From Generation Left to Population Left The Myth of Age-Based Conservatism Michael Doolan
LOOK LEFT
“You’ll be a conservative by the time you’re 30,” my grandmother said to me on my recent visit. This is a common idea in British politics. The optimism of socialism is said to be reserved for the young. With age comes rationality, a realism about the world, and a personal investment in the performance of the market. It’s undeniable that the Conservatives currently have a monopoly on the older population, with 67% of over 70-year-old voters voting Conservative in the 2019 general election. And the narratives of people turning right with age is not helped by the fact that centrist icons such as Peter Mandelson and Alistair Darling spent their youth supporting the Young Communist League and the International Marxist Group. However, has it always been the case that people become more right-wing as they get older? Or, perhaps a more appropriate question – are people becoming more conservative with age today? The revival of left-wing politics emerging across the West in the last few years has brought huge amounts of survey data on the public opinion of socialism. For socialists, the results were overall very positive. The Thatcherite think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), found
that 67% of people aged between 18 and 40 would like to live in a socialist economy. The same survey found that socialism was also most commonly associated with words like “workers”, “equal”, and “fair” by the public, and that very few people associated it with “failure”. Capitalism, however, was most commonly associated with words like “rich”, “exploitative”, and “unfair”. A similar poll concluded that 40% of people under 40 have a positive opinion of socialism, with a similar number agreeing with the statement “communism could have worked if it was executed properly”. The surveys did not reveal a complete victory for the left in the battle of ideas. When presented with a definition of socialism and a definition of capitalism, only half the respondents could correctly define socialism. This would imply support for socialism is relatively depthless: people like the ideas of socialism more than they know the practicalities of it. However, the young almost unanimously identify capitalism as a cause of the climate crisis and British housing crisis (with over 75% of people agreeing with both these statements). And 71% agree with the notion it fuels racism. In short, even though many may not know what socialism is, they
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