Why are older folks more conservative?

That people become more conservative as they get older is some sort of folk wisdom, though the meaning of "conservative" is often implied and not spelled out. Some scholars seem to classify conservatism as a tendency to cling to one's beliefs, an inflexibility with respect to one's ideological position. I do not subscribe to this classification. I will simply follow the well-known formulation of Edmund Burke: a conservative is a person who is in favour of maintaining the status quo, a person who actively endorses policies designed to promote the existing social order.

 What's the opposite of a conservative? Academic exercises to ascertain whether people indeed turn conservative (in the Burkean sense) as they grow old are invariably from Western countries with a liberal democratic form of government. More often than not, these countries also have a de facto two-party electoral system, with one of the parties considered "conservative" and the other "liberal". Therefore, these studies invariably consider "liberal" as the opposite of "conservative" (with "moderate" sometimes thrown in as an intermediate category). And then try to estimate what proportion of young supporters of the "liberal" party turn "conservative" as they grow older, and vice-versa. (There is hardly any data on how the same group of people changes across decades with respect to their political orientation, so nearly all of these studies are cross-sectional studies, they look at different groups of younger and older people, and extrapolate the results to estimate the direction of change of an "average" person's political orientation.)

 These academic exercises seem conceptually inconsistent to me. Why should a "liberal" in a liberal democratic society want the status quo to change? I know, I know: these studies often look at people's position on specific topics such as women's rights, same-sex marriage, social security, etc., and classify people as "conservative" or "liberal" based on those positions. But shouldn't a person in a Scandinavian country not wanting the social security system to be dismantled be classified as a Burkean conservative?

 Fundamentally, these studies seem beholden to the "end of history" narrative; that capitalist liberal democracy is the final stage of human social evolution, this is how human society will remain organized forever and ever, and only tiny changes may happen in a broadly steady state of affairs. Ironically, a huge proportion of humanity, probably more than 50%, has been living in societies which are explicitly NOT liberal democracies. This has been true throughout the second half of the twentieth century, which was the period considered by most of these studies. So essentially, these studies remain inapplicable to the overwhelming majority of humanity. Even in the case of Western democracies, their classification schemes and classification criteria limit their utility. 

 Does that mean people, on average, don't turn conservative as they grow older? For what it's worth, I think older folks are indeed more conservative as compared to youngsters, but that's overwhelmingly because each society "selects" people who favour the continuation of that society. In other words, people who favour the status quo are much more likely to live to a ripe old age, as compared to people who want to overthrow the system. Put differently, revolutionaries and radicals die young. (Yes, I am effectively saying that the opposite of a "conservative" is a "revolutionary" or a "radical", not a "liberal".) They are killed by cops, or they rot in prison, and ill-treatment ensures their early demise. Or they are forever on the run. This is true of black radicals who take on the might of the American state, of Indian Adivasi youth who join the Maoist movement and dream of overthrowing the existing state, of Palestinian youngsters who dare take up arms against Israel and its Western backers, and so on and so forth.

 Even people who do not try to violently overthrow the system but resist it in other ways find life a desperate struggle. The system ensures that any resistance has a cost. Stronger the resistance, higher the cost. These folks too succumb early to hard labour, malnutrition, ill-health, and other horsemen of poverty.

 One can also look at this from the people's perspective. Who is likely to want the status quo to continue? Someone who is well off, someone who is able to acquire and enjoy most of the comforts and luxuries of his day, some who dreads losing those comforts and luxuries. In contrast, a person who has to toil for most of the day just to earn a few morsels of food for herself and her family has all the reasons and the motivation to overthrow the system. Flipping again to the other perspective, we can say that the system is purpose-built to continue oppressing this person and to persecute her. 

 To summarize, older cohorts are indeed more conservative, I think; but that's simply because most of the folks who want a radical change in the system do not live past their youth. Remember, I am talking statistics here, not claiming that every single old person is conservative. I am not throwing in numbers, because I don't have any; I didn't conduct any survey.

 Sharp readers will have noticed that I did not say anything about any particular individual turning (more) conservative as he gets old. I do not really know, but I suspect the political orientation of most people remains steady throughout their adulthood.

 Ultimately, these categories are meaningful only in the context of a society that remains relatively stable for the many-decades-long duration of the study subject's adulthood. I doubt any society has been that stable in the past century. And with the ongoing crises of global capital and the onrushing climate catastrophe, stability won't be part of our imaginable future.

 But one can still dream, one can still probe possibilities. Will a hypothetical egalitarian society of the future, with collective ownership of resources and practicing "from each according to her ability, to each according to her needs", also share this characteristic of older cohorts being more conservative? Umm... let's step back and ask what would characterize a revolutionary in such as society. Who would want to overthrow such a society? And why? I think practically all the youngsters in such a society would be conservatives, in the Burkean sense. And they will keep being conservatives as they grow old!