Millennials Have Liberals Counting Chickens Before They’ve Hatched

The headline in The Chronicle, Millennial Generation Will End Culture Wars, Researchers Say. The story is on two new reports released today by the liberal Center for American Progress:

“The story throughout this survey is one of conservative decline and progressive ascendancy among young people,” says the first report, “The Political Ideology of the Millennial Generation,” which identified 17 liberal and four conservative values and beliefs supported by a majority of 18- to 29-year-olds. (The conservative beliefs involved focusing more on domestic, not global, issues; promoting free trade; privatizing Social Security; and seeing government spending as inefficient.)

The report, based on 915 interviews, found young people especially progressive on cultural issues and national security, strongly favoring sustainable lifestyles and religions’ focus on tolerance, for example, and opposing the primacy of military force in fighting terrorism…

The second report, “New Progressive America: The Millennial Generation,” portends a postracial world where gay marriage is a given and immigration is broadly accepted. “It seems unlikely that this generation will be reporting for duty in future culture wars,” the report says. It identifies the Millennial generation as “unusually progressive,” comparing their views on race, for example, to those of Generation X in the 1980s.

“Millennials are much more progressive on many issues than previous generations when they were younger,” the report says, citing universal health care as a key example. Seventy-one percent of young people agree that the federal government should guarantee health-care coverage for all Americans, according to the report. In 1978, it says, 43 percent of young people and 56 percent of senior citizens supported government-provided health insurance.

I accept that Millennials will likely be more accepting of sexual orientation and racial diversity. Beyond that, I still think all bets are off.