this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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the 🍒
What's worse is whoever posted this added 10.
18-39
"You'll agree more with republicans as you age" was always something I heard from right wing nut jobs when I became voting age. In fact, the opposite has happened.
There used to be a bit more truth to that statement. But not anymore. I'm exactly 43 years old.
Republicans today aren't the Republicans of my childhood and youth. They were bad then, but holy shit they're terrible now.
Maybe because they expected more of us would have wealth to protect? I always thought it was a stupid idea they told themselves to explain why their kids didn’t like them.
Personally, I’ve always been concerned about corrupt leaders coopting the inevitable wave of power coming to the millennials as the boomers faded away. I didn’t want to become like the previous generation, so I’ve paid extra attention to resisting being convinced to hate “out” groups. Only, the power never transitioned. Egg on my face, I guess.
Even as a child I knew the older generation was fucking everything up. I kept waiting for them to disappear but they never have...
It's only as I have grown older that I understand that these terrible people just get replaced with more and sometimes worse people...
I often heard something similar, in spirit. Roughly translated: "if you aren't a commie when you're 20, then you're heartless; but if you're still a commie when you're 40, then you're brainless."
I'm 40 this year. Still a communist. I guess that makes me brainless?
I’ve heard it as “if you’re still a communist when you’re 40, then you’re poor.”
You can also substitute communist with socialist or liberal.
Also I’ve heard another version where 20 is democrat, 30 is Republican, and 40 is libertarian.
It’s all “my team” kind of bullshit.
I started out libertarian in my twenties, then democrat in my thirties, now socialist in my forties, and I'm not poor.
If you're not a leftist when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're not a leftist when you're 40, you have no brain.
I originally heard this as:
If you're a Republican at 20, then you're heartless. If you're a Democrat at 40, then you're broke.
What they actually mean is "You'll agree more when you're rich and complicit in benefiting from ever more unethical practices of people around you that you now have to make mental gymnastics about to make yourself still seem like a decent person". But that's a bit too long.
You get more and more immersed in right wing propaganda as you get older. You get exposed to more reactionary institutions, you find yourself increasingly segregated from people of different races and income scales, you suffer the psychological torments of the capitalist rat race more nakedly, and it all adds up.
Lots of people I grew up with in high school are Trump Republicans now. They weren't MAGA shitheads in school, mostly because they were blank slates. They were warm to ideas like "Free College" when they were in college and cooled on it once they graduated (or flunked out). They were "moderate" when they had friends who were coming out of the closet and dealing with racial abuse and coming home in body bags during the Iraq War. But they grew increasingly right-wing when the law firm and the O&G offices and techbro money orgies demanded it of them.
Even before AI started straight up poisoning people's brains, they were getting into Facebook groups and Discord channels that rotted them. Nevermind the endless barrage of NYT / WaPo "Why These Trump Voters Need To Be Listened To" articles and CBS / ABC "Transgender Athletes: A Threat To Your Kid's Scholarship?" TV slop that drives so many liberals insane. Nevermind the Zionists, those nice sweet liberal folks whose faces melt right off the moment you suggest butchering millions of brown people might be bad Middle East policy.
Fucking sucks, but time really does turn people rightward when you live in a fascist hellhole.
that's not being a blank slate though, that's being so devoid of empathy that you can't even imagine what it's like being yourself a few years ago.
It's people who don't have a strong opinion because they haven't been bombarded with a particular flavor of social media yet.
A twenty-year-old is going to have a different view of alternative ethnic groups than a forty-year-old, simply by way of psychological attrition. You can only get so many "Black Man With Sour Face In Orange Jumpsuit" local news jump-scare stories before the racism is bludgeoned into your gray matter.
sure but that's all predicated on growing up in an individualist culture.
People also become more isolated from “others” as they age, at least those with stable jobs. They are surrounded by people of the same financial ability, and their job keeps them in an area, and their income matches to a house.
It’s not until they get laid off or they have a medical event that they start to think about it again. As long as the life compared to their peers is ok and their bellies are full, they don’t complain about trillionaires.
Problem now is that even those of us that managed the dream fucking hate them because they won’t share shit due to them being in some weird pedophilia club or something.
I assume in order to not be mad at them you need to have 10 mil invested or something.
I still hate them.
Even past this, I think we undersell the socializing value of public schools. This is particularly true of the big state universities, where you're going to be bumping shoulders with people from the opposite side of the state (even the other side of the country). But even public high schools have a way of co-mingling people from the other side of the tracks for one reason or another.
