me, are the methods I have adopted to counter the neolibs. As a young TU representative in the 1970’s I was at the Grunwick dispute. Direct action was THE way. I felt rather than saw the nascent approach of neoliberalism although it had no name then. I am proud to say I had my successes but in a paraphrasing of the lyrics in Telegraph Road – then came the lawyers. As a result I have been sacked and sidelined. Even when I won, justice came at the cost of gagging contracts. I learned new tricks.
I’m quieter now, at 68 and not in the best of health I can no longer take my place on a picket line and it would be pointless anyway. The anger that drove me back then remains because the injustice remains.
Gender, Race and Disability still provide ample cause for refuting the status quo. Policies for Housing, Health, Further Education and Training are a disgrace to a supposedly civilised society. Greed among ‘our betters’ has increased and they have become much more sophisticated in countering opposition. They are aided and abetted by politicians in a system that in the archaic sense of the word is corrupt – rotting from within. My noisy demeanour and overtly demonstrative attitudes of yore have been replaced with hard earned knowledge of law, regulation, procedure that is passed on to the young people I work with. I have not become more conservative I have become more productive.
“What is genuine is proved in the fire, what is false we shall not miss in our ranks. The opponents must grant us that youth has never before flocked to our colours in such numbers, … in the end, one will be found among us who will prove that the sword of enthusiasm is just as good as the sword of genius.”
I feel a lot coming on
Thanks for sharing this Bill
Not sure how this fits in with the polls that show ‘for every ten years older a person gets the likelihood they will vote conservative increases by 9 points.’
I’ d also challenge that ‘What was liberal in the 1940s is conservative now ‘ – surely that’s nonsense. After the war there was for more political engagement and challenging the structures of society that there is now with the zombie, brain death culture dominated by atrociously bad media. i think the writer is referring to tolerance of sexuality and race-but we know that that has been integrated into neo-liberalism and become part of the rentier wealth siphoning culture which doesn’t care about race/sexuality as long as you play the rentier game. This is the left’s gross failure: to conflate liberalism with superficial tolerance while economic illiberal-ism and financialised totalitarianism rules.
I am not sure I agree ion this Simon
Indeed, the polling evidence disagrees with you
Well, the point: ‘‘for every ten years older a person gets the likelihood they will vote conservative increases by 9 points’ was from a You Gov Poll after the last election.
The article assumes a linearity and a particular evolutionary process. How this is compatible with an era that is seen as moving backwards towards the ‘belle epoque’ of the late 19th century I don’t know. As Chomsky pointed out: ‘neo-liberalism is neither ‘new’ nor ‘liberal.’ And Chris hedges has written about the death ‘Death of the Liberal Class.’
I suspect a ‘metro-liberal’ University lecturer making a certain level of subconscious projection here!
Simon
I do rather think that for once you are missing the point of the argument
But we can disagree!
Richard
Simon Cohen “the polls that show ‘for every ten years older a person gets the likelihood they will vote conservative increases by 9 points.’”
I think you will find the person explaining the poll findings explained them poorly/wrongly. One single poll cannot do a cohort study. (Actually poor descriptions are common with respect to stats – for example the latest ONS details for retail sales the other day did this (https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/retailindustry/bulletins/retailsales/december2017 figure 5 is wrongly explained).
The paper which Dana Rosenfield is quoting is an attempted cohort study over 30 year period and it’s really interesting as it tells us one of our preconceived ideas that we become more conservative as we get older is probably wrong and we are more likely to become more tolerant. That sounds like good news to me!
Thanks Ken
That is what I read…
“Indeed, the polling evidence disagrees with you”
Yes. Well we all know about the reliability of polls. 🙂
I think … that liberalism is a very confused concept. The confusion is to do with the difference of emphasis in what we are liberal about.
‘Neoliberalism’ is all about money. It’s a reprise of laissez faire economics with perhaps some different bells and whistles. It has nothing whatever to do with socially liberal ideas about customs and mores.
I recall being quite … certainly surprised…. listening to Douglas Hurd some years back and realising that there was (to my mind) a deep disconnect between his position on, for example penal policy which seemed enlightened and his views on finance and economy which were antediluvian, and extremely rigid.
At the other end of the spectrum we have the ‘working class’ attitude which is in favour of the paternalistic employment culture, but fiercely against sharing those advantages (if they could get them) with any of them ‘scrounging foreigners’. (Or for that matter that bloke next door who is a lazy bastard.)
Picking a ‘third way’ through the thicket of of all the views between, and beyond, those views and mindsets is some challenge. Especially difficult when MSM has a clear agenda which prefers conflict (which sells papers) to resolution which makes rather dull copy.
“‘Neoliberalism’ is all about money. It’s a reprise of laissez faire economics with perhaps some different bells and whistles. It has nothing whatever to do with socially liberal ideas about customs and mores.”
