re: #280 goddamnedfrank

Not to mention that voting trends put a lot more of the blame on his generation, the baby boomers. You don’t see the current generation of young adults supporting drug war incarcerations, supporting education cuts after benefiting from heavily subsidized colleges, or trying to gut social security and medicare for even younger generations. That’s all baby boomers and older who are trying to pull the ladder up behind them.

I see a couple of factors involved in this. Drawing mainly from what I know about a few acquaintances who are whining heavily on Facebook right now. Oh, they’re late-30s or early-40s white males with a few children and college degrees.

1. Upbringing draws heavily from parents and culture growing up in. In my sample cases this is conservative and rural parts of western PA.

2. Young and coming of age in a period of cultural disruption and what was also the end of the myth of the American Dream. The American cultural environment also turned heavily into a theme of government and authority being corrupt and grasping by default.*

3. Increasing complexity of society and challenge of norms leading to challenges to their normal superior position in the social hierarchy. And from there they bought into the “culture war” memes and continue to seek reinforcement that they chose correctly here.

4. In both cases they had some tough times in their early-20s with college, job, and young children at that time. I think that has been converted into “I pulled myself through, why can’t everyone else?” without realizing that not everyone else had the family and friends that helped them out.

* - My pet example of this is the two versions of “The Longest Yard”. Both revolve heavily around challenging corrupt authority. But in the first one an exterior authority (the referees for the football game) are portrayed as honest and doing the job while they are portrayed as corrupt by default in the re-make.