The stereotype of the dumb white American redneck** being conservative. It's not true. People assume that conservative = no education. These days conservative = different education. If you grew up in the 1990s. Graduated college around the 2000s. Went into the tech. sector prior to the Fin Crisis, that is a TOTALLY different trajectory to anyone (like me) who came out of college in the height of the Fin. Crisis, with people hanging themselves from trees (happened in a park next to my house) because the job market was just that dire.
The dynamics are changing. The middle class is getting gutted in the West. A few enclaves of relative prosperity - like some areas of the tech. sector have trundled on longer and benefited more than most other markets. Certain groups have benefited more than other age groups. The younger gens. Pretty much anyone born after 1988 have it very rough.
Many conservatives have an education. Many are better educated than liberals. Different experiences and different perspectives in their day to day life has led them down a different route ideologically.
Try busting your ass for several months and not receiving any remuneration for your labour (as I have) because of a major deflationary trend as the private sector deleverages, and your business not getting paid for outstanding contracts. Live like that for a while, you end up with a different view of the world.
As much as people would like to pretend that they are the SOLE factors of their success, in reality this is not the case. Warren Buffet born today would have a fraction of the opportunities he had in his youth. People can be genuinely disadvantaged by dint of year of birth. That's not to excuse being a lazy shit, or robbing people blind (as Antifa do), or going out and trying to torch an ethnic demographic. Hard work and sucking it up is still the optimal choice, but if you want to know where these extreme ideologies originate- there is the core issue. A big fragment of the conservative movement are actually genuinely good people. The sort of people who are really just sick of freeloaders and statist thuggery in the form of Antifa or Nazis. You don't have to be an asshole to be a conservative, just understand that asking the world to hug and get along is unrealistic when prosperity is thin on the ground. There will be unrest, rising racial tension, competition, tribalism and violence- these are things which spring up when resources are scarce. Many conservatives just want to tackle problems with realistic solutions and THAT is what the liberals in bubble Cali cannot understand.
This is also why (ex)military, police, market traders, businessmen etc. generally tend to be conservative too. They are from backgrounds where doing the good thing makes you bankrupt or dead and competition is an endemic part of life.
**This demographic DOES exist, of course, but it's a gross oversimplification of reality at this stage. Especially in the younger conservatives.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/29/2017 09:22AM by istirith.