This is why paying attention to generational trends is necessary for political strategy.
Each peer group has among them influential individuals who can recognize the political and economic realities, as opposed to the media propaganda, and can logically guide their peer groups toward more reasonable decisions.
Millenials are the largest birth group, year by year, in the population. More than 65% of them will be eligible to vote in 2014.
The peer pressure among millenials is moving them rapidly against liberal policies and against Democrats, however strong their public school leftist indoctrination might have been. They are feeling the very real effects of a growing poverty, with the gloomiest economic prospects since the previous Great Depression, and the very real impression that they have been victims of the greatest sucker game in history.
I see less and less of these young people sporting facial piercings. That may seem like a trivial point, but I see it as a huge shift in the generational mindset.
The millenials are the next generation of the Hero Generation of WW-II; those scruffy, ragged, disillusioned Depression Era kids who rose up, showed up, united and fought together to defeat the NAZIs and the Japanese.
Our sons are millennials. They are disgusted with the boomer generation, and clearly see that their generation is having its future diminished. While they’re very negative on the D politicians, they’re not really any more impressed with the R side of the spectrum. I’d say they’re more libertarian in outlook than either major party. The NSA issues are huge, as is the economy and they’re fed up with any kind of war. I’m not sure how typical they are, having grown up in a D-hostile home, but from what they tell me, many of their college friends are unhappy with the economic prospects. The youth give me more hope than the majority of boomers. I don’t see them changing their politics after so many decades, no matter what evidence they’re shown.
My fear is that they'll end up fighting us and each other.
I don't think the generation that voted an unprecedented 66% for Obama, and refused to serve in the military, is going to be all that.
And went on to be great life long supporters of big government policies and were as a group staunch ‘Roosevelt’ democrats their whole lives. I was raised by that generation and while they did some great things they were unrelenting believers in the good that comes from government.
The WWII generation gave us FDR, JFK, LBJ, The New Deal, The Fair Deal, and The Great Society. They gave us the mess we are in. And while they are due accolades for the defense of the nation, they have more than their fair share of faults.