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Comment by throwaway22032 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway22032

You’re just seeing division.

The blue haired woman won’t date the fisherman and the farmer girl won’t date the metrosexual city boy.

Somehow you’re getting stuck on one side being universally correct, which in some extreme cases might be reasonable, but generally you are just looking at a societal split rather than one side moving hard.

IME, as a mid 30’s bloke in the UK in a stable relationship, guys haven’t significantly moved right wing, society as a whole has feminised (mostly in large cities). If anything it’s the women moving away from the previous norms - polling struggles with this because it defines “how the world was 30 years ago” (e.g. the home that almost everyone I know grew up in) as being hard right / conservative.

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Conservatives always perceive themselves as simply wanting to return to the past.

Unfortunately, their perception of "what was normal 30 years ago" is generally inaccurate as well as biased by their own personal experience, because it's hard to get an objective picture of their society as an 8 year old. You're growing up raised by a particular family (who, statistically, shares your tendency for conservativism) in a particular community, watching media made a decade ago by people who formed their values two decades previously.

Ah, yes, those dastardly conservatives, always trying to <checks notes>, bring back strong labor unions and <checks notes> repeal Citizens United.

Which isn't to say that the past was great or anything or that the conservatives are broadly right, just that your generalization is overly broad to the point of absurdity. Pretty much every ideology tries to pick and choose things from the past that ought to be revisited.

Edit: The sarcasm in a certain sentence in this comment is obvious enough that I'm not gonna feel bad for anyone who didn't get it.

Where have you seen conservatives trying to resurrect labor unions or overturn Citizens United? So far, I've only ever seen such suggestions coming from the fringe left (e.g., Bernie, AOC, etc.) and always shouted down as "socialism".

Both obviously need to happen regardless, but I don't see either happening in my lifetime short of a (probably bloody) restructuring of US government, and even then, only if we're lucky.

I think their point is that wanting things that we had in the past isn't the sole domain of conservatives.

Please point out 5 conservatives that want to bring back labor unions and repeal Citizens United.

1. Sarcasm, even sarcasm you think is obvious, rarely is. Even less so when in text and not spoken. 2. Not everyone on this site is a native English speaker, so won’t necessarily detect sarcasm and idiom super well. 3. Yup, blame the reader because they didn’t get what you were laying down…

> polling struggles with this because it defines “how the world was 30 years ago” (e.g. the home that almost everyone I know grew up in) as being hard right / conservative

Blanket statements that frame the problem dishonestly are a large contribution to the division. I'm speaking from a USian perspective here, but the people calling themselves "conservative" these days are imagining rosy snapshots of the past in a range from 30 up to 80 years ago (depending on the specific issue), decidedly not what most people "grew up in". And they aren't even rallying behind constructive solutions that might undo or at least mitigate the problems we're currently facing, but are rather just pushing some vague idea that tearing down our societal institutions will automatically cause those problems to be fixed. That is really the polar opposite of conservatism, and we should stop calling it such. I'd say it's more like anger driven accelerationism.

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