Absolutely this. Bigger cities can kinda-sorta avoid this. But the people you know best are going to be your coworkers and your neighbors, strictly by virtue of proximity. One of the perks of social institutions like churches and gyms is that you butt up against people who aren't perfectly parallel with you in terms of socio-economic status.
It happens, I'm sure. Constant exposure to propaganda and an increase in money can do that to you. But it didn't happen to my parents (who are seniors now) and it didn't happen to me, yet.
My point is, it won't happen to everyone like I was told by people in the town I grew up and first voted in. I grew up in a conservative hellhole, one that may or may not have one of the most corrupt and theocratic governments of any state, if that gives you any hints.
Sure. Nothing happens to everyone (except the one big thing).
But it happens to enough people such that it shapes general public perceptions and vibes.
But I agree, it cuts both ways. I wasn't a raging leftist in high school. I flirted with Republicans, because they were in the majority. I flirted with Libertarianism, because it seemed like they agreed me on a few things at least. I flirted with the local liberal establishments, because it at least looked like a runway towards progressive policies.
You can only see so much corruption, insincerity, and complicity before it drives you to the fringes. If I wasn't a fire-breathing leftist tankie wumao third-worlder Bookchin afficianado, I guess I would have ended up doing QAnon shit from the strain of it all.
Ha, I thought theocratic government would narrow it down. It's Utah.
I'm from Texas. From my experience, it could apply to anyone over here or east straight on to Florida. Nevermind the nightmare politics of the upper midwest or the fascist fuckwit colony of Idaho.
Oh yeah, I mean, religion is everywhere, including in those governments. But the Mormon church quite literally is the government in Utah. The vast majority of the state government are temple-recommend card carrying members of the church, and also went on missions. These aren't just practicing christians, most of them are bishops or high ranking members of the church.
I think that it's a difficult thing to understand from the outside, but if you lived there for more than a year, you'd definitely understand what I mean. Utah is a huge bubble. They turn their noses up at anyone perceived as an outsider (in practice, this meant "not Mormon"), including Atheists, people who were agnostic, Christians, Catholics, and people practicing Judaism. The way this was done was very insidious as well, because to your face, they'd be all nice, but then you'd hear their disapproval and judgement through the grapevine.
Anyway, I'm rambling/venting now, but my point is that Utah is about as close as you can get to a fully theocratic state in the US, it's much closer to something like the Vatican than anywhere else that I've lived or visited. Idaho is the way it is because of Utah - it has an extremely high Mormon population as well.
And the Southern Baptist Convention run Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi. Meanwhile, Opus Dei Catholics have their hooks deep into Missouri and Louisiana. Churches are a common way to organize a political vanguard in order to manage an ostensibly democratic institution. The Mormons have a ton of influence in neighboring Arizona, Nevada, California, and across the border in Sonora, Mexico.
I grew up in a town outside of Houston, Texas called Sugar Land. We also used to jokingly refer to it as "The Bubble", as it was a Planned Community that resulted from a collaboration of the O&G industry, the D.R. Horton Home Builders, and the Sugar Creek Baptist Church under Tom DeLay. Then the Catholic Church moved in and blew the whole thing up by flooding the district with the perfidious Irish and the nefarious Taiwanese.
But yes, being one of half a dozen Jewish kids in a sea of Southerners was certainly an experience.
US Theocracies are more common than you'd first guess. Louisiana is fully co-opted by southern Catholics. Check out the Veiled Prophet Society in St. Louis (half a zillion podcasts on the subject). Texas has its share of outright cult towns, the Branch Davidians being an iconic but hardly idiosyncratic example. And then you've got the various Black Baptist church tentpole institutions from Harlem to Oakland (marginally less toxic than the whites, but no less influential nor dogmatic).
The fastest way to get a large number of people to vote for you is to appeal to a member of the clergy. So quite a bit of US democratic power springs from a comparatively small but vocal set of religious hubs.
I am in no way denying that other states do similar things. I am saying that Utah is a completely different animal than those states. It was founded, incorporated, built, and run by Mormons the entire time (there used to even be a Mormon army), with a super majority of residents themselves being Mormon, all while the Mormon church is one of the richest religious organizations in the county. They're literally one of the biggest private land owners in the country as well. They are rich and by far the most powerful organization in Utah and Idaho.
Again, I do genuinely believe that you'd have to live there (and thus deal with the Utah government) to understand what I mean. It is not the same as the south. There aren't just cult towns like you describe, that is literally the whole state. Even relatively blue areas such as SLC suffer from the control and oversight of the church.
