High school boys are trending conservative
High school boys are trending conservative
A popular narrative suggests young people are liberal and getting more liberal. Thus, social media buzzed when a chart surfaced in spring that seemed to suggest 12th-grade boys had become overwhelm…
While many believe young people are becoming more liberal, data shows that 12th grade boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative compared to liberal. Around 25% of high school seniors identify as conservative while only 13% identify as liberal. In contrast, the share of 12th grade girls identifying as liberal has risen to 30%. Many factors may contribute to this trend, including the rhetoric of Donald Trump which appealed to disaffected young men, and the focus of progressive movements on issues of gender and racial equality which some young men perceive as a "matriarchy." However, most high school seniors claim no political identity, and many boys in high school do not actively discuss
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My first election out of high school I voted for a right wing candidate because that's what my Dad voted for, but also because I was entrenched in Christian ideaology and patriarchal propoganda.
After that I started paying a bit more attention to politics and slowly moved to the left with a few leaps along the way. Nowadays I find the Labor party of Aus to be about as conservative as I can stand. I can barely hide my disgust with anything to the right of them.
Real life experience can be far more radicalising than any immature ideas you inherent in high school.
Edit: My major leaps were: Having an employer illegally underpay me, seeing my friends lose 'stable' jobs in 2008, having a close friend come out as gay, leaving the church, volunteering with unhoused people, living in the UK, living in a rental controlled by a landlord with over 100 properties, and doing disaster relief work.
Yeah living through the fifth once-in-a-generation crisis in this generation is powerful left-wing propaganda.
I bet this happens to a lot of people unless they get sucked into a YouTube/truthsocial echochamber rabbit hole.
I totally could have gone down that route if I were younger. I spent a good amount of time reading conspiracy theories online before YouTube existed.
What effect did the UK change your political views?
I spent nearly every dollar I had saved to live in London, and don't think I'd ever seen such visible displays of wealth disparity once I got there. I got a good paying job but often struggled to save and pay all my bills.
I got to live through the Brexit debate while living behind a chip shop in a poorer, multicultural neighbourhood and heard all the bullshit about immigration being directed at brown people while I worked there as an immigrant myself but because I was white I was largely accepted.
I learned a new level of contempt for the pointless wealth of the monarchy and had to deal with a boss who was plainly bad at his job but because he had an OBE everyone around me worshipped him like he could do no wrong.
I also worked for some very large companies and realised they aren't anything special, just willing to exploit more people.
I’ve always suspected the British class system looks really weird to foreigners, to be honest it looks weird to us too when we sit down and think about it. George Orwell talks about it in England your England which even today remains one of the best things ever written on the subject I think. The monarchy is an odd one because a fairly large majority of people genuinely like the pomp and ceremony according to polling, the idea of a US-style directly elected presidency with a partisan politician in the role is legitimately unpopular in the UK. I think if we ever did become a republic our system would probably look to Ireland’s general approach as it’s the most directly comparable machinery of government in Europe.
London is particularly severe for demonstrating inequality but you see it all over the place, my hometown of Oxford has a delightful club two of the last four Tory PMs used to belong to whose initiation rites include burning a £50 note in front of a homeless person.
Oh I see, yes that sounds eye opening