Gen Xer here. My trajectory started conservative and has been moving left ever since. Like anyone just turned 20 I was very much focused on my own navel and what I thought about it. I was seduced by the heroic mode of politics, the single actor who made a difference. I was reading Mishima, disgusted by the rot in the system. I wanted success and looked to those who had conquered the mundane for inspiration.
The more I learned about the world and about how it works, the more I moved away from this worldview. Talking and listening to a wide variety of people will push anyone leftward. Allowing yourself to be educated and changed by the world will make you a part of the systems that make it work. I get the feeling that those who move right as they age have given up participating in the world as it is and still choose the path of domination and control.
There’s something a little surreal about visiting the home of a radical boomer, because it’s very much a grandparent’s house, but the pictures on the fridges are being held there by magnets with Lenin quotes. Lenin who to my knowledge… was old.
This isn’t exactly the topic, but it’s related, I find it interesting that while there isn’t a hard generational divide as your article says, it does seem to be true that young people are overwhelmingly more likely to want to get involved in organizing than older people.
For gen x folk like myself the vanishing of the left horizon that still existed in my childhood and youth (1970s and 1980s) during the 1990s was a profoundly numbing experience. I was essentially depoliticised (i.e. voted UK Labour) until the 2010s when the crash, Palestine, Scottish independence etc all reignited my dormant radicalism. Most important in this was being weaned off the Guardian and the BBC and engaging more fully with alternative, non-mainstream media. As a result I barely recognise the faux-left mild centrist of my 20s and 30s. Meanwhile, my dad has drifted Reform-wards on a diet of the Daily Express. I think media is quite important here.
Gen Xer here. My trajectory started conservative and has been moving left ever since. Like anyone just turned 20 I was very much focused on my own navel and what I thought about it. I was seduced by the heroic mode of politics, the single actor who made a difference. I was reading Mishima, disgusted by the rot in the system. I wanted success and looked to those who had conquered the mundane for inspiration.
The more I learned about the world and about how it works, the more I moved away from this worldview. Talking and listening to a wide variety of people will push anyone leftward. Allowing yourself to be educated and changed by the world will make you a part of the systems that make it work. I get the feeling that those who move right as they age have given up participating in the world as it is and still choose the path of domination and control.
There’s something a little surreal about visiting the home of a radical boomer, because it’s very much a grandparent’s house, but the pictures on the fridges are being held there by magnets with Lenin quotes. Lenin who to my knowledge… was old.
This isn’t exactly the topic, but it’s related, I find it interesting that while there isn’t a hard generational divide as your article says, it does seem to be true that young people are overwhelmingly more likely to want to get involved in organizing than older people.
For gen x folk like myself the vanishing of the left horizon that still existed in my childhood and youth (1970s and 1980s) during the 1990s was a profoundly numbing experience. I was essentially depoliticised (i.e. voted UK Labour) until the 2010s when the crash, Palestine, Scottish independence etc all reignited my dormant radicalism. Most important in this was being weaned off the Guardian and the BBC and engaging more fully with alternative, non-mainstream media. As a result I barely recognise the faux-left mild centrist of my 20s and 30s. Meanwhile, my dad has drifted Reform-wards on a diet of the Daily Express. I think media is quite important here.