Memes

It has more to do with acquiring a stake in the neoliberal status quo. Those who say life makes you more conservative are almost always older white people who stand to personally lose if their privilege goes away.

A worker who spends 40 years throwing their retirement into the stock market (401k) will be less willing to throw that away for a better future for the next generation. Earlier in their career, they may have been more willing to challenge the status quo and their own ideas because they had less to lose.

The bourgeoisie has a strategic interest in keeping western workers in a petty-bourgeois or labor-aristocratic mindset.