Why did So Many of Us become reactionaries?

There’s only one person I know from our generation whom I’m absolutely sure is a Trumper. It’s the guy who does my taxes. He has a MAGA hat on his desk. I don’t ask him about it, I just give him all my 1099s and my W2s.

Everybody else I know who’s around my age is a Democrat, a liberal, a left-winger. This almost definitely says more about my circle than anything else. When we talk, if we talk about politics and not about our latest ailment, we just assume we all are on the same page, and that page is progressive. So, I wonder, how did our generation become the generation that’s known as the MAGA base?

How did a generation that began with such idealism turn so reactionary? How did our revolutionary ethos turn into pseudo-fascism? Weren’t we the generation that marched in the streets, for civil rights and against the war? Weren’t we the generation that burned our draft cards and called for—no, demanded—change? Weren’t we the hippie generation that partied at Woodstock and didn’t trust anyone over thirty?

And yet now almost a third of all boomers, according to the Pew Research Center, consider themselves conservative. Nearly half who are registered voters “lean” conservative with conservative Republicans making up the largest single partisan group among boomers.

While younger people, like millennials, vote left, people over 65 generally vote Trump. How did this happen?

The easy answer, of course, is that people move to the right as they grow older. You become more conservative because you have more to conserve. But several studies suggest political attitudes are actually remarkably stable across time (although when they do shift, liberals are more likely to become conservatives than conservatives are to become liberals).

So, maybe, back then we weren’t all marching in the streets. Maybe we weren’t all calling for revolution. Just because our hair was long and we wore tie-dye and bell bottoms and listened to the Stones and didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the blows didn’t mean that we all read Marcuse and followed Mao.

And maybe that smaller group of us that indeed were followers, that believed in revolution, maybe we became disillusioned. After all, we protested in the streets and still the war droned on. We developed a counter-culture and got devoured by the broader culture, letting anthems of rebellion became jingles for TV ads. We worked for change and got more of the same.

Disappointed in the world, some of us turned inward—pickle ball, Goop or tai chi, anyone?—and got angry, got defensive, got conservative. And now some of us—maybe not my circle, maybe not yours, but a lot of us—are the cranky old get-off-my-lawn people.

At least we all get our taxes done.