Okay, Millennials...

[Blonde Guardian]

If you read a bit about the Boomer generation, you'll find that many sociologists bust my generation in half... Early Boomers and Late Boomers. Interestingly, the older they are, the more likely they are to be liberals. Early Boomers were the first people drafted and sent into Vietnam. They are the counter-culture, naked hippies at Woodstock generation and apparently, most of them remained left-ish as they grew older.

It's the younger Boomers (my demographic) who actually tend to be more conservative than our older peers. Younger Boomers were the so-called "Yuppies" in the 80's, for example. Many of them embraced Reagan at the time and later became neo-cons. I can remember many a political argument back in the 80's, between myself and other Late Boomers. Some of those arguments were very heated. Some became fist fights.

This is a very interesting observation, since the usual assumption is older = more conservative. It makes sense that direct exposure to the evils of the prevailing ideology would make you more permanently anti-establishment, though.

[Tessera]

This is a very interesting observation, since the usual assumption is older = more conservative.

As I said, it's all because of the Vietnam war. Early Boomers were the first people who were drafted and sent to Vietnam. They were essentially given no choice. That war was very unpopular and as we learned later, it was in fact an illegal war, started on the basis of a fabricated lie (the so-called "Gulf of Tonkin incident"). You can see how this would cause the older Boomers to harbor a strong resentment toward the Establishment... a resentment that many of them still carry to this day.

Late Boomers were all too young to be directly involved in Vietnam, so they were largely spared from having to deal with any of that horror. In my own case, the war ended when I was 15 years old... too young for military service. Any Boomer born after 1956 was spared from having to worry about Vietnam. Their anti-establishment sentiments were nowhere near as rabid as the prevailing attitude of Early Boomers.

I agree it's all rather unusual, but Vietnam was a real clusterfuck back in the 60's and it effectively chopped my generation in half. Something like 60,000 Early Boomers came back from 'Nam in body bags. The rest of us went to Disneyland, danced in discos, leaned further toward the right and voted for Reagan in 1980.

Not all of us, of course. I'm a Late Boomer and I've been a far-left liberal (progressive) for my entire life. I'm so liberal that I scare other liberals.