I’m actually more conservative in my 30s, as in conserving the very limited energy i have and not arguing with idiots and use that on those who worth it.

Any yet we are past the post of neo-feudalism which I find infuriating. This should be the political jihad being fought for votes in a democracy.

I was ultra conservative, born in Alabama to religious nutters, and don’t believe there is any representation for the Left in the USA.

I’m 60 now and lean WAY over to the left

53 year old me.

I have grown more progressive in my 30’s and 40’s, but looking around me, I feel like I have no choice but to acknowledge that, at least here in the US, conservatism has won for at least the next generation.

The strategy of buying up both ruling parties worked exceedingly well for the 1%.

Screw that, I’ve got empathy unlike conservatives.

the whole notion of “people growing more conservative as they grow older” is a relic from the time before conservatism started becoming the party of gamergate edgelords and identity politics.

44 here. Fuck Billionaires. Give equal rights to ALL people. Kill Citizen United. Also, fuck cops. They are all bad unless they see some unjust and does something about it.

I have become more conservative over the years…

Ferment the rich!

The longer i live, the more injustice I see

The reverse happened. But I’m GenX so that might be normal?

I was given the full American Exceptionalism battery of civics propaganda in my public schooling, and I believed it all even more than my peers. It might be a neurodivergent thing, being credulous and actually believing what my teachers taught me.

I also took economics 1A and 1B in my early college career, which was all capitalism centric. (They talked about command economics, usually as a counter example, highlighting the problems it has.)

I was kind of an asshole, but I was young.

Then SCOTUS gave Bush the presidency, and that was weird. He was creepy even before 9/11 but then that happened and, well, all the conservatives went full evil. When my dad was telling me that yes, Donald Rumsfeld is right that waterboarding is not really torture (Narrator: Waterboarding is, in fact, commonly classified as torture by the scholarly consensus) and that extrajudicially detaining and torturing people because they’re Arab and Muslim is entirely acceptable, I had a reckoning and an internal identity crisis. I knew that torture was what Darth Vader did to Leia to show that the Galactic Empire was evil through and through, and Vader didn’t flinch at the grisly tasks.

In the next decade civil rights, including ones established in the Constitution of the United States, started getting massive carve-outs. The bill of rights didn’t apply whenever national security was invoked. FBI was sending NSLs left and right telling people they’re now FBI informants and were obligated to keep that secret on threat of being disappeared. (NSLs are still a thing, BTW.)

Officials were openly engaging in war profiteering. Halliburton was getting fantastically rich. Also Texas, by way of Enron was fleecing California. The rolling blackouts were featured in Monsters Inc. …as was the scream extractor, possibly the best representation of late-stage capitalism at its peak.

The government gave massive bailouts to companies that (according to the rules of capitalism) should have been left to collapse. The US Press Corps was suddenly very cooperative (complicit) with the White House (I had to resort to internet research and foreign outlets to get news)

Obama got elected. There was tons of talk about Hope and Change. Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize just for not being George W. Bush. Neither hope nor change was forthcoming.

We talked a lot of enhanced interrogation and extraordinary rendition and black sites also signs of the surveillance state started manifesting even before Edward Snowden dumped a ton of data to news agencies.

Then in 2014, Michael Brown was shot in dubious circumstances, triggering the Ferguson unrest. Police uniforms lined up pointing their assault rifles like they were at a firing squad, what I remember was poor weapon discipline, and the sort of thing Red Goons from the Soviet Union did in movies starring Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris. Troops and troops of police officers pointing their guns like they’re ready to start shooting into the crowd. Then when the policing hour happened at night, they gathered up in their MRAP and started tearing up the streets (literally) firing their tear-gas grenade launcher willy-nilly, just gassing the whole neighborhood for no peacekeeping purpose. It was terrifying.

I learned in the 1970s a congressional order required FBI to catalog all officer-involved homicides and report annually to the BJS. They hadn’t. Only civilian volunteer groups had been tracking killings and brutality by law enforcement. Several news agencies started after Ferguson. One of the beats on Techdirt already was about police being stupid or drawing their guns early, or SWATTING the wrong house and rendering it unlivable. Oh yeah, social engineers discovered they could get a house raided by police with big guns anytime they wanted to, and it became an occasional tactic in COD PvP.

In 2015, I was long read about the faults of capitalism, the failures of government, the rise of regulatory capture, the police state, the surveillance state and rising wealth disparity (which was a big deal in my college Macroeconomics class – this is how you get your civilization to collapse to social unrest). From there, I was a few breadtube videos away from going totally Pinko Commie, but I less adhere to any given ideology so much as specific ideals (e.g. Everyone gets fed. )

Strangely, a Bolshevik chorus follows me around everywhere I go.

If we actually got the ability to eat the rich, I would be okay with eating meat again.

Haven’t hit the moltov throwing antifa stage but yeah.

Im actually more conservative as im approaching my 30s.

I used to have this overly inclusive bleeding heart “everyone is equal” kind of attitude which I now see isnt really true. When you actually get passed the narrative and look at the reality and stastics, its undeniable that certain “types” of people are just more pre-disposed to violence and thuggery than most normal people. Like you might not like what im saying, but you cant disagree with the actual data that shows how much more naturally violent those low-lifes are. So thats why now im not ashamed to be vocally prejudiced against cops.

I hope I’ll never become like my bigot father