Yep, you got in one.
The “liberalism” in Neo-liberalism is about liberating capital (money) not people. Property rights not human rights.
Marco Fante says:
I was reading the other day about the way in which the early Tories (before they called themselves ‘Conservative’) were actually a radical party challenging the rigid economic and social rigidity of the ‘Establishment’ Liberals. (Whigs even). There was a time therefore when they were the progressive voice. I’m sure Margaret Thatcher was a ‘progressive’….just there was a lot of disagreement about the merits of what she was progressing towards.
Political terminology has a dreadful tendency to drift. Humpty Dumpty would have loved it.
This is a valuable insight. One implication that may be worth considering, is whether that means either people, as they age, do not move their opinions as far along the ‘spectrum’ of political opinion than we may too easily suppose, or may be more or less open to political flexibility than we thought: and whether or not older generations are ‘set’ within a notably narrow range on this supposedly identifiable political spectrum (my reservations here are whether there is a calibratable political ‘spectrum’ at all). The question becomes – for example – whether older Brexiteers (or in Scotland, older Unionists) would be open to revising their opinions or positions on major issues, or not. If they are, then it becomes a matter of how this opportunity is best addressed.
There is a darker side to all this. It seems to me the opportunitic success of Brexit was built out of quite simple, even crude symbol signalling that appealed to obvious markers associated with Britain’s (pre-EU) past; especially “the War”, with all the symbolic buttons that can be pressed there. There is a deep, deep irony here; because the lesson of 20th century life Britons actually chose to draw from Britain’s bitter experience of the 20th century; was to join the EU. This was a political choice rather more than the economic choice that ill-informed British hindsight has almost always proposed.
More broadly, and at the level of unconscious propagandizing, television drama in the UK is obsessed with the social milieu of early 20th century (pre-EU) Britain, in a fit of permanent (sentimental and at bottom fairly crude) nostalgia for a chocolate-box and very British past, interwoven, highly improbably, with the insertion of unacknowledged and embedded signals of current social mores. This clandestine, implicit insertion of social modernity gives this dramatised view of Britain’s past a certain persuasive credibility, sophistication and relevance that may even look like “wisdom” to the inattentive. Indeed it is remarkable how little the deeper mores of society change in British dramas about the past, evoking not a sense of evolution, but rather of a reassuring, eternal social fixity. In British dramas of its own past, the past never, ever quite looks like LP Hartley’s authentically foreign country. I have always thought that this trope is so widely dispersed in the intellectual ether, as to be redolent of systematisation; the existence, at least at an unconscious level of psy ops.
John,
I don’t watch a lot of television, but over the years I’ve seen my share. I’m intrigued by this observation in passing:
“….British past, interwoven, highly improbably, with the insertion of unacknowledged and embedded signals of current social mores. ….”
From time to time (and increasingly) I am struck by the feminist undertones and overtones of period pieces and wonder to what extent current productions are misrepresenting female characters, by giving them a modern mindset. There have always been feisty women, but we are in danger of painting this rosy picture of the past which makes feminism seem as if it were not a necessary and important transforming movement in the latter half of the twentieth century.
In the same way casual racism, which would have been the norm, is erased to be palatable to our current ideas of ‘political correctness’. The exceptions being when it is the purpose of a drama to highlight those particular issues.
This is tantamount to cultural revisionism I suspect.
I do not wish to qualify my earlier statement, but if I may say, your choice of feminism is a particularly complex issue to select. I do not claim special insight, but I say ‘complex’ because I do not believe trends are ‘linear’. Some of the most remarkable women, who stubbornly ignored every traditional barrier, however severe and implacable, came very early in the 20th century. I would select such women as Elsie Inglis and Dr Elizabeth Ross (two of the earliest women to graduate in medicine) as illustrative. It may be argued that the key to their capacity to contribute was a function of WWI, but Ross became a doctor in Bakhtiariland in Persia (Iran) in the middle of a revolution (working for the family of a leader of the revolution), and also the world’s first female ship’s surgeon; all before the Great War. Her life was extraordinary, and she died fighting typhus in a hopelessly overwhelmed Serbian army fever hospital in Serbia in 1915. She is still celebrated on the anniversary of her death, each year in Serbia, as a hero.
John S Warren says:
January 24 2018 at 10:38 pm
“…your choice of feminism is a particularly complex issue to select. I do not claim special insight, but I say ‘complex’ because I do not believe trends are ‘linear’. ”
In my defence I would say I didn’t so much select it as offer it as something I’ve noticed, and I pose the question rather than make the case. Certainly female emancipation has not been linear, one only needs to think of female monarchs and warriors from history – they were stand-out characters rather than representative of a norm.
And I couldn’t begin to offer comparisons across different, cultural, national, ethnic groups, now nor through the ages.
