The older we get, the more conservative we become?

@cardibach

"But actually, using logic, austerity and right wing politics clearly don’t work. As a logical thinker you should be abandoning them. Assuming you are one."

Thank you for your detailed political and economic counter argument on why right wing politics "doesn't work".

Whilst I'm waiting for that let me turn to "austerity ". Austerity in itself is an action to fix problems from other policies (principally high debt. Just like going cutting spending in January is an action to fix over spending during Christmas.

The problem with the economics of the left is that haven't really progressed beyond the Keynesian economics that they studied at A Level.

Borrowing more money to economic prosperity doesn't work as Liz Truss and the current French economic crisis have shown. Currently the UK spends approximately the same amount of money on debt interest as it does on education- this is not a sustainable position.

Actually that was nothing to do with communism and everything to do with forcing German V2 rocket scientists after WW2(at the threat of death) to help develop their rocket technology.

Prior to WW2 the Soviet Union was technologically very backward and was struggling with a basic agricultural economy, technically they would have been hard pushed to build fireworks let alone space rockets.

Of course,. Both sides have committed terrible atrocities. Neoliberal capitalism is a massive killer and is on line to bring the human race to an end in a few decades.

Why should people who are 'unwilling to work' be funded by the taxpayer?

“There is a clear correlation between more education and more left-leaning views”

Talk about smug.

If there’s one aphorism I hate, it’s this one. Leftism correlates to education today, not because leftism is the intelligent choice, but because leftism has reorientated society to mean more status for graduates. Decades ago, when leftism actually meant a better deal for the working classes, it wasn’t the choice of the educated.

You’d think a Marxist would understand this.

Also the right.wing are famously tolerant of people who are unable or unwilling to work and never force them into work or cut their benefits and leave them to starve to death

You mean the Soviet Union. It also built a few gulags and committed a genocide in Ukraine with Holodomor. But don't let facts get in the way of your idealism.

The right-wing junta in Argentina used similar tactics at exactly the same time.

@cardibach ok so you said nonsense to my opinion on the left trying to shift the Overton window based on identity politics.

So how is it that so many middle aged women who voted LP for years are now politically homeless like me?

They DID shift the Overton window when they started the nonsense about identifying as something rather than class analysis.

Eg vulnerable women who are in prison, but putting violent males in there as they "identify" as a woman.

The only thing restoring my waning faith in the left is Wes Streeting and his support for the nurses in their case for single sex spaces.

Most of the other LP MPs have lost their minds.

Im steadfastly committed to safety nets including free nhs, disability benefits for the vulnerable etc

But i worry at the moment that the help i want directed to the very vulnerability who simply cannot support themselves etc, is spread among too many. The definition of what constitutes "disability" seems to extend to anyone who finds anything a bit hard now

Russia went from feudalism to space in about forty years under communism.

Fuck that smug shit

There is a clear correlation between more education and more left-leaning views

In my fifties, still a radical green leftie, and much better informed than when I was 20

Communism is a nice idea but whywould anyone train for years to be a surheon if they earned the same as an HCA?

The super rich should pay their taxes though.

I agree that capitalism has a lot to answer for too though and is very destructive.

I think it is true. As a young woman I was very left and into dark green politics. Now I still care about the environment etc but wish i'd gone for high paying jobs and feathered my own nest. Very glad dd wants to be a banker. The idealism of youth dosn't last.

It's complex. My Dad, Labour voting trade unionist in his younger years lurch towards the right in his 50s and 60s, but in his final decades moved towards the left again.

Maybe the right coalesce around certain core values whilst the left are idealists. Perhaps you lose your idealism as you get older.

As I've got older, I've not become more conservative. But I have grown in experience, knowledge and understanding.

The youngest group had lower votes for Labour, and higher for Reform, than the next two higher age groups

The youngest age group had fewer votes for Reform than any other demographic. The leftwing vote in that bracket was split by the highest Green vote overall. The graph here is very clear.

https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/49978-how-britain-voted-in-the-2024-general-election

I believe that the left/right division is now less based on age than it is on sex, certainly amongst Gen Z. Women in general are supporting progressive, left of centre parties, and men supporting more right wing parties.

Here's an interesting article about it:

https://www.psa.ac.uk/psa/news/gender-and-generational-shifts-uk-voting-trends-what-should-we-think

I’m saying doing it ‘to protect your kids’ is nonsensical.

The youngest group had lower votes for Labour, and higher for Reform, than the next two higher age groups. So I don't know that I would agree with you entirely. And that's in the face of an incumbent Conservative party that was in too long and badly in need of renewal.

Bigger picture, outside of the UK seems to see a pattern in the direction of young people voting for more conservative parties, and it's an arguable interpretation that the UK is on the tail of that, so it might carry on. It will be interesting to see whether the next lot of new voters continues the trend.

Who's supporting communism here?

@crackofdoom

A couple of quotes from this thread:

I'm 58 still a proud commie troublemaker always will be!

Same here. I was right wing as an ignorant 20 year old. The older I get the further left I go. I’m developing more and more communist ideals as I get older

God some of the arguments I had in the Corbyn era along the lines of "far left, if only - he's just a mild social democrat who doesn't hate immigrants".

But then the tabloids somehow managed to label Ed fucking Miliband as "Red Ed".

Ok? I'm not sure that was really the point of the post you quoted, but fine.

I don't understand your post though, are you trying to say that because some people like yourself don't become more conservative, it can't be true in the general case?

Because that seems odd. It's nothing to do with you personally whether it's true or not.

Who's supporting communism here?

Pinochet's Chile- a right wing dictatorship- also used to "disappear" political dissidents and have their children adopted.

Trump's America did something very similar on its southern borders, and presumably will do so again when he returns to power.

@38thparallel Pas vraiment.