The Kids Are All Left: How Young Voters Will Unite America by David Faris

Author:David Faris [Faris, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612198200
Amazon: 1612198201
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2020-06-28T23:00:00+00:00

Boy howdy, I just don’t know what to tell you here. Silents went 70–30 for Harry Truman in the first presidential election in which any of them were old enough to vote and then Eisenhower by double digits, and Johnson by forty points over Goldwater, and Nixon by thirty points over McGovern, and then Reagan by landslides, Clinton decisively, Bush, Kerry (!), and then McCain, Romney, and Trump. Overall, this group has voted for the Democrat in just six of eighteen presidential elections. I think it’s fair to look at the overall trajectory of Silent politics and characterize them as quite a conservative generation, even if sometimes they voted for Democrats. This is a picture of a cohort of people who came of age in an era when the parties themselves weren’t that different, when their economic policies (generally somewhat liberal) and their racial policies (united in protecting apartheid in the American South and mostly hostile to anything other than cosmetic justice initiatives) were similar enough that bouncing around between one party or the other between national elections didn’t seem like quite as crazy a proposition as it might today. And with those voting patterns in mind, it makes a lot more sense that their party ID has made such a dramatic move since the early 1990s to the Republican Party.

It’s not just the Silent Generation either. Despite their reputation as a large group of acid-dropping, long-haired radicals, most members of the baby boomer generation were also not especially liberal when they were young. While early boomers voted for Johnson in droves, giving him the same 70 percent of the vote Silents did, they also voted narrowly for Nixon twice, decisively for Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and then George H. W. Bush in 1988.23 Members of this group gave the Democrat the same percentage of the vote in 1968 (49 percent) as they did in 2016 (48 percent). The members of Students for a Democratic Society may have gotten all the press attention, and Hollywood may want you to remember boomers exclusively through the lens of the antiwar movement, but it looks like most of them were much more ordinary when they were young—and that they basically never changed. For every David Horowitz, there were many more people who either started out as hippies and remained so forever or who began their political lives as conservative-leaning and never changed. Of course, there are differences inside the long boomer generation, but overall they are not nearly as liberal as the media stereotypes would have you believe.

Of course, some humbleness is in order here too. It is worth noting that the whole field of polling was born and matured in the lifetimes of the oldest members of the Silent Generation. Scientific public opinion research dates only to the 1930s. The realignment of American politics that began with the passage of civil rights legislation is less than sixty years old. It is certainly possible that unforeseen changes in the political system could soften partisanship in ways we cannot currently foresee.

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