What happened to you, Boomers? You used to be cool, man...

Whenever I think of Baby Boomers, I think of The '60s political unrest, free love, drugs, Woodstock, hyper-liberalism, Civil rights...you know, all that jazz.
Well, now the Boomers are all grown up and in charge of the country. For one, a lot of them are now hyper-conservative. For another, the United States nowadays always seems to be on the brink of backsliding away from some of the Progressive gains of the last four decades. What happened? I understand all that my idea of The Sixties and Baby Boomers might be more of a Theme Park Version, but still...

Also, this post...

Old age, bitterness and a lack of political expedeincy, coupled with a belief in their own correctness and the fact of being larger as a generation than the ones that followed.

Essentially because they were too idealistic, decided that "If I can't have you nobody will" towards the world and decided to fuck over their childrens generation by kicking away all the old social ladders and going "I didn't use these (even if they did) So you won't either" and then assuming an air of smug self-satisfaction towards naivety in the youth.

edited 31st Aug '11 1:08:56 PM by JosefBugman

Maybe it's because when you get older you get more conservative and all that junk.And because the reason I am not concerned about it because I am a conservative and I really don't care for some of those progressive ideas.Besides the sex revolution my opinion made everything worse.

Because the liberals of yesteryear are the conservatives of today...

Because some of them, like my sister (she was born in '61, so she counts! I love pointing this out to her), had kids and freaked the fuck out. And overcompensated in aaaaaall the wrong ways.

because traditionalists tend to be older, cuz it was so much better in the good ol' days.

Some of the old-timers of my acquaintance hated the "damn dirty hippies" even when they were young.

Except "conservative", in practice, usually refers to certain political positions, meaning that a new ideology which incorporates those positions will generally be considered conservative, not progressive.

I'd be tempted to say that "the political spectrum has shifted left since their salad days, so there merely appear to be right-leaning by modern standards", but I'm not sure as to whether or not that has actually happened in the United States.

Christian fundamentalism seems to have grown louder but on the other hand: back then they couldn't complain about gay rights and abortion and their other pet peeves.

Conservative means "being against change, and for bringing the status quo back to some arbitrarily earlier point in time when things were 'better'." Liberal means "changing the status quo to reach some arbitrary point that is 'better'."

Yesterday's liberals, after getting what changes they like, become tomorrow's conservatives, when the next generation wants to change yet more things...

edited 31st Aug '11 3:27:21 PM by USAF713

Because the liberals of yesteryear got what they want, and are now conservative because they want to keep it that way.

Really think about it, besides the drugs and such, most of them got what they wanted, so now all they want is to hold onto the comfortable way things are that they like, and not bring any strange alien present day liberal concepts into the fold.

No they didn't.

I know quite a few (my parent's generation) who gave out their last political hurrah for Barack Obama, and are now pretty much depleted.

They went all mainstream. They were better before they were cool.

It's an error to think the Boomers share a common history. I doubt the majority of Boomers were hippies (which would have also included members of the tail end of the Silent Generation, as well), so much as the hippy movement was loud enough in it's time to leave an outsized presence in modern cultural history. Most other people just spent their lives as they always had, without picking up so much as a single bead necklace - Richard Nixon's 'Silent Majority'. The Sixties were a tumultuous political and social decade, and it's fair to say that the more conservative elements of American society would've looked at the unfolding developments with no small amount of fear and resentment - loathing, perhaps. And now that they've got the power, they have a chance to win a nearly fifty-year long culture war. It might explain how fast sociopolitical developments are being dissolved right now, so it seems.

edited 1st Sep '11 4:16:34 AM by DarkDecapodian