system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
nah, current conservatives mostly weren't actually leftists (obviously there'll be a few, nothing is ever absolute, but we're talking broad strokes here.) some were liberals and centrists, sure, many more were always conservatives, and there are also many, many older leftists who never really changed. the thing is, wealthier people tend to be more conservative ("i got mine" mentality abounds!) and wealthier people tend to live longer, so you end up with a much less fair representation as people age. 

purely anecdotally, i know a lot more people my age (30s-ish millennial) who leaned left and have stayed that way than people my gen X sibling's age, who were more leftist in their youth and have largely slid to centrist/neoliberal. times, they are a-changin', hopefully.
gpt
With myself and my Gen friends and classmates x it seems and I hate to say it there is a huge divide between those of us who went to college and those that did not. I think we on the boarder of going to college or getting married and starting tamiles right of school.

Higher education made the difference locally but looking back their parents might have been traditionally more Archie Bunker than Maude.

Another irony is that even though we briefly thought Alex P Keaton was cool and his hippie idealist parents were not, a lot of us out grew that and also we didn’t have as much time for social justice we were kind of stuck between any day dying from nuclear war and then as teenagers from AIDS, green house gases and then my senior year everyone was in a panic again because they might be a war and a draft. 

Gee I have to stop thinking about it