It will actually change a lot. There’s a famous saying in physics: “Science makes progress one funeral at a time.”
Specifically, according to Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Obviously, politics is much more biased than physics, so deaths will have an even more progressive impact. Boomers (and Gen X) are ideologically bankrupt with views radically divergent from those of younger generations and scientists generally. The reasons are obvious: culture, wealth, lead poisoning, etc.
Capitalism is like any other ideology. You can’t defeat it by convincing your opponents, but by waiting for them to die and gradually changing the status quo. Authoritarian-capitalist regimes like China, Russia, and (increasingly) the US, are shitty, so unbiased young people will have a tendency to reject them as model societies. I.e., an objective observer would tend to prefer Taiwan over China, and Norway over Russia, so there will be a gradual ideological shift leftward. This is an oversimplification, but it’s also fairly easy to observe in practice. Indeed, it’s one of the main reasons that Russia and China are so aggressively anti-democracy: it’s a direct threat to their system by counter-example! Democracy anywhere is a threat to autocracy everywhere.
Boomers dying will change nothing. The problem isn’t boomers, it’s the capitalist class.
It will actually change a lot. There’s a famous saying in physics: “Science makes progress one funeral at a time.”
Specifically, according to Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Obviously, politics is much more biased than physics, so deaths will have an even more progressive impact. Boomers (and Gen X) are ideologically bankrupt with views radically divergent from those of younger generations and scientists generally. The reasons are obvious: culture, wealth, lead poisoning, etc.
Capitalism is like any other ideology. You can’t defeat it by convincing your opponents, but by waiting for them to die and gradually changing the status quo. Authoritarian-capitalist regimes like China, Russia, and (increasingly) the US, are shitty, so unbiased young people will have a tendency to reject them as model societies. I.e., an objective observer would tend to prefer Taiwan over China, and Norway over Russia, so there will be a gradual ideological shift leftward. This is an oversimplification, but it’s also fairly easy to observe in practice. Indeed, it’s one of the main reasons that Russia and China are so aggressively anti-democracy: it’s a direct threat to their system by counter-example! Democracy anywhere is a threat to autocracy everywhere.