It's insular because it's Mormons giving the reach around to other Mormons. But you see the same social dynamic replicated in other religious groups in other states. You just don't see the bright dividing lines, because the religious organizations transcend state boundaries in other areas of the country. There's not some hard stop between the Kansas and Missouri state lines, where being a Southern Baptist begins and ends.
I've lived a number of places, some of them very deeply religious and others much more plural. I can't speak to Utah specifically, but I can speak to a few places that were functionally operating as Jonestown minus the kool-aid. If you give the history of these states a hard look, you can see the same patterns and the same social structures. "First Colony" got its name for a reason, and it echoes through the community in a way you wouldn't understand unless you lived there.
I'm not sure if this drives home part of my point, but take a look at this (if you click the link, you might have to click "search this area"):
https://www.google.com/maps/search/Church+Of+Jesus+Christ+Of+Latter-Day+Saints/@40.2957943,-111.7057408,15z
That is a tiny, zoomed in silver of roughly three and a half x two Utah blocks (yes, even the block system is different because of the Mormon grid) picked at random in the Utah valley. That is NINE separate LDS churches in that image, all within a 2 minute or less drive of each other.
There is no such thing as an "independent" Mormon church, either, like the religions you are talking about. These all have members paying 10% tithes which goes to the church leadership as a whole. They are wards and individual churches under the same exact umbrella. Go to any place in the valley, and you'll find even more. Where I grew up, there were four LDS churches within a 5 minute walk of my house. No joke.
This is why Mormonism is completely different than any of the other religions you have mentioned. They are a full blown corporation, and there are no independent churches. Zero.
Harris County has 3,031 churches in total, giving a church-to-population ratio of about 1:1,350. Salt Lake City is closer to 1:700. I suppose you could big-dick me and insist that Utah has more. But at some point, we're just arguing a matter of degrees.
Indianapolis, Indiana comes in at 2,892 churches with a population of 830k, giving it 1:289. Here's a street in Tuxedo park with five churches in walking distance that I found just googling around.
No. The Mormons are much more like the Catholics in that regard. Abet, more in the style of an MLM than a horizontal monopoly. The proliferation of Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, and other denominational churches in Texas is much more free-lance. Throwing down churches like we throw down oil wells.
It's a variation on a very well-established theme.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree here. I lived in Utah for multiple decades, and the bubble also goes both ways. If you can't experience it for yourself, you will not understand.
Using SLC to compare is also not ideal. SLC is the least Mormon part of Utah. You should be comparing entire states, not just the cities. You should also be comparing the actual religion, and not just blanketing all of them into one. Apples to apples.
Utah has at least 5,229 LDS churches, and 24 temples (which are reserved only for the members with temple recommends). Not counting those temples, Utah has roughly 1 church for every 652 people. Not everyone is Mormon, the vast majority are though. If we only count church members, this goes to 1:411. This is all state wide. No individual cities, and it's one religious organization (I prefer corporation).
Samesies, I have no idea who perpetuates this stuff.
Getting older includes losing your field of fucks to give. If you've spent your life bullying and celebrating your ignorance like them, you'll become more conservative. If your views and your morals have stayed somewhat consistent and you've been generous, courteous and compassionate, those values will persist your lack of fucks to give, often pushing you further left rather than right.
Same here. Turns out reality has a liberal bias unless you go out of your way to ignore it.
prior to the internet the establishment controlled public opinion
...or ignored it.
Really? Reality is biased towards oligarchy?
No, oligarchy is a poor approach that's applied to reality and enforced by violence.
This you?
Liberalism is a fundamentally oligarchic, right-wing ideology. So what are you really trying to say?
In my country (US) liberals are known as left-wing and conservatives as right-wing.
There is no such thing as a "left-wing" liberal anywhere on earth. It's a fundamentally oligarchic, right-wing ideology. Always has been, always will be - everywhere.
If you think there's anything "left" about liberal oligarchy it means you've been lied to.
Also... those people calling themselves "conservatives?" They're just fundamentalist liberals - ie, just liberals who doesn't hide the fact that they're all about protecting their private ownership over the economy - the core tenet of liberalism - and care little for the fluff that liberalism has traditionally used to camouflage that core tenet.
That's all they are.
Kthx, I'm not here to argue about your worldview, have a good one!
We're not arguing about my worldview - we're arguing about yours.
Can't take a hint? Okie dokie you're blocked bye.
Maybe you just never grew up and allowing you to vote was a mistake. Have you considered seeing a doctor about this?