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ELDERLY BUT COMPETENT
“Of a certain age,” am I? “Born before 1960,” would you? I’d go and give Gerard Henderson a piece of my mind, if I could remember where he lives, and if I could find my spectacles.
At least Wayne Sanderson has something nice to say: Bulletin editors are incredibly professional. Yes. Yes, we are. Thank you, polite young man.
The Churchill quote he uses has been shown to be not anything the great man said.
Let’s not go making up any Thomas Jefferson quotes of our own.
My brother - a Marine earlier in his life - joined the National Guard in his forties, and lobbied successfully to do a tour of duty in Iraq (finished it up last February). He was a 47-year old sargeant, and some of the young whippersnappers in his unit called him grandpa - once.
I don’t now, and never did, buy all that malarkey about “if your not a liberal when your under 30, etc., etc.” You don’t have to be a genius, or very old, to note the astoundingly high BS factor in much of what passes for liberalism (not talking classical liberalism here, of course, but the U.S. Democratic Party version of it).
Oh I don’t know. I remember the Sixties as a time when most young people were either liberal or at least made themselves appear to be liberal because it was fashionable. When the Seventies came we all became apathetic. But when Reagan became President, I noticed for the first time a groundswell of young committed conservatives. And it has only gotten stronger since then.
College Republicans. I still can’t get over it. I thought that was an oxymoron.
Posted by wronwright on 2006 08 25 at 01:01 PM • permalinkPerhaps Mr. Henderson is not taking geography into consideration. If you were born into post-WWII southern or western small town America (excluding California), conservatism was your religion whether you willed it or no. I don’t know about Australia, but I’d be willing to bet it was the same outside the city centers.
You were once a lefty, Tim? When did you get mugged?
I can’t speak to the grave yet, but conservative from the cradle.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 08 25 at 03:46 PM • permalinkJust what is it that they mean when they say things like “you’ll leave your humanity behind” if you fail to let your “heart” lead you in your twenties? “Heart” is a euphemism for the emotionalism of childhood, ungoverned by the rational thought of an adult. The “humanity” they tout is the state of childhood. A thinking adult can see beyond the limited perceptions of children and see that brotherhood and love are not conditions set by social engineering, but are values that must be earned.
I’ve always thought that the signal characteristic of the John Kerry type baby-boomer was a kind of willful retardation, Peter Pan meets reality. This has left us with too many who have the knowledge of an adult, integrated by the mind of a recalcitrant twelve-year-old.
#5 Wow, all I “remember” from the ‘60s was everyone’s face twisting into a colourful votex of spinning geometric shapes; their voices slowing waaaayyy down and then speeding up until they sounded like a 33 LP on 78, whence they finally melted into the floor and reappeared as a malevolent ooze dripping from the ceiling.
Oh yeah, and the day I found one of the first HP handheld calculators in a park in Sunnyvale, which, after a rare moment of lucidity during which I realised it was not an alien superweapon, returned it and got $500 reward for my trouble.
Left? Right? Who knew?
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 08 25 at 05:40 PM • permalinkI just went looking for an article Caroline Overington wrote on John Howard’s South park Conservatives in The Australian, but it’s no longer on line.
If you can find a copy of it anywhere else, it’s definitely worth a read.
Posted by Oafish and Infantile on 2006 08 25 at 08:19 PM • permalinkOK, Tim, you weren’t born before 1960, but your trajectory is still classic Boomer - red-hot radical until the light eventually dawns.
Sorry, but what a cliche. I’ve always been right-wing - right-wing Labor, that is - and always will be. It’s due to a father who grew up working class, got a scholarship through the NSW Railways, became an engineer, is now retired, and at ALP meetings on Sydney’s affluent North Shore is always the most right-wing person there.
Posted by David Morgan on 2006 08 25 at 09:23 PM • permalink“If you don’t believe in socialism when you are young, you have no heart, if you believe in socialism when you are old, you have no brain.”
