OPINION

The kids are all right: Katrina Trinko

Millennials might not be the liberal generation they've been made out to be.

Katrina Trinko
At San Jose State University.

The kids are all right — politically.

That’s the surprising finding of an analysis done by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge and her team. Turns out, the number of Millennials unironically hanging Reagan posters in their rooms may be larger than assumed.

Just consider these stats from the analysis: among 12th graders, 28% considered themselves conservative in 2014, up from 23% in 2002, and among students entering college, 22% identified as far right or conservative, up from 15% in 1971.

In fact, “More 12th graders, and just as many college students, identified as conservative in the early 2010s as did in the early 1980s, a time often characterized as conservative,” notes the analysis.

No, the Bernie believers weren’t a phenomenon dreamed up by the media — liberals do still outnumber conservatives among young adults. But as a conservative millennial who often feels like my political bloc is invisible, I’m gratified to finally see some recognition that some of us would prefer, say, school choice to “free” (aka taxpayer-funded) college.

And in a world where the media skews liberal (a 2014 Indiana University study found a mere 7% of journalists considered themselves Republican) and so do college professors (there’s about five liberal professors for every conservative one, according to a 2014 University of California, Los Angeles study), it’s impressive any Millennials have escaped the overwhelming groupthink present in their sheltered — excuse me, “safe” — spaces.

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Maybe it’s because they’re fed up with the current status of our country — and were willing to look outside the conventional wisdom for solutions. You know what’s sobering? Looking at the collapse of Greece, and realizing that despite that, none of the “grown ups” in Washington are taking our debt crisis — $19.7 trillion and counting — seriously. I’m not the only skeptical millennial: a mere 6% of my peers thought they would get the same level of Social Security benefits retirees get now, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center poll.

And calculating how much you need to save for retirement when you assume no Social Security benefits (while still seeing those deductions in your paycheck) is about as much fun as listening to a Baby Boomer drone on about the 60s.

Economic issues could be another factor. Many of us graduated from college and high school amid the recession. We realized jobs might be harder to find than we had thought, and we struggled — or saw friends struggle. In a January USA TODAY/Rock the Votes poll, young adults who identified as conservative outnumbered liberals by 5 percentage points, 38% to 33%, when it came to economic issues including jobs, minimum wage, and equal pay.

There’s also the wide interest in entrepreneurship by Millennials: 51% of 18-34 year-olds would like to own a business someday, according to a January poll for Young Invincibles and Small Business Majority. And it’s clear that the onerous regulations so favored by the left don’t help the would-be kale chips producer triumph: “Small manufacturers, or those with fewer than 50 employees, incur regulatory costs of $34,671 per employee per year,” according to a 2014 study by the National Association of Manufacturers.

School choice could be another issue where Millennials find conservativism more compatible: a Harvard University poll released in April found that 40% of 18-29 year olds agreed that “if parents had more freedom to choose where they could send their children to school, the education system in this country would be better.” And while young adults certainly skew to the left on LGBT issues, that’s not the case for abortion: that same poll showed only 36% of young adults agreed with abortion being allowed in all cases — yet that's the liberal tendency.

Another factor may be about Millennials being fed up with the results of much-vaunted political compromises hatched by moderates. In fact, due to the rise of conservativism, young adults, like older Americans, are becoming more polarized: The percentage of conservative twelfth graders has grown from 21% to 29% from the late 70s to the 2010s, while the percentage of liberal students has stayed stagnant relatively stagnant, going from 35% to 34% , according to the San Diego State University analysis.

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But while compromise is a great “feel good” word, Millennials are seeing all too well how actual compromises work out. Just look at college costs as an example of a government-private sector hybrid. Currently, there’s no free college, but there are generous government subsidies for college costs. Colleges, seeing the chance to get more money, have responded by hiking college costs astronomically — private four-year colleges have gone from average costs of 10,088 (in today’s dollars) in 1975 to $32,405, according to the College Board. While I oppose government-funded “free” college and would prefer to see us trend in the opposite direction — eliminating government subsidies, so colleges are forced to find ways to cut costs — it’s clear, regardless of your views on who should pay for college, that the current hybrid model isn’t working out.

And let’s consider those bipartisan, compromise spending bills Washington conjures — all of which seem to continue spending at a breakneck rate. Admittedly, many of our current lawmakers (average age in the Senate: 61) won’t necessarily be around to face the music when the bills have to get paid, but Millennials — already anticipating Social Security cuts — are aware it’s unlikely to be pleasant.

It’s easy to assume Millennials are a liberal generation. But the numbers show that in both identification and in issues, there’s a hardy segment of us who value freedom, personal responsibility and smaller government. Millennials’ political beliefs are "complicated," as we say on Facebook.

Katrina Trinko, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is managing editor for The Daily Signal. Her views do not represent The Heritage Foundation, her employer.

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