I think I’m observing that sometimes I’m suddenly taken aback by a character in a drama expressing views or attitudes I regard as very ‘modern’ and wonder at their authenticity in that context. Some people delight in spotting wardrobe and prop anachronisms ! Material anachronism is somewhat easier to authenticate or refute.
In the context of the original post, regarding political opinion and left/right voting trends, conclusions are complicated by the shift of what we would at any given time regard as a ‘centrist’ norm.
It’s very difficult to present an objective view in a world where the datum points are constantly shifting. 🙂
I do take your original point: indeed I added a comment to that effect, but managed to misdirect its destination somewhat, and over-analysed my first reply! I think you are right, I suspect it may be deliberate and perhaps systematised.
Rigorous, forensic history would, I suspect be too problematic for the current ‘creative’ orthodoxy of conventional drama production , or the expectations of commissioning editors, or the values and purposes of the institutions that are most influential in shaping our social culture. In short; to the extent that this shadow-modernity is ‘recurrent’, it is not an accident.
The idea of Eugenics has surfaced again recently, apparently there are believers still around. Back in the first decades of the 20th Century it was a major form of political correctness that many believed in and was very influential. The Fabian Society, for example, was one base. Anyone who thought it was codswallop was not invited, as it were. Science, thought and time have moved on and indeed it was. Now many of the ideas of the mid and late 20th Century are being tested by the radical changes occurring and found wanting. If you read George Monbiot in the Guardian this morning, given the way humanity is going it may not matter long.
The principle reason for the success of eugenics in the early 20th century was the influence of Sir Ronald Fisher (1890-1962); mathematician and biologist who palyed a major part of effecting the ‘neo-Darwinian’ revolution (with Haldane and Sewall Wright) and the application of modern statistical techniques to Darwinism. The core of his theory was however (and quite explicitly) Mendelism; but unfortunately as a young, Cambridge disciple of Darwin and Darwinism, and a convinced ideological Eugenicist (and probably lacking sufficient knowledge of the history of the idea), he effectively wove the whole intellectual legacy of both Galton and the older Darwin, indiscriminately into the fabric of the theory.
Fisher seems to have linked monetary worth with genetics:
‘He proposed the abolition of extra allowances to large families, with the allowances proportional to the earnings of the father.’ (Wiki).
That has certainly made a recurrence in recent years -how this aligns with impoverished artists; poets; musicians and even scientists whose research was carried out in poverty is beyond me.
Fisher had a remarkable capacity for avidly promoting thoroughly bad ideas. A smoker, he thought smoking beneficial; and in the 1950s very belligerently and dimissively claimed that there was no statistical evidence for the proposed relationship between smoking and cancer.
I should add, however that you have grasped the general principle I am proposing. The present, perhaps in etiolated form, but nevertheless ‘the present’ is subtly imposed over ‘the past’ that is being presented.
Good article in the Guardian suggesting the opposite https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/03/do-we-become-more-conservative-with-age-young-old-politics
though it looked at those who voted conservative which is of course a different thing.
Thanks Sean
I posted the one I refer to because it offered an explanation I had not seen before
There is surely a wealth distribution effect too. So going back to the period 1945-1980 we see that wealth and income inequality were lower than today. Therefore many more people born in the period 1940-1965 were able to acquire assets than is possible for people born 1965-2000.
That initial easier start in asset acquisition is amplified by compound interest and asset value inflation over subsequent years so the Baby-Boomers and early Gen-Xers wind up with significant assets as well as senior positions in the social hierarchy by the time they reach middle and older age.
I would therefore hypothesise that many such people arriving at middle age would be under legitimate personal economic pressure to adopt a financially conservative political outlook even if they are socially liberal and perhaps started life with a much more leftist economic outlook.
Perhaps there’s even a perverse tendancy across the generations that the more egalitarian previous periods were the more likely the beneficiaries of said egalitarianism are to become moderately wealthy and therefore economically conservative and thus it becomes less likely that future periods will be as egalitarian as the time of their youth.
My mum would more succinctly term it “pulling up the ladder behind you”!
I realise my post appears to disagree with the main article but my hypothesis is that people who grew up in the 50s-70s may have a greater tendancy to become conservative as they age for purely economic reasons while those who grew up in the 1920s/’30s and the early 2000s would not experience the same economic incentive to adhere to conservative financial views so will tend to either remain economically progressive in outlook as they age or even become more progressive as they age. I.e the economy you live in and your place in that economy and the changes occurring to the economy affects how your political viewpoint changes over time.
So we could see people 20-40 years old tending to become less conservative as they age now and that could be a reversal of the tendencies of those 50+ now. Then in the future the children born to the current 20-40 year olds will inherent a more egalitarian world, easily accumulate assets and grow MORE conservative as a consequence of economic incentives.
