Why do people go to the right as they get older?
If they do, that is
I was very pleased to be interviewed this week by John Fleming for his mildly legendary ‘So It Goes’ blog about my novel ‘Midlands’. The interview is here.
I’m always available for all and any podcasts or promotion to plug the book, of which I’m very proud.
Now on with today’s post.
A recent post of mine on political homelessness prompted an interesting comment from a reader; why do people as they get older generally only go to the right?
Why do we see fewer people becoming left radicals as they age, recanting their youthful conservatism to take up a position on politics’ left-wing?
You could argue there are exceptions, like the writer Harold Pinter’s strident anti-Americanism1 or the later John Le Carré who spoke of his ‘rage of age’ as he became increasingly hostile to the conditions of the post-Cold War world – and if I could conceive of anyone going to the left as they age it’d be someone who’d been at the heart of the establishment when young. Nonetheless, the overall tendency is to say goodbye to the left, a journey everyone from Woodrow Wyatt to Dave Rubin has made.
It may just be that we hear more from those who leave the left. It’s a matter of coverage, as it is just in the left’s nature to care more than the right about who is in or out of it, given how many people on the left enjoy denouncing their own apostates. This means there’s less market for articles and videos where someone declares they are leaving the political right. The right hates them; the left thinks they should have figured out correct politics sooner. As a background condition, the left apparently apparently reads more than the right anyway, while conservatives watch more TV, meaning the long and involved article about how one became disillusioned with right politics of whatever stripe has less potential readers.
Meanwhile, conservatives are both less fussy and more celebratory of those who join their tribe, welcoming them for offering an insider perspective and, crucially, confirming that liberals are insufferable; the left-winger being paid to provide that service often finds that though the left may have lost their sympathies the right certainly hasn’t gained them. It’s worth acknowledging that in the US the ‘Never Trump’ conservatives, centred around podcasts like The Bulwark, do provide some equivalent of the ‘alienated conservative’ for liberal audience; others, like the radio host Glenn Beck, have made a full recovery from ‘Trump Derangement syndrome’.
Yet let’s try and step back from the social dimensions of this and ask at a more basic level: Is there something about the natural course of a human life which supports a shift towards the right? And, conversely, anything about left-wing politics which are harder to sustain with age?
On the latter point, it seems to me that the left is wedded to a kind of universal affirmation of brotherhood which ageing somewhat undermines. Age particularizes; you might embark in life with an encompassing love of mankind but by middle-age you’ve inevitably met a good few idiots; you may even have met idiots disproportionately from one country or background. There is a certain inevitable loss of innocence, a shedding of what the Germans called blauaugikeit (blue-eyedness) that lends itself to a slightly less peace-and-love vision of the world and, indeed, at times a sense that it is often exactly a peace-and-love vision of the world which enables wrong-doing.
As you age, you’ve seen the complexity of things; that life isn’t as simple as decent ordinary humanity being exploited by an avaricious capitalist class, that people are their own enablers in their oppression and difficulties, and the explanation that this ‘false consciousness’ is also a function of capitalism seems frustratingly hermetical. Overall, you’re at a stage where, to quote the great British rapper Roots Manuva, ‘Situations are complex/because you’ve got particulars/I got particulars’.
There is undoubtedly an aspect of this which just maturity, like when you see an online tug at the heart strings like ‘We should cancel HS2 and give the money to nurses!’ and now think ‘Capital expenditure doesn’t work like that.’ This is conservatism in the sense of Robert Conquest’s First Political Law, ‘Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.’