Millennial Generation Will End Culture Wars, Researchers Say

Washington — Everyone knows that young people came out to vote and overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama in last year’s presidential election. Now the Millennials, as the younger generation is known, will usher in a liberal era and end the culture wars, according to the Center for American Progress.

In two reports released today — one based on a new survey and the other drawing on much recent data — the center, a liberal research organization, augurs a progressive future.

“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. Distinctions between college-going and non-college-going young people in the report belie some assumptions about progressive leanings in higher education. “Non-college young people (43 percent favorable) are even less positive about conservatism than are college-educated ones (48 percent),” the report says.

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.

“Dismissing Millennial progressivism as just the product of youth would be misguided,” the report says. —Sara Lipka