Ryan Burge, a Professor of Practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at WashU, says fewer Americans are getting more conservative as they age. People born between 1940 and 1954 still are, but among people born from 1955 to 1979, there's no change in political outlook as they age. For those born in 1980 or later, it looks like they are becoming more liberal as they age.
I take this as a hopeful sign. I don't think anyone on the political right has any idea how to organize the new world AI is quickly taking us to.
In a few years, driving jobs and unskilled work will be gone to cheap robots. AI is poised to be able to do more and more white-collar work. At some point, the choice will be the chaos of collapse if we insist the old free-market economy is the only way to do things, or figuring out how everyone lives, gets fed, and gets healthcare in a world where most people won't have jobs.
The fact that more people will be left-leaning and liberal than conservative in this world is a hopeful sign that they won't choose collapse and clinging to the old order.
In a reversal of a historic trend, Americans are now becoming more liberal as they age, not more conservative. This may have large implications for issues like UBI, as robots & AI take over more and more human jobs.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
29 Comments
I was born in the late 60’s and have definitely become more liberal as I get older.
Burge’s data is interesting but the causal framing deserves scrutiny. Are people “becoming more liberal as they age,” or are Millennials/Gen Z simply staying liberal rather than drifting right? Those are meaningfully different phenomena with different implications.
The traditional “age = conservative” pattern was partly explained by wealth accumulation — you become more protective of assets you’ve built. But if younger generations are structurally locked out of wealth-building (housing, job security, pensions), the incentive to shift right never materializes. The politics follow the material conditions.
On the UBI/AI angle: the assumption that a more liberal electorate automatically translates to UBI adoption skips several hard steps. Political will ≠ policy implementation. Even broadly popular ideas like universal healthcare have stalled for decades in the US despite majority support. The real bottleneck isn’t ideology — it’s institutional capture and the speed at which policy can adapt to economic disruption.
The more unsettling scenario: AI-driven unemployment arrives faster than any political realignment can respond, regardless of which direction the electorate is leaning.
It’s a hopeful sign with the large young male conservatives issue.
Hopefully they grow older, see life, and touch grass
Turns out when you prevent people from having the same or better life than they grew up with in terms of housing, employment, retirement, and opportunities for recreation, they might end up wanting to see some change in the world.
The whole thing people are missing with the concern about young people becoming conservative is that’s exactly how most of us started our adulthood too. Then we had to live and realized how stupid being conservative is. Turns out when your brain hasn’t been smoothed by lead poisoning you can be smart enough to learn things.
I find this true with myself. For me, it is because I have time to look into what is going on.
Yeah, maybe not.
Gen Z males twice as likely as baby boomers to believe wives should obey husbands [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/05/gen-z-men-baby-boomers-wives-should-obey-husbands](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/05/gen-z-men-baby-boomers-wives-should-obey-husbands)
Hard to be conservative when you have nothing to conserve.
Whoda thunk that people that have little to no prospect of ever owning or retiring comfortably would be disinterested in conservative ideologies?
Wishful thinking. My observations as I’ve aged are the opposite. Friends and family all moved to the right.
I believe the millennial / elder millennials saw a promise broken and have lived through enough “unprecedented events” that we are tired of boomers and prior robbing us of our “American dream”.
A store clerk could raise a family with a traditional wife (stay at home) and still have money for trips, boats, retirement.
The policies of those that came before us cared little for those that came after and we are sick of it.
Millennials were always more liberal than Gen-X and before.
Boomers started liberal only as a protest to Vietnam. They were never really liberal. They just didn’t collectively have enough bone spurs. The 80s happened the moment they hit the office so – the very moment they could impact society from the inside we took a massive rightward turn.
Everything to do with Civil Rights in their generation was actually done by the generation that fought in WWII and so personally saw why such things are important.
Gen-X, my generation, was apathetic to most political issues but shaped by Boomers into a need to hustle to survive. That made most of them right leaning as they believed the company line.
Millennials were our first real progressive generation since the 50s… But have lacked a unifying cause like the Civil Rights movement or a massive war against tyranny in their youth. So while the ‘Greatest Generation’ gave us the post WWII end of wars in western Europe, Civil Rights, and the eventual deconstruction of Colonialism… Millennials gave us coffee culture and lo-fi music.
Gen-Z I don’t know. Social media has made them right leaning. They’re like the “kids of the 1880s” in a sense. In that I think the generation after them will go progressive again as the bill starts to come due for the billionaires the same way it did for their predecessors at the end of the first gilded age.
