It’s long been popular wisdom that people become more conservative with age. “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart,” Winton Churchill was said to have declared. “If you are not a conservative at 35, you have no brain.”
Churchill never said that. And the notion that people lean more to the right as they age is, at a minimum, disputed (millennials, especially, are showing few signs of moving in Churchill’s political direction). My beef isn’t with whether it’s true or not—the fact is a big slice of the population is conservative and older voters are historically more likely to be so. I just struggle with the very idea that you’d shift to the right as you learn more about the world.
When I was a teenager, it seemed pretty cool that Alex P. Keaton toted a briefcase to high school. I read Ayn Rand in my late teens and absolutely identified with Howard Roark and his raging against the societal machine. I inhaled Capital City and dreamed of being an investment banker. I even devoured Henry Kissinger’s reprinted columns in the Australian Financial Review, and couldn’t quite believe such an iconic statesman’s words were appearing Down Under.
My reaction to these youthful indiscretions now ranges from amusement (who doesn’t like Michael J. Fox?) to deep embarrassment (Kissinger, for obvious reasons captured perfectly by Ben Rhodes recently). And that’s because the more exposure I got to the world—and the world of ideas—the more liberal I became.
I often joke that as a left-wing Australian, I’m basically the equivalent of a socialist in the US. A big part of that is because the countries remain politically fundamentally different, even if Australia’s right-wing seems to want to cosplay Donald Trump. In America, for example, Obamacare’s very existence remains subject to debate—about 40% of the population remains against it, and Donald Trump only two weeks ago revived calls to roll it back. In Australia, people of all political stripes largely support Medicare, the national healthcare system, with beefs more around accessibility and affordability. That is, dissatisfaction is about how it operates, not whether it should.
But here’s my thing: how on Earth could someone dealing with the inevitable aches and pains of aging at the same time politically move in the direction of the side wanting to reduce access to healthcare? For me, getting older has only highlighted the fragility of our time, and the role luck can play in whatever success we have. And I absolutely believe it only takes one or two changes to vastly alter our lives.
Among the biggest factors? Health and financial security. You or a family member get sick. Someone loses their job. Someone can’t find a job. You have to care for an elderly parent. You can write a long list of ways shifts here can devastate lives: after all, more than half a million Americans go bankrupt annually as a result of medical bills.
Government can play a pivotal role in mitigating these risks, and that should be shouted from the rooftops as we start this presidential election year. After all, what else are taxpayer dollars for? Instead, we’re drowning in ridiculousness about Joe Biden’s age, his likely opponent’s legal battles, and the fabulist that is George Santos.*
But this is also par for the course. For the media, politics is all too often about power battles and personalities rather than substance or real-world issues. And that pretty neatly sums up the American political divide right now, in which one side is seeking power for power’s sake by all manner of distraction and punching of social-issue hot buttons, while the other tries to implement policies it then seems incapable of communicating about effectively.
Tangentially, what got me thinking about this recently was this column by Scott Galloway. At a broad level, Galloway’s argument is we should stop hoping for capitalism to solve our biggest problems. That’s not because there aren’t millions of people who desperately want to do good and passionately believe in the power of companies (and technology) to drive change. We all want to work for organizations we believe are positive forces in the world, and corporations are filled with good people in it for much more than their bank balance. The problem is capitalism as a system isn’t built that way, the same way the DNA of large companies fights transformation no matter how much it’s needed.
“Corporations are so good at making money,” Galloway writes, “they shouldn’t be trusted to do anything else. This is not an abdication of corporate responsibility or reheated Milton Friedman, but a call for more robust government oversight and regulation, including antitrust actions and a rebalancing of power from the top 1% and corporations.”
It would be amazing if the world’s corporations could, for example, collectively accept the catastrophic consequences of climate change, put self-interest aside, and do all in their power mitigate it. But that’s struggling, and it may be too late anyway: even if countries collectively meet targets celebrated by the COP28 outcome, the world “is on track for a temperature rise of up to 2.9C” by 2050 (anything over 1.5C is regarded as disastrous).
Instead, the real world dictates a more straightforward approach: the job of companies is to make the most money, and the job of regulators is to force change through enforcement and incentives. It’s through this push-and-pull that the excesses of capitalism are curbed, and it’s also how Ayn Rand rolls in her grave.
“We can’t—and shouldn’t—weaken the pull of capital,” Galloway said. “The profit motive is capitalism’s driving force, and it’s driven a greater increase in prosperity than any other human creation. The problem is our better angels are outmatched.”
All of which gets me back to the trope that people become more conservative as they get older. On one level, I can understand the impulse to increasingly to protect what you have—kind of a “get your grubby paws off my hard work!” approach to life. But aside from it being pretty asshole-ish to pull up the ladder behind you, individualism simply breaks down when confronted by an existential threat like climate change.
Confronting the planet’s rising temperature is the only way to keep at least some of what you have before it’s either washed away or burnt to a crisp. And that demands collective action as well as all of us individually doing our part. It’s a recipe for a right-wing brain explosion, which partly explains why so many deny the very existence of the blindingly obvious. As an aside, I’d note this shouldn’t be a big deal given conservatives have no problem happily supporting government intervention to ban books, stop women from having control over their bodies, and myriad other things. Just add “save the planet” to the list.
After more than four decades of policy triangulation and, by world standards, pretty light liberalism in the US, I wonder if we’re approaching at a bit of an inflection point around political alignment. Plenty will debate the merit of the major parties, the policies they advocate, and the candidates they field—and they should, especially in the year ahead. But millennials may be leading the charge in concluding, with good reason, that something needs to change—headed by the idea it makes sense stick to the left lane, rather than turning right.
* Actually, the Santos story is pretty fantastic.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.