Survivorship bias, COINTELPRO killed the best boomers before we were even born.

It isn’t a generational divide, it is an exposure-over-time issue.

Folks who were breast-beating foot-stomping anti-war activists in their teens/20s regress into milquetoast “both sides” moderates in their 30s/40s and eventually metasticize into ghoulish chud reactionaries as their diet of right-wing cable news/talk radio eclipses the volume of grass between their toes. Folks who stay clear don’t ride this wave of reaction. And folks who keep in tune with other left-leaning groups and attend like-minded events tend to go with the flow, rather than clinging to drive-time AM radio bigotry.

You can watch this happen in near-real time if you actually know anyone who regularly watches that shit. Hearing my mom spout the most reactionary beliefs and views - she frantically texted me the other day to warn about people in the streets attacking anyone who looked Jewish - is a daily reminder of what the toxic slug of network news does to people.

Incidentally, if you ever meet one of those bow-tie high school dorks, ask them what magazines/websites they recommend. I guaran-fucking-tee you’ll get pointed to some combination of The Economist, the WSJ, and the Financial Times. Watch for the kids with the deeply reactionary views and see whether they’ve been tuning into their parent’s OAN/Newsmax subscriptions. See how many Hillary Clinton liberals are ride-or-die for NPR and the BBC and the Atlantic.

Its always and forever the media diet. Age isn’t a factor, except in how heavily exposed you get to this bullshit.

I just hope that Biden is going for the record in unfavorability among young voters!

Some people on this very site will try to tell you that generational political divides aren’t real.

In 2016 primaries, Bernie Sanders received more votes from voters under 35 than Trump and Clinton combined. Trump and Clinton both won the primary.

Seriously

“Not all boomers are bad”

“OK let’s ask them”

“Genocide against Palestine is good” - 81% of them

they’re explainable not by the year you are born but the propaganda you were exposed to growing up. People are products of their environment. Saying this is explainable by age itself is the same type of analysis as saying crime statistics are explainable by race, and not by a racist justice system. Correlation does not imply causation. There are systemic explanations for these phenomena.

At least 50% of the left wing activists who I used to organize with 15-20 years ago, people who used to be more radical and progressive than myself at the time, including my mentor, have now turned reactionary chuds who complain about “wokeness” and immigrants. And we are not even from a Western country. Exploited workers from a poor country complaining about illegal immigrants who came from even poorer countries.

Another 40% of them settled down, secured relatively decent jobs and stable income, started families and became your typical boomers. Only two of us remained as the “radicals” that we used to be (even though, and I’m ashamed to admit this, I did regress into a socdem for a while).

It’s incredible how two decades of constant defeat and helplessness can turn even the most decent people cynical and misanthropic. I knew these people, who were fighting for progressive rights in a conservative country decades ago, so you can’t tell me they were just chuds all along. Something changed and broke them.

I think a lot of people here are just young or relatively new to leftist movement. If the status quo continues, give it another 20 years of being defeated at every turn, some of the people here would just turn into the reactionaries not so different as the ones they are yelling at today.

Yeah people always say that generations don’t exist only class. But when in history has there been a generation that has it as good as the baby boomers? Their entire generation is defined by the fact that they enjoyed the spoils of the post WW2 world order while the majority of the industrialized world lay in ruins, and we’re supposed to ignore that?