Right now Gen-Z is drunk on hate and aggression the same way folks were during the ‘Indian Wars’ and ‘African / Asian Colonialism’ of the late 1800s. They’re having fun seeing other people suffer, and that will create the setup for our next generation of wars.
[https://linktr.ee/RyanBurge](https://linktr.ee/RyanBurge)
That guy doesn’t have an agenda at all.
I heard it best as that to be a conservative you have to have something you want to conserve. People in their 30s to 50s have children looking up to them to do something about an absolutely broken world. Some of us are inheriting civil war, almost all of us will inherit WWIII in some way. The environment is fucked and we’re pouring what’s left of our resources into dangerous machines to put people out of jobs. There’s very little that conservatism has to offer you at this point if you’re not in the 1%, you have someone you hate enough to throw aside all other morals, you feel you have a religious mandate to be one, or you simply don’t give a fuck. Conservative values are more often than not Authoritarian values and Authoritarian values are killing us.
I mean yeah dude, it was gonna happen at some point. I’m 33 and I don’t ever see myself turning conservative 🤷♂️
I just assumed the trend was we maintain our liberalism for far longer than before. Getting more liberal is not what I expected. Good news regardless.
Who would have thought that things like COVID would make people realize we suffered completely avoidable disasters and didn’t? We had the highest death toll for COVID and also had the best economic recovery afterwards – under different presidents. And, oh look, highest death toll from COVID president came back and started a new war. I’m starting to think this political ideology doesn’t actually care about life.
I always thought of political ideology as a spectrum represented as a rubber band. I might be near the center, but when the right gets more right, it pulls that center to the right too, and even though my views don’t change, suddenly I’m on the left because one side moved the needle.
Nobody is going to be pro corporation when jobs are scarce. You think laborers are going to vote pro corp, worker oppressor repubs when they start getting replaced by robots?
So the the historically selfish are seeing the writing on the wall and becoming “liberal” to promote social programs so that they don’t lose out on what they may still retain, thus effectively still being “conservative” ?
Seriously doubt it when you have 80 million + hardcore fascist terrorists.
I don’t know that people ever really got more conservative as they aged. Older Americans were often more conservative than younger Americans in the 1970 – 2020 era, but that doesn’t mean their age caused them to be that way. They could simply have been more aligned with conservatism when they were younger and then just got older. Remember that the people in the age cohort are constantly shuffling in and out of it as they age and kick the bucket.
I bet it has a lot to do with taking the lead out of gasoline.
Because it’s not age that makes one more conservative, it’s wealth, and we aren’t getting the boomer wealth.
Are the people in control becoming more liberal? CEOs seem like they aren’t as they aren’t implementing UBI or even livable wages.
I see AI used to justify lay offs and that’s it.
Maybe Americans have always been the same but the parties around them are changing?
Sir, the people who have all the money I’m not going to care about those who can’t survive. Regardless, if we’re all becoming more liberal, which I think is the word that should just be described as I give a fuck about other people.
There is no guarantee. I can do everything that we say it will be able to do. Yes, once again the people with the money will do everything they can to make sure it happens.
The world will be at a crossroads eventually and I don’t have faith they’re gonna make the right decisions
Is there anymore direct evil then actively sabotaging national parks, cutting aid to cause death around the world, starting wars while campaigning against your opponents on that position, while stealing other countries natural resources, raping children, and putting oil barons in charge of the epa and polluting all our countries waterways?
Your link goes to a general page for him rather than something more in depth, and I’m very dubious about this given that the central premise (people becoming more conservative as they age) has been repeatedly debunked. Even the (limited) quality data that way is more concerned with edge cases (such as people who start voting later). On the whole though the data actually shows that peoples political views are relatively stable after being formed at a young age.
Don’t get me wrong, we’re still likely to be becoming more liberal of a society over time (relatively), but that’s based more on data from things like which president someone came of age under (which is still not as promising as it could be due to things like the Reagan bump).
owning property is the dividing line. that’s historically been tied to age, but somewhere along 2008, that’s been severed.
AI is late to the conversation.
Americans have already learned how much of their natural, economic and healthcare resources are being consumed by elites.
Real wages have stagnated since the 80’s, with gains made only at the top percentiles. Meanwhile, Americans workers have demonstrated higher productivity for decades but are getting squeezed harder for less.
My old man was a Republican until he approached retirement and saw what his party was doing to Medicare and he abruptly changed his allegiance.
Most important: Americans have watched “conservatives” hollow out the nation: destroying once solid institutions, regulatory agencies and fiddling while infrastructure crumbles while granting tax breaks for the wealthy. The lesson is clear.