I wonder how long this populist wave that's spreading over the west [0] is going to continue?
[0] https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/getFile.aspx?I... [pdf]
[0] https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/getFile.aspx?I... [pdf]
I'm being flippant, but--look at the vote splits by age. Young voters in the UK overwhelmingly voted against Brexit. Young voters in the U.S. overwhelmingly voted against Trump.
The voice of populism today is the voice of economic and cultural disenfranchisement. It is difficult to re-employ millions of 60-year-old folks whose skills are out of date. It is difficult to get 60-year-old folks who have spent their lives in a homogeneous town, to accept multicultural diversity.
They are crying out for help and success again, and we'll continue down this course as a society until we either give it to them, or they leave us.
Many a 20 year old communist is something else at 30 and then again at 60.
don't people get more conservative as they age?
But people don't generally slide back from what they experienced as kids. A LOT of 18- to 25-year-olds today grew up as a kid in a society where it is acceptable to have friends from lots of ethnic backgrounds, to have friends who are gay or trans, to believe that women should be equal to men in society, etc. They're not going to lose that as they age. That's their base concept of "normal."