Liberals, it is said, have a baby problem. They don’t have enough of them, compared to conservatives. And this failure to replenish their ranks is a reason why they lose elections. Call it a fertility gap.
“The political right is having a lot more kids than the political left,” Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks says. “The gap is actually 41 percent.”
(Virtual) show of hands — how many liberals reading this had conservative parents (like me)?
The article says 80 percent of people who express a party preference vote like their parents. Looking back over the past couple of centuries, though, seems to me that every now and then there will be a relatively sudden shift in political and/or cultural sensibilities. The 1960s come to mind. We may be about due for another shift. If so, those fertile conservatives are breeding the next generation of progressive voters.
Conservative parents, liberal me. Part of this is that the definition of conservative has changed a huge amount in fairly recent history.
When my Dad died, I made the comment about what do you about a man who voted for Richard Nixon every chance he got?
Here’s another child of staunch WASP Repug father (mom not so much but now is a flaming lib) who did not follow in the footsteps. Being the oldest of four- built-in babysitter – I’m also childless by choice.
Very conservative father and mother who became increasingly conservative in her later years. While I like to say I am a liberal, but I am not an idiot, I almost always vote for the Democrat, do not think “government is the problem” only corrupt and incompetent government officials, and believe that society should look out for all of its members. I do not know if that qualifies me as a liberal or not. I really can not refute the article’s premise, however, because I have 9 siblings and with perhaps one exception they are all to the right of me some substantially so. On the other hand my children are quite liberal as are a majority of my nieces and nephews who have reached adulthood.
Left-wing parents, I’m left-wing, I’m working on my kids. This morning my 13 year-old and I discussed how war can benefit private companies (we talked about Cheney and Halliburton) while financially ruining the country.
Stuff like this gives social scientists a bad name.
Maybe it’s the fault of the ABC News article, but I get no hint that this ‘researcher’ clearly defined ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’, which seems pretty important, given how those terms have been morphing in the last 30 years. Nor am I convinced that he could parse out the actual positions of these people from the source he claims to be using.
Plus, you’d want to check this over time, to make sure that political bias wasn’t controlled by historical experience, like say, the Depression, or something. And if this gap is real, why have the last Presidential elections been so close that a few votes in one state made the difference? Or are we only going to see this efffect 18 years from now?
41 percent gap he says. Precisely. Bah.
My parents are essentially centrist, with a democratic bias … and i turned into a raging liberal, while my brother turned into a raging conservative…
We don’t talk politics when we get together anymore…
-me
Paul said what I would’ve said about the sloppy reporting.
For the record: Two R parents in the family, two D kids and one R kid (who by now is embarrassed that Bush is R).
Is this bad science reporting day on Mahablog? Wish I’d known–I’d have worn my magnets.
Both of my parents are Republicans. My brothers and I are all quite Liberal. My daughter once asked how my parents could be so conservative. After all I grew up in that hotbed of Liberalism- Massachusetts. In a college town no less. I replied that they lived there, but they weren’t from there.
Don’t know about my parents, but my wife is a conservative, and I’m a liberal, and we bred 4 conservatives. I’ll have to ask Mendel, but I think conservatism is the dominant trait in offspring of mixed affiliations
Terry, comment #4, why are you equating liberal = idiot?! Your beliefs are very Democratic and highly desirable. I’d like to think I’m not an idiot along with serveral million other like-minded individuals.
Bush and his neocon supporters are the idiots.
B. I live in a town where a sports talk host always said “Iam a homer, but I am not an idiot” meaning he rooted for the home team, but faced up to facts when the team was not playing well or made a bonehead play. I like to think I am a liberal, but that does not mean I subscribe to every “liberal” thought if I do not think it makes sense. Examples would be that while I defend his right to say what he wants, I think Ward Churchill is a nut, while I think needless cruelty to animals is reprehensible, I like to wear leather shoes and eat all sorts of animal flesh and when I or memebers of my family are sick I have no reservations about seeing them treated with drugs which were tested on animals, and while I believe a woman has the right to control her own body, I think abortion really does pose difficult moral issues. In short, I am not a “pure” liberal and I am actually quite conservative in terms of things like risk taking or accepting changing technology etc.
Both parents voted Republican all the years I was growing up. In my high school, I was the campaign chairman for Nixon [1960] for our school’s mock election…..egad, I still have the letter that Nixon wrote and sent to me in response to my request that he tell my school why we should vote for him!
But that letter is the last of my connection to anything Republican, except for an appreciation of one Republican Senator [Fitzgerald] who won my support when he himself exposed and fought the good fight against our state’s out-of-control Republican sleaze machine.
Something interesting, my deceased father switched parties some 10 or so years before he died…..he was quite disgusted with Republicans by then. My mother is today in her eighties and a staunch Democrat, too. One of my brothers is a Republican, my other two siblings are Democrat like me. Of my three grown sons, one is a Christianfundamentalist/Republican, the other two are blessedly and progressively Democratic.
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