When did Generation X outliberal the Baby Boomers?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The Baby Boomers were never 'liberal' in any real way.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The Boomers voted for Reagan. They were anti-government because of combo Vietnam/Watergate angst and their parents were mostly New Deal pro-union generation.

Or, less charitably, they grew up and decided they'd got theirs.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The Boomers voted for Reagan. They were anti-government because of combo Vietnam/Watergate angst and their parents were mostly New Deal pro-union generation.

Or, less charitably, they grew up and decided they'd got theirs.

do you mean that many would have had jobs, spouses and children by 1984?

Yes, and that this inclined them politically rightwards in a way that revealed the fundamental shallowness of their earlier 'leftism'.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What I mean by that is this--and I don't really think this is unique to the United States, definitely not.

Part of why I’m on the left myself, other than the fact that I come from an ancestrally left-leaning family, is that I believe that left-oriented policies smartly implemented provide a better life for almost everyone, the only exception that comes to mind being people who were already fabulously wealthy. In fact I’d go so far as to say that I think that assent to this idea is a necessary precondition for (for lack of a better phrase) true leftism, or else we’re all just a bunch of memphises and freepcrushers left hanging in the breeze. When the Baby Boomers grew up and got houses and jobs and kids and cars and decided that the right (or the center, I guess, whichever) now better suited their interests, they certainly may have been justified in so deciding, but they did also expose the fact that the so-called New Left in which they had earlier dabbled was, at heart, an unreal vision, since it was only appropriate not only for just one segment of society, which would have been questionable enough, but for a segment of society delineated by something as chimerical and by definition ever-changing as age. This unreal vision was demonstrated to have been predicated almost entirely on the exact sort of cultural-liberal and social-liberal preoccupations that I have next to no patience for even when I happen to agree with their policy conclusions, and to have thus been like a plantain tree—inside there was no solid part.

In other words the old saw about young men and leftism and hearts and old men and rightism and brains is itself self-evidently an attitude of the right and any former leftist who adheres to it or who bears it out in their life experience doesn’t really strike me as having been in any way firm in that leftism to begin with.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

There's been some speculation that the very youngest Millennials might not be quite as liberal as the older Millennials. I've said before that this might be because of Quiverfull-style thinking taking off in the mid-'90s. Once, maybe 12 years ago, I saw an article that said the birth rate among conservatives was much, much higher than among liberals.

But I think the most recent exit polls showed that the younger Millennials actually are at least as liberal than the older Millennials, at least in some states.

Social Issues-Its more of a generational thing with the exception of Blacks who are mostly socially conservative no matter where they live or whites who live in the Deep South who are mostly evangelical.

Leaving aside the fact that I'm not sure 'socially conservative' is quite the right way to describe the way cultural issues are approached in the black community, it's very much a generational thing within those groups too.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Leaving aside the fact that I'm not sure 'socially conservative' is quite the right way to describe the way cultural issues are approached in the black community

How would you describe it then?

That's the thing, I'm not sure. Conservative with respect to gender, maybe, but for one thing I don't think that's the only common or necessary element of 'social conservatism' in the American context. For example, black America, even middle-class black America, is vastly less receptive than white America, even indigent white America, to law-and-order politics, for reasons that should be extremely obvious. For another thing traditional gender role expectations differ somewhat between white America and black America anyway. For example, part of the historical (but recently decreasing) black animus against male homosexuality is the sensibility that it indicates some sort of lack of respect for women, which doesn't really enter into white social conservative thinking on the subject (although, weirdly, some cultures within classical antiquity might find it very familiar).