What you said is what they want you to think. Lord knows both major parties in the US have serious problems, but if you think they're indistinguishable, you're not paying attention.
He used to hang out with the 1960s Democratic Party mighty, even ran in an election. His essays are pretty sharp.
I never said that the Democrats are perfect. They're not even all that good. As often as not, they're the lesser evil. That doesn't mean it's rational to stay home and let the greater evil win.
I'll grant you there are other topics on which they differ, but depending on what you look at, your options quickly blur together.
I don't disagree with anything you said, either. It sucks, and I said so. People are reacting like I said the Democrats were nearly perfect, and I'm not sure how anyone got that from what I actually said.
Sure, they swamp social media with their anger, demonstrate, disrupt conservative speaking engagements, burn and vandalize private property and call for violence in the streets and revolution but have never really voted in huge numbers:
In a number of other key battleground states, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, it looks like millennials didn't show up at the polls in the same levels they did for President Obama, and that was a problem for Democrats.
The millennial coalition Obama created just didn't translate to Clinton, despite the Beyonce and Katy Perry concerts.
In many of these states, Clinton still won the young vote, but her margin of victory was substantially smaller. In Florida, it was 16 percentage points less than President Obama's; Wisconsin, 20 percentage points smaller; and Pennsylvania, 19 percentage points less.
And I believe most younger voters once they have to pay taxes, raise a family, and start building their retirement and saving for their kids college, become more Conservative and less "progressive" or Liberal.
Is that accurate? It's conventional wisdom but I've never seen it convincingly demonstrated.
Of course, some of the issues change. Gay marriage is rapidly becoming a bipartisan consensus (45% of republicans support it, more than Democrats did 20 years ago). Other issues, like abortion, have not changed. Still others have changed in the opposite direction, like the gun rights: https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/o....
What I was asking about is the assertion that as a person ages they become more conservative. Comparing generational differences won't directly answer that question.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that any given person got more conservative as they aged. But most people must have done so, because the group as a whole did.
Of course this is, as you say, based on self identification. But conservative and liberal are best described in terms of self identification, because they’re relative terms. As recently as the 1990s, a “conservative” view of the family would have meant two parents of the same race. Today, that wouldn’t be a conservative viewpoint, but a far right or reactionary viewpoint. Given how quickly the acceptance of gay marriage has accelerated (much faster, after Obergefell, than the acceptance of mixed race marriage after Loving), a “conservative” view of family could soon be two people, regardless of sexual orientation. (And that doesn’t only move in one direction, either. In the 1960s, a “liberal” might have actually believed in government ownership of the means of production. Today, most “liberals” identify “socialism” as a strong welfare state within a free market framework.)
If someone were to ask me if I was liberal or conservative, I'd have to ask them, "for which policy?"