That is now out of date. It has become a thought substitute that reflects the economic illiteracy that dominated intellectuals, both socialists and conservatives alike, until the revival of non-socialist liberalism in the 1970s. That was a time when people of good will were offered impossible choices – Catholicism or communism in the 1930s, then later a range of leftwing ideologies in opposition to the dreaded “status quo”.
Perhaps the lowest point was the time when young men in Australia and the US were conscripted, before they could even vote, to fight for freedom overseas. The fight was worthwhile but the resort to conscription demonstrated the moral and intellectual collapse of the conservative establishment.
The situation has been transformed by the revival of non-socialist liberalism with a three-legged program of freedom, rule of law and a robust moral framework. Hayek is one of the most important leaders of this so-called New Right or neo-liberalism and his essay “Why I am not a conservative” (on line) provides a clear statement of a non-socialist alternative for warm hearted people. Many conservatives who are also free traders and civil libertarians will not recognize themselves in Hayek’s picture of the protectionist, authoritarian conservative, simply because the word means different things to different people. It is not the words that matter, it is the policies
#14 I am in agreement with your comments and familiar with Hayek’s work. There is a site worth visiting Cafe Hayek, which has much to admire (and to criticise) about this “middle way”.
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 08 25 at 11:46 PM • permalinkYour looking very well for your late 40’s Tim…
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2006 08 26 at 12:22 AM • permalinkThe kids today who are conservative do not need a life time of experience and thought to arrive at conservatism. Merely looking at their elder moonbats is sufficiently cautionary.
I completely agree. When I was old enough to learn something about the world, I was somewhat influenced by my greenie mum’s views, but it only took me a few months to be completely turned around by doing my own research instead of believing the bullshit fed to me by socialist high school teachers. Still being a teenager AND a musician, I’m constantly surrounded by Lefties, and it does get rather frustrating. I just have to hope that one day they see sense! (Reasonable debate is out of the question, of course.)
#12 MentalFloss
i think it’s this one:
Posted by benson swears a lot on 2006 08 26 at 01:52 AM • permalink...of course, the link is now borked, murphy’s law etc. try:
this link (scroll down, hit the ‘free’ button, enter code etc)
Posted by benson swears a lot on 2006 08 26 at 02:04 AM • permalinkerm, that should have been Oafish and Infantile, not Mentalfloss, oops.
Posted by benson swears a lot on 2006 08 26 at 03:47 AM • permalinkThanks Benson, but your link still didn’t take me far . . .
Posted by Oafish and Infantile on 2006 08 26 at 05:00 AM • permalinkOops, my bad Benson . . . . I didn’t realise the code was case-sensitive.
Here’s Caroline Overington’s article in full (apologies in advance for the length of the post, but it’s worth the read):
Howard’s South Park pals
Young voters have flocked to the Prime Minister as the good times continue to roll, writes Caroline Overington27feb06
“The man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at 40 he has no head.”
- Aristide BriandIt is 100 years since Aristide Briand’s expulsion from the French Socialist Party prompted him to utter words that have become part of the received wisdom of politics.
Before John Howard, the notion that young people leaned to the left was largely unchallenged. The youth vote was the dominant force that propelled Gough Whitlam into power in the 1972 “It’s Time” election and stayed with Labor throughout the Hawke and Keating years.
By 2004, however, when Howard won his fourth election, the ground had shifted dramatically. Less than a third of young people—32 per cent—voted for Mark Latham, while 41 per cent went with Howard.Even allowing for the 17 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds who voted for the Greens, the uncomfortable truth for the Opposition was that, for the first time since reliable age-specific polling began, less than half of young people were voting for candidates from the Left.
Howard’s policies were hardly tailored to young people. He spoke for the middle class, caring more for business than for endangered marsupials. Young people would be expected to work for the dole, and Howard was stridently opposed to student unionism, indeed to all compulsory unionism, and to the republic. Under Howard’s Government, HECS fees have doubled. Yet Howard has, over the past 10 years, been utterly transformed in the eyes of the young. To the horror of many baby boomers, Howard’s new constituency, the “young fogies”, adore him the way their parents loved to smoke dope.
