"You'll be a conseravtive when you're older."

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Hi all. Brace yourselves. This is going to be another rant. I want to talk about a political argument that I'm sick of hearing.

"I used to self-identify as a liberal. You'll become a conservative when you're older."

I find this to be a garbage argument because I was actually a conservative when I was younger.

I was very right-wing as a kid because I was hyper-ambitious. I felt as though I was destined for great things because I was smarter than everyone else. Now I'm an adult and I struggle to stay employed. I've discovered that the capitalist system is brutal, even for people who are intelligent. As a kid, I assumed that all poor people were gangsta thugs who weren't working hard enough. I was wrong. I regularly work until I'm on the verge of an emotional breakdown and I still struggle.

Additionally, I was a user on a conservative forum for a while when I was in my early twenties. Lots of people were using the phrase "Nuke em' till the sand glows!" when discussing the Middle East. Nobody there had a reasonable plan for liberating he Middle East.

In other words, most of these war hawks aren't driven by reason. They're driven by juvenile testosterone fantasies.

Another Thing: Why do so many right-wingers hate "political correctness"? White people aren't allowed to use racial slurs in public? Oh noes!

Another Thing: Lately, I been hanging around with trans people a lot. They're actually very nice to me. At first I was nervous because I had been fed transphobic propaganda. Nobody expected my to use a very weird pronoun. I accidentally misgendered a trans man but he didn't get mad at me because he knew it was just a slip of the tongue. Trans people will only get mad at you if you misgender them on purpose. Personal experience has taught me that.

On the whole, the left has offered my hope and emotional comfort. The right only ruined my youth with false "rags-to-riches" promises. To Hell with them.

Oh no.

Good bye!

Conservativism will bring about the end of human civilization. They have no new ideas and refuse to adapt to changing situations.

I think the threat is liberalism being so anxious to embrace drastic changes, that things will eventually get out of control.

Yes. People are anxious to liberate themselves from oppression. That's obvious.
Why is that such a bad thing? How wealthy and privileged are you?

Another Thing: You conservatives need to make up your mind. Are leftists "controlling" or are they out of control? Are they authoritarians or are they anarchists? Which one is it? It can't be both.

I think extremists of any stripe are dunder heads.

My views on subjects both social and political are a mix of "left" and "right."

I guess this is true so far as it goes. I certainly considered myself liberal when I was young, however that was the accepted norm for my pre-80s age group in the US. And my son (in his late 20s) is a staunch liberal, although that may be somewhat due to his fiancée's influence.

Rather than become more conservative, I believe I've gotten more apolitical over time. When I think back on my life, I can't think of many ways in which my personal life was directly impacted by who was President or which party controlled Congress.

In particular, one thing I've noticed is that when you know them personally, most conservatives in the US seem to be nicer people, simply put. Whereas many liberals seem to be arrogant pseudo-intellectual blowhards. I understand that's a gross exaggeration, but I don't care to go into greater detail. An illustrative example might be a group of people my wife and I have habitually eaten Friday dinner with for quite some time. There are a couple very left-wing people in this group, including even an anti-Zionist Jew, and for the last couple of years they have gone on non-stop about politics and my wife and I have come to realize it has been (figuratively at least) making us ill. Before the recent election, it was all about what a POS Hillary is, now it's all about what a POS Trump is. A wast of time in my opinion.

OTOH I could never be a Conservative, if by conservative you mean (to give one example) the person I recently saw who had "OBAMA - One Big Ass Mistake America" emblazoned on the back of his car. I'll just never get the anger.

I'm 56. My political views are very similar now to what they were when I was in high school.

I'm 60. Still as left wing as ever.

I don't think that saying is entirely bizarre, it was more or less true for much of recorded history. Young men always were radical, dabbling with atheism, full of energy and world-reforming zeal. The world tames them, they become more conservative and religious as life's responsibilities pile up and the exuberance fades. If you take a very long view of history I think the general idea would stand.
If you only take the last 50 years or so I think it is less true, we have an entire generation (the ones who came of age in the 60s particularly) of stereotypical embarrassing dads and granddads, wearing youthful clothing and hairstyles that look ridiculous on their graying heads. They still listen to rock music, hold left wing views and talk about "the establishment", blind to any suggestion that they _are_ the establishment.

