The Millennial Generation: Our Liberal Future

From New York Magazine courtesy of BuzzFlash:

How doomed are conservatives? Pretty doomed, if you look carefully at the Pew Research Survey’s close analysis of the youth vote in the 2012 elections. The Republicans’ long-term dilemma has generally been framed in racial terms, but it’s mainly a generational one. The youngest generation of voters contains a much smaller proportion of white voters than previous generations, and those whites in that generation vote Republican by a much smaller margin than their elders. What’s more, younger voters supported President Obama during the last two election cycles for reasons that seem to go beyond the usual reasons — social issues like gay marriage and feminism, immigration policy, or Obama’s personal appeal — and suggest a deeper attachment to liberalism. The proclivities of younger voters may actually portend a full-scale sea change in American politics.

More here.

I tentatively agree with this glimpse into the future, but, of course, I've got my own take.

First, throw out the so-called social issues because nobody except for the weird right-wing xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic fringe, which is decreasing in numbers year after year, really cares about them anymore.  That leaves us essentially with economics and foreign policy.  At the moment, without the global communist menace from the Cold War years, and now that we're not nearly so frightened of guys in turbans coming to Islamisize us while we sleep in our beds, nobody really knows anything about foreign policy, so it's by and large run of, by, and for the corporations, which most Americans don't realize or understand at all.  So throw out foreign policy, too.

That leaves us with economics.  And the "liberal" Democrats are, these days, just about where the Republicans were in 1989 or so on economics, not psychotic extreme far right in the way we understand the term "conservative" today, but pretty conservative nonetheless.  So I'm not about to endorse a view that says an uptick in youngsters supporting the Democratic Party means that the nation is headed back toward the left.

But these are significant numbers.

Really, what I think this shows is that the Republicans have ridden their ideology into political irrelevance, rather than indicating some sort of major nationwide ideological shift on the horizon.  That is, the GOP is now a cartoon parody of what a functional conservative party is in reality.  But on their lemming-like path in that direction over the years, they managed to pull the entire American ideological spectrum with them.  The Democrats filled the vacuum left behind by the Republicans, and, presto, the only functional conservative party left on the block, really, the only functional party left at all, is the Democrats.  No surprise that people are flocking to them.  There is no real voice for the left in the US anymore, so the only game in town is the Donkey Party if you're serious about your politics.  And I think that's what young voters understand much better than their set-in-their-ways elders.

Sure, we call them "liberal," but that just doesn't make it so.  For now, however, I'll take it.  More Republicans would definitely be very bad news, indeed.

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