Howard’s position as Prime Minister of choice for people aged 18 to 24 became apparent during the 1998 election when Labor arguably misread the mood of the electorate on such issues as immigration. Many voters, particularly in Queensland, abandoned the ALP (and the Nationals) for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. In the aftermath, some in Labor concluded that the result was an aberration but, in a Newspoll taken in June 1999, a year after the election, young people confirmed their preference for conservative politics. The Australian’s political editor Dennis Shanahan wrote that the “young fogies” had poured across to the Coalition “and deserted Labor so dramatically that there has been a complete reversal of support for the ALP”. “The youngest voters are now the Coalition’s second-strongest area of support, behind its traditional power base of the over-50s,” Shanahan noted.
The results were confirmed in the 2001 election when a Morgan poll found that 18 to 24-year-olds voting in that election gave Labor their primary vote at a rate of only 1.2 per cent more than the general population. By comparison, in 1990, young people gave Labor their primary vote by 10.4 per cent more than the general population.
In October 2004—the election that would give the Coalition historic control of both chambers—the “young fogies” of generations X and Y again deserted Labor. Clive Bean of the Queensland University of Technology, one of the principal investigators in the Australian Election Study of voting behaviour conducted after each poll, told The Australian in 2005 that it might have been the first time more young people voted Liberal than Labor. The trend was particularly noticeable among young men, 49 per cent of whom voted for Howard, compared with only 28 per cent who voted Labor. In the 25 to 30 age group, an overwhelming 62 per cent of men voted for Howard, compared with 27 per cent for Latham.
The rise of conservative youth under Howard mirrors a similar movement in the US, where blogger Andrew Sullivan coined the term “South Park Republicans” in 2001 to describe young iconoclasts who “see through the cant and the piety of the Left and cannot help giggling”. The term comes from the anti-establishment television cartoon series South Park whose heroes are four, foul-mouthed fourth-graders who gleefully lampoon the sacred values of the Left.
TO BE CONTINUED
Posted by Oafish and Infantile on 2006 08 26 at 05:03 AM • permalinkCONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST
In his US bestseller South Park Conservatives, Brian C. Anderson says the program is “the number-one example of the new anti-liberalism”. He notes that the show’s single black person is called Token. Anderson describes how the show lampoons the boomers, who championed individual happiness over familial responsibility and promoted no-fault divorce.
In Australia, recent studies have shown Australian young people reacting against the liberal-progressive values of their parents in much the same way. Clemenger BBDO’s 2005 survey Tomorrow’s Parents Today found that young people were significantly more conservative than their parents. They were more likely to volunteer, to give to charity and to go to church. They were also more likely to marry, and there is already evidence that they plan to have their children earlier.
According to Ian Manning of National Economics: “You do get the feeling that forgoing worldly ambition for the sake of having kids is gradually coming back into favour. In the past, people have said, ‘Oh, I can’t have a baby yet, I’ve got to pursue my career’. But maybe it’s become socially acceptable to say, ‘No, I’d rather have a family’.”
The Democrats’ 2005 youth poll, based on a survey that is distributed to secondary schools, TAFE, universities, youth, and church and community groups across Australia, found that 64 per cent of students viewed family as the most important issue in their lives, ahead of health, education and money. Compared with earlier polls, there was a substantial drop in the number who had tried marijuana (from 43 to 33 per cent in 10 years) and much less support for the decriminalisation of drugs. Young people were also increasingly backing the Howard Government’s policy of mandatory detention for asylum-seekers, with support rising from 41 per cent in 2002 to 58 per cent in 2005.
Former Education Minister Brendan Nelson, who dealt every day with young Australians, is not surprised. He points to some of the obvious factors: the economy has boomed under Howard; there are plenty of new jobs, especially for young people; interest rates have stayed low; school retention rates have increased; and there are more opportunities for travel. Young people, in particular, have never had it so good.
During the 2004 election, some within Labor expressed the deluded hope that recruiting rock star Peter Garrett to stand as a Labor MP would appeal to young people, but Labor’s Nicola Roxon disagreed. “We have to remember he was a hero when we were younger, so we think he has youth appeal, and it’s true, to some extent, he does, but if you asked a 19-year-old, they might not even know who Midnight Oil was. He recently came to speak at a function for me, and he was fabulous, but the people who wanted to come were 40 and 50-year-old men. He gave a very passionate and interesting speech, and people were really engaged, so that really is our key. We’ve got a perfectly good message, if people listen to it.”