A better question might be why didn't that generation grow up like everyone else had before them.

This is precisely why I'm not a conservative. Life throws enough responsibilities at me. Religion adds more responsibilities on top of that. Why would I want to deliberately make my life harder?

It was my "world-changing exuberance" that made me a young conservative. I thought "I'm a genius! I can do everything myself, without any help from the community!"

It's a different kind of responsibility, a moral responsibility and a hope that your neighbours will follow similar rules to ease the burden of the other, more temporal responsibilities.



Well not everyone follows the stereotype... besides your particular young man's disease sounds like Thatcherism or Reaganism: economic liberalism, a godless strain of conservatism. Not socialism, but not as far from the anti-tradition world reformers as you might think.

I can't speak for the conservatives. But in my observation they're controlling but also gullible and reckless in what they're liberating and it keeps being taken to another level. Today's leftism will probably be considered way too conservative twenty years from now.

I have to agree with XFilesGeek; wing-nuts are wing-nuts and they rarely have anything interesting to say outside of inadvertently expressing what they really believe or why they operate the way they do.

I had somewhat of a similar experience in terms of having a lot of highly-charged and high-IQ friends who thought they were better than everyone else, encouraged me to think the same, and then I did get out into the work world and found out that it's almost complete chaos and that while doing the right thing and working hard (within limits and standing up for yourself) is probably the best you can do it's almost nothing in terms of guarantees of security, safety, or even any guarantee that you'll ever have the finances to move out of your parents basement without getting married or taking on roommates. Lots of bosses are twits, a lot of people in corporate jobs are disorganized and sloppy sorts who fly by the seat of their pants and put everything off till last minute (an absolute nightmare for those of us with ASD who are used to having our heads chopped off for anything short of absolute perfection), and you really find out that almost anything you were told about how the world works is wrong.

Here's at least what hasn't changed - while I don't mind the right blend of capitalist and socialist ideas (like capitalism with safety nets or capitalist structure underpinned by something like UBI as a pressure release) I still think that, compared to true communism/socialism, capitalism is still only the second-worst system to everything else. It's not a matter of me having any temptation to give it a glowing review, it's just a matter of orders-of-magnitude of suckage. Some systems have a quantity of people living on the street or below the poverty line, other systems have to run on conspiracy theories and when things don't work cook up show trials and throw even more people in gulag. Heck, people get nervous about the idea of for-profit prisons; that *was* the Soviet economy. I ask myself, given a choice, whether I'd rather live in Flint, Michigan or Caracas, Venezuela right now - I hardly have to think twice on that.

I think this is where people are better off doing the hard work of criticizing the system but criticizing it in ways that they know would modify what we have to make it better. The moment someone starts acting as though a certain race, class of people, or something else are made of a foreign or other-worldly substance, whether nordic Reptilians or Matrix agents, they're showing that they can't hold causality and its relationships together in a responsible manner. That said equally - conservatives who say glass the Middle East or who want to take it directly to North Korea without a check-in on consequences, especially with China and Russia, or worse - who make divine right statements about presidents acting with the go-ahead from God, terrify me even more than leftists. Doesn't mean they aren't both horribly wrong, just that I know almost everyone by and large agrees on the psychosis and danger of the conservative side, much harder to get people to speak open and honest (at least it was for a long time) about the fundamentalist believers on the left.

Conservatism is not a fixed idea. It depends what you are trying to conserve.

You could have a conservative Liberal, e.g. the classical roots of Liberalism.

The word Liberal has a completely different meaning in the US, that it has for the majority of its history.

Social Conservatism, is as bad as the Regressive Left.

I don't think most people mature politically with age, they may change and have different interest, and may be slightly more pragmatic about their interests, but in reality the electorate by and large aren't all that smart politically young or old.

Things are already out of control. It's only been 300 years since the industrial revolution. The acceptance of "infinite growth" capitalism has become the new "normal state". 300 years is a blink of an eye compared to the age of the earth or even the length of time we've had human civilization. Modern conservatism is not true conservatism in the older sense. Worship of capitalism is something entirely modern. Neo-liberalism is entirely modern.