I’m sure you’ve heard the claim, “You’ll get more conservative as you get older.” Throughout the middle of the twentieth century, the reality was that our society was designed to kill anyone who wasn’t a conservative. In the last six months, this trend has reversed in a big way.
War and racism were the two most fundamental forces behind the creation of the “middle class” after World War 2. For the first time, the GI bill and FHA program handed trillions of dollars to white conservatives and funded the creation of the suburbs. “White flight” saw an enormous swathe of the urban tax base and white population leave to create new enclaves outside the cities. As an institution, the suburbs became an extension of the ideology of the class of people for whom they were created. Bans on ethnic minorities were common in these new white enclaves, and black people were specifically exempted from access to much of the government’s white-flight funding. Locally funded education in the new suburban enclaves meant white suburbanites withheld funding for urban communities; carefully denying access to quality education to entire generations of the urban minorities.
While that government money kept flowing, the suburbs continued to grow and prosper. At the same time, white flight flight meant the diverse urban landscapes continued to suffer. Since then, the Keynesian multiplier has been running its course in those suburban enclaves. Real estate markets still play a central role in recycling the trillions that were handed to white conservatives, with homes doubling or tripling in “value” and exchanging hands to fund small businesses and education, so the next generation of white conservatives can continue the work of cultivating their dystopian anti-community vision of a segregated, reactionary world.
For these reasons and many more, our society has long punished and systematically exterminated non-conservatives and especially non-whites. For example, there are significant differences in life expectancy between black and white people living in the same neighborhoods, even in the San Francisco Bay Area. Those differences are much more extreme in the more common highly-segregated neighborhoods in the bay area.
One side effect of the systematic extermination of non-whites and non-conservatives is the fact that white conservatives get to vote more times in their lives since they live longer. Also, because of gerrymandering and centuries of racial voter suppression efforts, white conservative voices in America count for more than black non-conservative voices.
All of that changed very suddenly in 2020. Let’s look at two graphs…
Statistically in America, the generations that are oldest right now are also the most conservative. Another thing that comes with age is risk of death from coronavirus. This connection alone is already enough to scare many pundits into fearing that the ongoing leftward demographic shifts will be dramatically accelerated by the effects of the pandemic. Some have gone so far as to speculate that the mass death forecast for the president’s core voter base could cost him the election.
It is perhaps ironic therefore that his strategy has been to do nothing and pretend it will go away. Maybe it’s ironic that the white conservative movement in America decided to achieve consensus on several salient points. These older white conservatives — the people most at risk — tend to think coronavirus is not real or exaggerated. The same people also refuse to take even the most basic health precautions. This rejection of reality amplifies the potential impact of the pandemic.
For this reason, the long-standing trend of systematic extermination of non-conservatives has suddenly been reversed, as conservatives hoist themselves high on their own petards, committing this final act of mass suicide in defense of their core principle of rejecting evidence and focusing on ideological divisions instead.