You get more and more immersed in right wing propaganda as you get older. You get exposed to more reactionary institutions, you find yourself increasingly segregated from people of different races and income scales, you suffer the psychological torments of the capitalist rat race more nakedly, and it all adds up.

Lots of people I grew up with in high school are Trump Republicans now. They weren't MAGA shitheads in school, mostly because they were blank slates. They were warm to ideas like "Free College" when they were in college and cooled on it once they graduated (or flunked out). They were "moderate" when they had friends who were coming out of the closet and dealing with racial abuse and coming home in body bags during the Iraq War. But they grew increasingly right-wing when the law firm and the O&G offices and techbro money orgies demanded it of them.

Even before AI started straight up poisoning people's brains, they were getting into Facebook groups and Discord channels that rotted them. Nevermind the endless barrage of NYT / WaPo "Why These Trump Voters Need To Be Listened To" articles and CBS / ABC "Transgender Athletes: A Threat To Your Kid's Scholarship?" TV slop that drives so many liberals insane. Nevermind the Zionists, those nice sweet liberal folks whose faces melt right off the moment you suggest butchering millions of brown people might be bad Middle East policy.

Fucking sucks, but time really does turn people rightward when you live in a fascist hellhole.

There used to be a bit more truth to that statement. But not anymore. I'm exactly 43 years old.

Republicans today aren't the Republicans of my childhood and youth. They were bad then, but holy shit they're terrible now.

Truth is, it was never about age. It was about asset accumulation. The more you had to protect, the more right-wing you got, generally speaking. There are obviously exceptions.

They fucked everything for younger generations so hard now though that we AREN'T able to accumulate assets to the degree where that shift happens in large numbers anymore. So we are staying left-wing for the most part. Unfortunately they seem to have realized their error and decided to just brainwash the really young gens with AI slop brainrot instead.

It only happens to those that are privileged. But since the previous generations has been pulling the ladders behind them...

Maybe because they expected more of us would have wealth to protect? I always thought it was a stupid idea they told themselves to explain why their kids didn’t like them.

Personally, I’ve always been concerned about corrupt leaders coopting the inevitable wave of power coming to the millennials as the boomers faded away. I didn’t want to become like the previous generation, so I’ve paid extra attention to resisting being convinced to hate “out” groups. Only, the power never transitioned. Egg on my face, I guess.

My aunt said "When you're older and wiser, you'll understand".

I'm now a Democratic Socialist and 37. I still do not understand and have, in fact, become more leftist with age.

What they actually mean is "You'll agree more when you're rich and complicit in benefiting from ever more unethical practices of people around you that you now have to make mental gymnastics about to make yourself still seem like a decent person". But that's a bit too long.

A racialised socio-economic buffer in-between liberal elites and the underclasses was the whole point of the creation of the (so-called) "middle class" through Keynesian economics - that's really what the "New Deal" (in the US) and Apartheid-era economic policies in South Africa was all about. By giving a relatively small (and white) section of the working class a small taste of private property they'd become invested in the colonialist liberal economic order, and it was pretty successful too - it's the reason why boomers are the way they are.

However, now that Keynesian liberalism has inevitably degraded into neoliberalism (which is really an inevitable process) that pretend-social contract is essentially in tatters - so I guess all bets are off.

I can't help but wonder if that actually used to be true, but it was because of more accumulated lead exposure over time rather than aging over time.

I'm an old white guy born into conservative religious america, and my entire adult life has been spent sliding to the left as I observe the left being correct and giving a shit about people while the right continues to be disingenuous and destructive and greedy.

Two of the most despicable libertarian oil pushing fuck nuts

Technically only one fucknut left from the original four. They Ayn Rand'd themselves sequentially and now the organization they run is mostly burning cash on vanity shit for libertarian baby-brains. But at its height, they were a terror.