FROM THE LEFT

As the saying goes, if you’re not a liberal when you’re young, then you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain.

The idea, of course, is that liberalism is a game for the youth and that age brings security, stability and a nat- ural resistance to change. The upshot, in American pol- itics, is that while most voters might start on the center-left, with Democrats, they’ll end their political journey on the center-right, with Republicans. One party represents disruption and change; the other party represents a steady hand and the status quo.

Or at least that’s the story. The reality is a little more complicated.

The evidence comes from a new Wall Street Journal anal- ysis of the latest data from the General Social Survey, a comprehensive examina- tion of American attitudes and beliefs, conducted since its creation in 1972 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

It is true, according to these researchers, that voters typ- ically become more conservative as they get older. But the extent of that drift — of where it finally reaches — depends on where they start. When the Pew Research Center studied this question in 2013, for example, it found that the cohort of baby boom- ers who turned 18 under Richard Nixon was much more Democratic than the later cohort of boomers who turned 18 under Jimmy Carter.

Overall, according to the General Social Survey, boom- ers, who came of age during the turmoil and transforma- tion of the 1960s and 1970s, are still more liberal than not. Gen Xers, who came of age during the Reagan revolu- tion, started off more conser- vative than their older coun- terparts and have become the most consistently conservative generation in the electorate.

The case of Millennial vot- ers is where things start to get interesting. As children of 9/11, the War on Terror and the 2008 financial crisis, Millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — entered the electorate much more Dem- ocratic than their immediate predecessors. But while they have gotten a little more conservative in the years since, it has been at a much slower rate than you’d expect.

What’s more, the gap in the number of Millennials who identify as Democrats rather than Republicans is huge, with more than twice as many self-identified Dem- ocrats as Republicans. The next cohort on the roster, Gen Z, is even more liberal and Democratic than Millennials and shows no indication of becoming substantially more conservative as it ages.

Now, we should always be a little wary of talking about “generations” as uniform, monolithic or even partic- ularly coherent. But groups of Americans do share com- mon experiences, and it is not hard to explain the persistence of left-leaning beliefs and liberal self-identification among young Americans.

There’s something else to consider. For the past 15 years, neither the Republican Party nor political conservatism has stood for stability and a steady hand. Just the opposite: From the Tea Party onward, it has stood for chaos, disruption and instability.

Millennials and Gen Zers may well age into more con- servative views, but that doesn’t mean they’ll vote for Republicans. And if you want to understand the Republi- can Party’s growing hostility to free and fair elections, you should look no further than its extraordinarily poor stand- ing with the two youngest groups of Americans.

President Joe Biden’s given a speech linking the Isra- el-Hamas conflict and the Rus- sian invasion of Ukraine and framing U.S. involvement as part of a grand strategy to con- tain our enemies and rivals.

Broadly speaking, Biden is correct. But the difference between the president’s stra- tegic analysis and the kind I’ve tried to offer recently is two- fold: the general absence, in Biden’s words, of any acknowl- edgment of difficult tradeoffs and the specific absence of any reference to China as a potentially more significant threat than Russia or Iran.

So let me explain why I worry about China and why I keep insisting that a strat- egy of containment in the Pacific should be a priority, even when other threats seem more immediate.

Start with the geopolitical background. It makes sense to talk about China, Iran and Russia as a loose alliance try- ing to undermine U.S. power, but it is not a trio of equals. Only China is an arguable peer of the United States, only Chi- na’s technological and indus- trial might can hope to match our own and only China has the capacity to project power globally as well as regionally.

Moreover, China offers a somewhat coherent ideolog- ical alternative to the liber- al-democratic order. The Putin regime is a parody of Western democracy, and Iran’s mixture of theocracy and pseudode- mocracy holds little broad appeal. But China’s one-party meritocracy can advertise itself as a successor to dem- ocratic capitalism, an alter- native model for the devel- oping world.

These general strategic real- ities obviously aren’t as threat- ening as actual aggression. But the threat China poses to Taiwan, in particular, has different implications for U.S. power from the threat Russia poses to Ukraine or Hamas poses to Israel. Whatever hap- pens in the Ukrainian con- flict, the United States was never formally committed to Ukraine’s defense, and Russia cannot realistically defeat NATO. Whatever mis- ery Iran and its proxies may inflict upon the Middle East, they are not going to conquer Israel or drive U.S. power out of the Levant.

But the United States is more committed (with whatever public ambiguity) to the defense of Taiwan, and that expectation has always been in the background of our larger alliance system in East Asia. And there are good reasons to think that China is open to invading Taiwan in the near future and that the U.S. could join such a war and lose outright.

China hawks tend to argue that losing a war over Taiwan would be much worse than our post-9/11 debacles, worse than letting Vladimir Putin hold the Donbas and Crimea permanently. I think they’re right: The establishment of Chinese military preeminence in East Asia would be a unique geopolitical shock, with dire effects on the viability of America’s alliance systems, on the likelihood of regional wars and arms races and on our ability to maintain the global trading system that undergirds our prosperity.

And it’s at home where I fear the effects of such a defeat the most.

Whatever anxieties you have about our current political divisions, whether you fear left-wing disillusionment with America or right-wing disillusionment with democracy or both, such a defeat seems more likely than anything to accelerate us toward a real internal crisis. Which is why, even with other foreign crises burning hot, a debacle in East Asia remains the scenario that the United States should be working most intensely to avert.