There’s an old saw, attributed to everyone from Winston Churchill to John Adams, that says, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”
Americans love to say this as a way of dismissing younger people’s idealism while attributing wisdom and experience to conservatism. We love to break politics down into age cohorts, but I’m not sure that was so much the case before the massive post-war baby boom introduced a youth culture that basically took over American society, for both good and ill. Ever since, we’ve been obsessed with what various age demographics are thinking and doing as if it’s the key to understanding America.
