The Millennial Generation: Our Liberal Future?

I've noted before that demographic changes spell long term doom for today's Republican Party and its Christofascist/Tea Party puppet masters.  Unfortunately, the needed death of today's virulent form of conservatism won't come soon enough to satisfy me even though the longer term out look is encouraging.  And leading the wave that will hopefully send the greed driven, white supremacist, homophobic GOP base into the political wilderness is the so-called "Millennial Generation."  A piece in New York Magazine follows up on an issue discussed in a previous post and looks at the hoped for future and the role the under 30 crowd will play in it.  Here are excerpts:

How doomed are conservatives? Pretty doomed, if you look carefully at the Pew Research Survey’s close analysis of the youth vote in the 2012 elections. The Republicans’ long-term dilemma has generally been framed in racial terms, but it’s mainly a generational one. The youngest generation of voters contains a much smaller proportion of white voters than previous generations, and those whites in that generation vote Republican by a much smaller margin than their elders. What’s more, younger voters supported President Obama during the last two election cycles for reasons that seem to go beyond the usual reasons — social issues like gay marriage and feminism, immigration policy, or Obama’s personal appeal — and suggest a deeper attachment to liberalism. The proclivities of younger voters may actually portend a full-scale sea change in American politics.

More than four decades ago, Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril identified the core of Americans’ political thinking as a blend of symbolic conservatism and operational liberalism. Most Americans, that is, oppose big government in the abstract but favor it in the particular. They oppose “regulation” and “spending,” but favor, say, enforcement of clean-air laws and Social Security. . . . . Public support for most of the particulars of government has stopped Republicans from rolling back the advances of the New Deal, but suspicion with “big government” has made Democratic attempts to advance the role of the state rare and politically painful.  

This tension continues to define the beliefs of American voters. . . .  But this is not the case with younger voters. By a 59 percent to 37 percent margin, voters under 30 say the government should do more to solve problems. More remarkably, 33 percent of voters under 30 identified themselves as liberal, as against 26 percent who called themselves conservative.

Obviously, such a future hinges on the generational patterns of the last two election cycles persisting. But, as another Pew survey showed, generational patterns to tend to be sticky. It’s not the case that voters start out liberal and move rightward. Americans form a voting pattern early in their life and tend to hold to it. That isn’t to say something couldn’t shake these voters loose from their attachment to the liberal worldview. Republicans fervently (and plausibly) hoped the Great Recession would be that thing . . . .

But young voters haven’t drawn this conclusion — or not many of them have, at any rate. So either something else is going to have to happen to disrupt the liberalism of the rising youth cohort, or else the Republican Party itself will have to change in ways far more dramatic than any of its leading lights seem prepared to contemplate.

As I have said before, the GOP seems bent on engaging in a form of slow political suicide.  The aging angry white vote motivated by racism, homophobia and a rejection of modernity is literally dying off and the GOP is doing nothing of substance to face the changing demographics overtaking the country.