I think it’s important to remember that the January 6th insurrection wasn’t representative across any demographics except extremely conservative Republicans and conspiracy theorists. Since generational analysis is already inherently problematic and inexact, I’d hesitate to make blanket statements about the entire age group based on a sample like that.
It may be reasonable to say that in general, people in the age groups often lumped together in “Gen X” are statistically more likely to be conservative than younger people, but that’s about as far as I’d be willing to go.
And the relatively low numbers of boomers at the insurrection may be explained more by their age than anything else. The absolute youngest boomers are turning 60 in the next year. The oldest are almost 80. Going and beating up Capitol police, scaling fences, and breaking into Congress may just be physically too demanding for most of them.
I think it’s important to remember that the January 6th insurrection wasn’t representative across any demographics except extremely conservative Republicans and conspiracy theorists. Since generational analysis is already inherently problematic and inexact, I’d hesitate to make blanket statements about the entire age group based on a sample like that.
It may be reasonable to say that in general, people in the age groups often lumped together in “Gen X” are statistically more likely to be conservative than younger people, but that’s about as far as I’d be willing to go.
And the relatively low numbers of boomers at the insurrection may be explained more by their age than anything else. The absolute youngest boomers are turning 60 in the next year. The oldest are almost 80. Going and beating up Capitol police, scaling fences, and breaking into Congress may just be physically too demanding for most of them.