Millennials are breaking the oldest rule of politics, and the American right has noticed.

Historically speaking, it’s true that people tend to grow more conservative as they get older. Or at least, it was true for previous generations. As newer polls have shown, Millennials and Gen Z are breaking the pattern.

We’re not aging into church and conservatism – on the contrary. If anything, we’re getting less religious and more liberal as we get older.

And National Review, the conservative magazine, has noticed. They’ve published an article whose title betrays their scarcely contained panic: “The Link Between Age and Conservatism Is Breaking“.

I’m always interested to read articles by religious apologists noticing that young people are leaving religion in droves, and theorizing about the reasons for that. It’s a revealing glimpse into the way they see the world. This is another flavor of that lament.

There’s a rich harvest of schadenfreude to reap from this article, and I’ll get to that. But first, it wouldn’t be a conservative publication if it didn’t blame every problem on a lack of grit and moral fiber among the youth. NR doesn’t disappoint:

We find shocking levels of reported depression and suicidality among the young, although in some ways, younger people have been groomed to report themselves as depressed and mentally unstable.

NR implies that young people aren’t really depressed, they’re just being told (“groomed”) to believe that they are. Do they display this same skepticism toward self-reports when the conclusion is one they agree with? If a survey found that religious people report greater happiness, would they reject that conclusion because church members are “groomed” to say that believing in God makes them happy?

That’s not the bottom of the barrel, either. In an even grosser claim, NR asserts that not marrying makes women ill:

Unmarried women in middle age report huge rates of depression, or other mysterious illnesses that are diagnosed as fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis, and are experienced as “constant pain” in all joints, poor sleep, and exhaustion.

Marriage is the cure for rheumatoid arthritis. Who knew?

However, once you get past the obligatory victim-blaming and insulting pseudoscience, NR proposes a different explanation. And what’s fascinating is that this one comes pretty close to the truth:

Conservatism is also associated with settling down. People who acquire property tend to become more conservative. And Millennials just aren’t doing that at the same rates as previous generations. By age 30, just 42 percent of Millennials own homes compared to 48 percent of Gen Xers and 51 percent of Baby Boomers. The gap persists into their early 40s.

…Are we surprised that a generation that feels least optimistic about living in a family and in their own home has little faith in the American dream? Should we really find it shocking that so many of them find something resonant in the 1619 Project’s understanding of this country, which theorizes that America is about exploiting labor unjustly without due rewards or respect?

To my own surprise, I agree.

NR doesn’t elucidate on why Millennials are less optimistic about the future, but I can fill in the gaps for them. Inequality has skyrocketed in America over the last few decades, mostly because of older generations building ladders to prosperity for themselves and then yanking them away from those who came after.

With enthusiastic support from older voters, Republicans have crippled unions, slashed tax rates at the top, frozen the minimum wage, tried to scrap social-welfare programs, done everything in their power to keep health care unaffordable, and presided over soaring prices for education and houses without any sign of concern. They want to raise the retirement age for those who come after them. They’ve fought tooth and nail against every effort to stop climate change, the single biggest crisis that makes younger people feel hopeless and pessimistic about the future.

At the same time, they’ve passed onerous voter-ID laws (while barring student IDs as valid forms of identification, of course), closed polling places on college campuses, fought against automatic voter registration, and taken other measures to discourage young people from voting. When even that hasn’t worked, they’ve resorted to aggressive gerrymandering to dilute young people’s votes into meaninglessness and enshrine permanent minority rule.

In short, conservatives have done everything possible to keep young people poor, oppressed and powerless. And now they’re upset and dismayed because those young people, as they transition into middle age, aren’t invested in the system anymore! It’s a true leopards-eating-my-face moment.

All the other social ills that NR recognizes, like high levels of depression and loneliness, civic fragmentation and chronic illness, are symptoms of this bigger problem. They’re the result of a crushingly stressful and precarious existence, where good jobs are dwindling and the ones that are left still don’t pay enough to afford health care, housing and other necessities.

Obviously, merely to recognize this is treading on dangerous territory for a conservative magazine. What NR doesn’t do is suggest what, if anything, they think conservatives should do about it.

We can guess. Much like the religious apologists who react to the decline of religion by saying they need to double down and do more of what wasn’t working, we can imagine that NR‘s solution would entail more union-busting, more trickle-down economics, and more voter suppression. It’s the epitome of “the beatings will continue until morale improves” thinking, and it’s why the ground is going to keep crumbling under their feet.