Growing Conservative

Point your rose tinted glasses to the future. Or to your iPhone.

Nathan Liu
Aug 28, 2017 · 3 min read

Many older people look at the young as wide eyed and easily deceived. They call us naïve and cite both war and peace in their bibliography of rose tinted wisdom. They did see the world in times we can only fear, they did sacrifice their lives to end fascism like we’ve never seen, and our grandmothers were destined to spend their lives as housewives. And so we should listen to them when they are right and we should listen to them when they are wrong. But to be treated as inferior? That we should never accept.

We have a destiny, it seems, to be passionate socialists in our twenties and conservative ‘pragmatists’ in our old age. Sixty-two percent of under-24 year olds voted Labour in 2017 while sixty-one percent of over-65s voted Conservative. Sixty-four percent of older people agreed with just twenty-nine percent of under-24s that Brexit was right. When we’ve lived as long as they have, our elders propose, we’ll understand why.

They too often forget, however: we’ve seen more of the world than they ever will. We have the internet.

On Twitter I follow gay muslims, straight white developers and the President of France. I challenge my views with people from libertarian think-tanks, Blair’s government and the Bush administration. I hear echoes from Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Nicola Sturgeon. I can read the stories of convicts and first hand accounts of white supremacist rallies. I’ll never understand what it’s like to be these people, but I get to try.

When our grandparents were our age, they didn’t have the world’s information at their fingertips, on their wrists or on twenty-four hour TV news. This kept them grounded in their locality. They couldn’t get lost on MailOnline, Breitbart or with fake news on Facebook even if they wanted to. If their life were a video game, their draw distance was set low.

Young people today have freedom to be who they want to be and to interact with people from across a world we don’t fully understand. We get to challenge our views and ideals when waiting on a tube platform. We can discuss the President’s words from 36,000 feet in the air.

Getting politics from social media isn’t universally good—in fact there is a stronger argument that it’s universally bad—but it represents a freedom of thought that older generations didn’t have at a time when their opinions were most malleable.

There is and will always be greater value in going out and meeting new and different people or campaigning physically for a political cause. But now even those not willing to make the effort can experience diversity. Diversity that happens to be incompatible with the politics of Brexit and austerity. The 18–24 year olds of the world, as we leave the band that many see as a label of inexperience, will have all grown up with this freedom. I believe and hope that this generation will not grow conservative because in the networked world of today I struggle see how that’s possible.

Maybe in forty years my opinions and worldview will have changed. I can’t say who I’ll be voting for or what I will believe. But I will remain proud of my generation for seizing the opportunity to grow up inquisitive and open-minded. I will be proud that I was curious.

I hope my elders are too.

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