I doubt this
“pulling up the ladder behind you”
Neat. I like that. It expresses the point well – and yes, your overall suggestion is basically right.
It gets worse though. The current class of middle -aged serial landlords that use leveraging and tax rorts to buy existing houses (several houses). They produce nothing and yet often grow rich. They grow rich at the expense of the young who are paying twice as much (in median income terms) as their parents or grandparents did to buy a home.
This phenomenon is quite unprecedented. It signals a new lows in rent-seeking as well and generational conflict. The conflict isn’t based on differing opinions about social issues. Its a parasitic relationship.
Marco,
“….. The current class of middle -aged serial landlords that use leveraging and tax rorts to buy existing houses (several houses). They produce nothing ..”
It’s not entirely true that they produce nothing. Well not true of all of them and not necessarily true.
Some of this activity involves a person buying neglected and substandard property and making it habitable. This process has costs in labour materials etc. which are invested up front for a payback in selling-on or in generating an income stream. I don’t think there’anything inherently wrong with that.
What’s wrong is a system operating in a distorted market which for various reasons to do with current supply and demand for housing, supply and demand of individual reward, underpinning government subsidy of rents (and mortgages) and rampantly inflating land and property prices is producing disproportionate rewards. Disproportionate to the work done and the financial risk. Post 2008 property price correction would have wiped out a lot of these ‘players’ without the massive government intervention in the financial sector.
I’s not (in my view) fair to pillory people for making up their pensions when the orthodox routes are broken. We’re looking at a situation borne of bad government regulation and provision which produced this bizarre market. Many of these people are enterprising hard working people who are responding to the world around them and yes, there may well, in a better world be far better ways their enterprise could be harnessed.
Andy,
Sorry for the late reply but serial landlords (my phrase) doesn’t refer to people “making up their pensions” but speculators with several established properties looking to ‘flip’ them for a windfall capital gain.
Furthermore the maintenance of an existing property “making it habitable” may involve work but it is not production. It does not add to the stock of homes. In housing, production comes by way of new construction.
Marco Fante says:
January 26 2018 at 2:16 pm
Andy,
“Sorry for the late reply but serial landlords (my phrase) doesn’t refer to people “making up their pensions”
In the current economic climate it does. Or at least that’s what a lot of people believe they are doing. And they are doing it because quite reasonably they don’t trust the private pension industry (who would ?) and the destruction of the state system offers a guarantee of what these people would regard as poverty. And they’ve bought the neolib agenda. It’s what they know, it’s all they understand.
Andy,
It may be that I express myself too aggressively on that particular topic but some keep misinterpreting it. They automatically think that what I am saying is code for: “please hate all baby-boomers”. That is not what I am saying. I am not talking about some old rentier, frustrated by the ultra-low interest rates, that is merely looking to supplement a pension with the modest rental returns from one or two properties.
I am, as I said, referring to speculators of the highly-geared variety with several established homes (or many) that are looking to flip them quickly for a fast capital gain. That has nothing to do with making up one’s pension and they are not strawmen. There is a plague of such people and a specialised seminar industry devoted to teaching them.
Much of what you say is nonetheless true. Post GFC, the low interest rate /QE strategy of central banks was partly intended to push people out of safe liquid investments into riskier, more productive investment. To the frustration of some central banks it appears that what they have effectively done is push people into leveraged speculation on the price of existing assets.
That’s not very productive at all, needless to say, but what the central bankers don’t seem to understand is that productive investment isn’t going to do very well without a recovery in aggregate demand and that needs to be led by government – fiscal policy. Monetary policy (as they know it) just don’t work any more.
As an aside, in July 1950 I met Lord Lindsay of Birker, a founder of Keele University College at the time. The house and land had been bought from Ralph Sneyd of Keele, the last of a long line of Sneyd’s of Keele dating back centuries. He had bought too many three legged horses and gambled on too many losers in his racing interests. There were a number of branches of this family, one of them mentioned long ago by Jane Austen. She knew them quite well. As it happens they were close relatives of the Nesbitt’s who numbered Arnold Nesbitt as one of their close family. He crashed the city and lost us the America’s in the 1770’s by speculating in East India Company stock. He had a theory that all you needed to do was to persuade the government to spend a lot more on the basis of debt without security.
There is still the problem of tribalism in politics though. Many life long Tories will never vote for a left alternative even when they do agree with the policies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7lsRbDKOXg
There is an interesting vidoe on how people form their views/world view: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe (apologies I have posted the link before.
Life could be/should be about leanring – fixed views suggest you ain’t leanring – or absorbing what is going on around you. I started (early 20s) as somewhat Tory (this was in the 1970s pre- Thatcher) – I’m a lobng way from that now – having been changed by events – but this requires a flexibility of thinking which, from observation, seems to ossify in many people as they get older. I hope I’m not missing the point.