The View from Behind the Wall

“That the aged are more conservative than the young is well known. It is often said that, if you are not a radical at age 20, you have no heart and that, if you are not a conservative at age 40, you have no head. But why at age 70, you should lose your head and become politically apoplectic is unclear.” Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

By Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—10/21/2013—I live in a retirement community—gated and walled off from the impoverished mainstream of Central Florida.

Its residents are for the most part comfortable, but hardly plutocratic.

Yet they hate Liberals and the Left with an unrivaled passion. And they especially loathe Obama, whom they erroneously describe as a man of the Left.

Mention his name, and they who, being bored and under-occupied, are normally phlegmatic suddenly launch themselves into paroxysms of rage and vituperation.

That the aged are more conservative than the young is well known. It is often said that, if you are not a radical at age 20, you have no heart and that, if you are not a conservative at age 40, you have no head.

But why at age 70, you should lose your head and become politically apoplectic is unclear.

Here are five hypotheses. A few, however, are as inchoate and unreasoning as are most social and political enmities:

1. Obama is Black and thus incarnates those (Blacks and Hispanics are lumped together) who are fast becoming the majority in the United States and are already the majority in Central Florida. Many white aged Americans, even those from immigrant backgrounds, feel that that they are in effect “losing their country.”
2. Hispanics in particular are younger than the country as a whole, and the elderly white, themselves victims of ageism, react with a retaliatory “youthism.” Obama, as a comparatively young president, is the target of hatred both because of his youth as well as his identification with younger population segments.
3. Hispanics and Blacks are net borrowers. The aged white are net savers. Although savers need borrowers, the aged don’t see matters that way. They view minorities as excess and improvident borrowers. To some extent, this is correct, and Obama, of course, has been president during a period of very low interest rates. Low rates redistribute income from savers to borrowers.
4. Whites are terrified of the talk of even more widespread redistribution: “Why increase my taxes to give to those freeloaders?”
5. The aged in my own community, as is to be expected, tend to be more sickly and thus more prone to depression than younger folk. Part of the resentment against Obama, I find, is simply a formless howl against the decline of intellectual and physical vigor and the usefulness conferred by productive employment. Again, as noted above, this relates to Obama’s comparative youth and his political constituencies, not to speak of his svelte and lissome physical bearing.