There are some cool ass, communist old people who will smoke a joint with you and express their shame for being conflated with their lead consuming contemporaries, and then there's 20 year olds that listen to Ben Shapiro and want to make america great again, lamenting over never experiencing the "good ol days" when minorities had to defer to people who lacked significant melanin and women had to latch onto a man to have any social standing and silently accept whatever that man did to her.

As a rule, people are a product of their cultural upbringing and accept it blindly as the path of least resistance, which is why stereotypes exist. But that's just a majority within a population, not a universal of a population.

[–] Therevev@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm an elder millennial, raised by boomer hippies. My parents stayed pretty leftist their whole lives, a few of their friends still lean pretty hard left.

But many of their old "hippie" friends have gone pretty right in the last decade or so. These people had been liberal my whole life, until they hit about 60ish, and several have gone pretty conservative

I think it has a lot more to with getting old and not understanding new social trends, so you just go the other way because it's comfortable

[–] hglman@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago

Also age-related cognitive decline + intense propaganda amoung peers.

[–] Crismus@lemmy.fmhy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same here. My dad was hard left hippie, but the step-mom was far right racist from Oregon. I ended up with half my family in Gen X, with me and my little brother as millennial.

But, most of us dropped further anarchist than just liberal. I think it all comes down to money. All of my family are still as poor or poorer than we were growing up.

Only when people become wealthy as they grow up really become more conservative I think.

[–] Therevev@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

I think that plays into it, but my most of these people aren't wealthy. They were all working class. And the most left of these people that I still talk to is is probably better off than most of the rest off them. But he's also financially comfortable because he was union.

But I think of lot of those people forgot how bad struggling really is. Nostalgia clouds a lot of opinions. I still tell stories and laugh about some things I had to do when I was struggling, and they can kind of seem like fun stories now that it's over, and the older I get, the less i think about how much it actually sucked.

[–] LucyLastic@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

My Mum has been a hippie most of her life, but just recently she's started to say some right-wing talking points. She's old and now has limited mobility. It makes me so sad.

[–] Mysterious_old_man@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Absolutely true, my uncle Bruce is more hip than I am and he's in his 70s