@sh76 said
So, it's all the Boomers' fault?
Sorry; not buying it.
Everybody wants what's best for themselves. No generation is wholly better or worse than their parents or children.
The pendulum swings back and forth. The rightward swing of the pendulum was tremendous between 1980 and, say, 2006.
Now the pendulum is swinging left, with a massive assist from an incompetent Republi ...[text shortened]... will overplay its hand (as it's trying desperately to do right now) and the pendulum will come back.
Not exactly the Boomers' fault; they just took advantage of the situation they found themselves in. But actually I think they were appreciably more selfish than earlier generations, since they grew up in a time of steadily increasing prosperity which bred complacency, never had to face a crisis like the war which encouraged solidarity and collective action, and were largely emancipated from religion, the most effective means of ameliorating human selfishness.
The pendulum swung to the right because, essentially, social democracy was the victim of its own success; people fostered in the benign economic environment of the early postwar era easily got rich, and thus gravitated toward the economic right. Although many dominant right-wing parties in the 1980s still espoused socially conservative postures which the economic elite generally didn't endorse, they bit the bullet and voted for them anyway so that their taxes would be cut.
The pendulum is swinging left now because a generation hasn't found the free-market economy to be to their advantage. People who came of age since the millennium found house ownership out of reach, secure jobs almost non-existent, and above all found it tough to find the means of marrying and raising a family. Since basically people become conservative when they get jobs, buy houses and start families, it's no wonder that the present younger generations aren't following the usual trajectory.
The left is, as you say, overplaying its hand... above all as far as social issues are concerned. If everyone voted on economic grounds, the left would have been as triumphant worldwide during the Great Recession as the Roosevelt Democrats and Swedish Social Democrats were during the 1930s. Since scepticism about the left's social agenda is the one thing that stands between it and broad electability, I can't help feeling that the right has a secret vested interest in keeping Woke issues at the forefront of political debate.