Roxon’s candid remarks illustrate Labor’s critical failing over the past decade. While Howard has been promoting the benefits of a healthy economy, Labor has been diverted by issues such as the republic, the symbolism of Aboriginal reconciliation and opposition to the war in Iraq, which may be important to some young people but are low on their list of priorities.
In 1998, after Howard decided he would not support the Yes vote in the constitutional referendum for a republic, Labor decided to embarrass him by supporting the Yes vote. It provided backing to young republican stars, such as Jason Yat-Sen Li and the lipstick princess, Poppy King, and to the movement that adopted youth oriented slogans such as Give an Australian the Head Job and which distributed condoms marked Rooting for a Republic, in the hope they would appeal to young people. In the end, only 46.5 per cent of voters voted Yes to a republic and there was scant evidence that young people backed it more firmly than others.
TO BE CONTINUED
Posted by Oafish and Infantile on 2006 08 26 at 05:04 AM • permalinkCONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST
Labor saw a chance to win back the young vote when Howard backed the US-led war in Iraq. In some of the largest demonstrations since the Vietnam War, young protesters led a cardboard puppet of Howard up the street making it lick the bottom of a cardboard George W. Bush. More than 25,000 students took part in the Books not Bombs protest. Yet, as the 2004 election showed, anti-war feeling did not translate into votes. It was another disappointment for Labor, after the Sorry Day march for Aboriginal reconciliation across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in May 2000, which delivered no measurable swing to Labor in the November 2001 election.
These carefully staged events were in any case aberrations to a general trend, in Australia and most other Western nations since the end of the Cold War, away from student and youth activism. The Palm Sunday peace marches, which once were dominated by young people, are essentially dead and even protests against voluntary student unionism in 2005 attracted nothing like the crowds of protesters that once routinely gathered on university campuses.
In part, that’s because young people do not have time to paint slogans on to protest signs. They work an average of 20 hours a week, on top of full-time or part-time study, and they leave university with HECS debts worth $30,000 or more. Since the collapse of communism, young people are less likely to adopt the Marxist view that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. To them the fruit of capitalism is new cars, plasma TVs and trips overseas. They have grown up in an age of prosperity in which the welfare state appears redundant. A vibrant economy has emboldened young people to create small businesses of their own.
These factors have meant that Howard—straight-laced, conservative Howard—has been responsible for something that smells suspiciously like teen spirit. He has encouraged the young to rebel.
Extract from The Howard Factor - A Decade That Changed the Nation edited by Nick Cater and published today by Melbourne University Press. $29.95.
Posted by Oafish and Infantile on 2006 08 26 at 05:04 AM • permalinkYet, as the 2004 election showed, anti-war feeling did not translate into votes. It was another disappointment for Labor, after the Sorry Day march for Aboriginal reconciliation across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in May 2000, which delivered no measurable swing to Labor in the November 2001 election. [Emphasis mine.]
Surprise! People don’t like feeling sorry all the time about every damn thing under the sun that they never, personally, had a thing to do with in the first place.
These damn kids. They just refuse to wallow.
#5 Wronwright said, “When the Seventies came we all became apathetic.”
That was the end result of Disco Syndrome. Symptoms included wearing doubleknit polyester, very wide lapels, chunky heels, overuse of hair product, and an undesireable urge to dance.
The overuse of hair product and the wearing of doubleknit polyester caused the subject to sink into an apathy that was only alleviated by the song stylings of the BeeGees, Donna Summer, KC and the Sunshine Band, and Kool and the Gang.
Frequently, victims of Disco Syndrome engaged in confused and flurried sexual couplings, accompanied by repetitions of “Afternoon Delight” and Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.”
A bad time was had by all.
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The kids today who are conservative do not need a life time of experience and thought to arrive at conservatism. Merely looking at their elder moonbats is sufficiently cautionary.